The Feed

"The Feed" is a family affair for the 21st century, a complex sci-fi drama that examines how the dysfunctional members of a high-tech dynasty navigate the ever-more closely connected world they're helping shape with their paradoxical inability to connect with one another.

Brought to the screen by Channing Powell ("The Walking Dead"), and based on Nick Clark Windo's novel, this new Amazon Prime drama is set, by and large, in a London of the not-so-distant future; it's a city of monumental architecture and grubby precincts inhabited by a marginalized class of people who refuse to be hooked in to The Feed, a global communications matrix similar to the Internet, only plugged directly into the brains of its users. The Feed makes it possible for those who are online to swap memories, send and receive electronically telepathic voice messages, or even communicate in real time. The Feed even enables its users to experience the kind of enhanced reality that, in 2019, exists only through the screen of a cell phone: A wedding at the start of the first episode, for instance, takes place at the births Museum, but attendees see a fantasia of a Chinese palace around them.

The happy couple are Ben Hatfield (Jeremy Neumark Jones) and his bride Miyu (Jing Lusi). Their wedding is the event of the year – which may be why someone or someones unknown hack the Feed implant of a member of the kitchen staff and attempt an assassination.

The attempt is foiled, but two years later the marriage is in critical condition, with Ben and Miyu separated, Meantime, older brother Tom (Guy Burnet) and his wife Kate (Nina Toussaint-White) – who he first met at Ben's wedding – are expecting a child. Tom has little to do with his super-rich, and super-influential family, preferring to go his own way and do his small part in mitigating the damage that the Hatfields' technology is doing to society by working as a "feed psychologist," someone who works with people who are addicted to a constant barrage of electronic stimulus directed right at their brain stems. (Remind you at all of people you might know today?) Among Tom's patients is a young man named Danny (Shaquille Ali-Yebuah), whose addiction is so all-consuming he literally can't turn off even if he wants to; when he does, his brain patterns go berserk and he experiences seizures.

Danny's condition may or may not be connected with the assassination attempt at the wedding which, even two years later, remains a puzzle for Tom's genius father Lawrence (David Thewlis) and hard-driving mother, Meredith (Michelle Fairly, "Game of Thrones"). When similar crimes begin to target others in the Hatfleild company hierarchy, Larence and Meredith turn to Tom for help in unravelling the human side of the problem, even as their efforts to identify the technological causes lead nowhere. Meantime, Kate fears that Meredith and Lawrence have plotted to "enable" Kate and Tom's newborn daughter without permission... and, possibly, as part of an unauthorized experiment that could have profound implications for the future of the human species as a whole.

A gaggle of other characters rounds out the ensemble – devoted security chief Gil (Chris Reilly), for instance, or Feed coder Evelyn (Clare-Hope Ashitey) and her tech-detox professional boyfriend, Max (Osy Ikhile) – but much of the time the action returns to the Hatfield family, a clan with the usual explosive secrets shared by TV families everywhere since TV gave up on black and white fairy tales line "Father Knows Best" and "Leave It to Beaver." Porn, obsession, brutal patriarchy disguised as fatherly wisdom, simmering resentment... these people can hardly stand to be in the same room together. If the hackers don't get them, they just might do each other in.

The six episodes of Season One made available for review jolt along in fits and starts. There are whole hours that feel like they could have been compressed into much shorter blocks, such that the six segments might have been presented as three or four hours and been the better for it. At the same time, however, the larger scope of a continuing series allows the storylines and characters to breathe and develop in gratifying ways. Ben's collapsing marriage isn't just a matter of a workaholic, spoiled rich kid not being able to forge a successful partnership; Ben still loves Miya, albeit to the point of obsession, such that he resorts to virtual companionship with a younger, cheerleader-patterned version of Miya. (Just try explaining that to mom and dad when they start sorting through your apps.) Meredith might be a dragon lady, but she's also an unstoppable force of maternal nature (not unlike Catelyn Stark). As for Lawrence, he's unapologetically arrogant – and yet sincere in his belief that he knows what's best for his children, and for the world that's grown dependent on his technological innovations. These people are not monsters; they are gifted, powerful, and flawed, but they are also surprisingly genuine.

It's too easy, sometimes, to see today's debates about surveillance and privacy playing out in the show's beats, and there are a frustrating number of red herrings sprinkled throughout – not red herrings, actually, so much as threads that refuse to tie up or even, initially, make much sense. Stick with it, and these diversions might amount to more than enthusiastic (an sometimes on-the-nose) world building, but in the short run they feel like nothing so much as padding. Patience is the key here – and that, of course, is one more way of critiquing, and tweaking, our impatient, on-demand, electronically-orientated contemporary world.

"The Feed" streams on Amazon Prime starting November 22.