Living in a world affected by climate change is not a monotonous experience, reflects Dorothy Fortenberry, screenwriter and executive producer of A Challenging Future, which can be viewed on Apple TV. “There are days when it is deeply sad and I experience a kind of mourning; others seem ridiculous and rare to me, like when it snows in Los Angeles; and there are days when I'm very angry and I want to go out", she reveals, "and we wanted to capture the essence of all these emotions in the series". The plural includes creator Scott Z. Burns, who already had experience in the story of societal decay after producing the documentary An Inconvenient Truth with Al Gore and writing Contagion, the film directed by Steven Soderbergh. In this project he imagines the imminent future of humanity in a fictional key. What will happen when the oceans have been emptied of fauna? And how will humanity survive the heat, droughts, constant fires and rising sea levels?
"We wanted to make the series to explain the middle point: that whole section of the story before we get to the end, because we have a choice to decide what the world will be like tomorrow," says Burns, who conceived and planned the plots after working closely with scientists, politicians, journalists and environmental activists such as Denis Hayes, to make the narrative of the destruction of the planet believable and have a scientific basis, and covers 2037 to 2070. The eight episodes focus on independent stories that narrate from the opening of a casino in an almost melted Greenland, the disappearance of whales or the arrival of realities with curfews depending on the quality of the air: "It is a future that could exist and in which we bring out our best and worst qualities: empathy, creativity, innovation and compassion against our short-termism, greed and fear”.
"The solutions to climate change such as renewable energy or sustainable agriculture already exist, so part of the mystery lies in why this change is not being implemented," asks Burns. In the fiction, a businessman played by Kit Harington reasons that capitalism, which has brought human beings to climate change, can also be the solution: “I feel grateful to be able to question capitalism even though the idea raised by the character is a discussion we must have”. The creative tandem further elaborates on why they decided to end the series with an episode focused on the idea of responsibility. During the research process, they studied whether there were structures to modify the behavior of the main actors of capitalism and hold them accountable: “Are there international courts? Are there government leaders who can control billionaires who only seek the maximum possible profit? These agents exist but they must be empowered and they must function successfully on their own."
At the moment, those who have allowed themselves to be convinced by the proposal are the actors on the front line of Hollywood: Meryl Streep, Edward Norton, Marion Cotillard, Diane Lane, Sienna Miller or David Schwimmer star in the anthology series that moves between drama, thriller and satire to awaken the audience from this carbon lethargy.
