Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Getty
“It’s a little bit of a breaking of trust with the audience,” says Christopher Keyser from his hotel room in Paris where he was shooting the second season of Julia earlier this year. He says that the current business model for networks and streamers is to throw “a thousand shows at you so you’ll forget and move on. And I think that’s a complicated way of developing a relationship with an audience.”
One show Keyser and I haven’t forgotten about is his short-lived speculative Netflix show, 2019’s The Society.
For those of you who might have missed it prior to its late 2020 cancelation, just days before season two was set to begin shooting amidst staunch pandemic protocols: The Society follows a group of teenagers who return from an ill-fated field trip and discover that they’re the only ones left in their town. (Thus, they form their own society.) It was an interesting look at politics, environmentalism and the future of humanity that I still think about constantly, especially as season one finished on a cliffhanger that showed the remainder of the town living on in another timeline or dimension in which the teens were the ones who disappeared.