The ways we talk about the future have been decidedly…darker over the past half century, a hard turn from the sunny optimism that informed most visions of the world to come for decades before that. Finding dystopian takes, in both science fiction and fact-based stories, is pretty much all that’s out there these days.
But how we talk about the future matters, because it shapes how (and whether) we tackle the real problems before us on many fronts. Getting past the dystopic is why the upcoming PBS documentary series A Brief History of the Future exists. The six-part series, whose first episode debuts April 3 on PBS and YouTube, represents an earnest, sleekly produced, and thought-provoking effort to provide some balance in our future visions, and reason for hope.
The show’s list of executive producers is eclectic but eye-popping: a futurist, a rap superstar, one of the world’s best soccer players, the activist wife of a billionaire former Google CEO, and a Murdoch who believes in climate change.
“My daughter said she didn’t think there was a future for her,” said that Murdoch, Kathryn, whose husband, James, is son of conservative news kingpin Rupert. “Everything about the future was dystopian. I set out to prove her wrong, and rebalance that.”
The documentary series came out of conversations Murdoch had four years ago with futurist Ari Wallach, one of three she had hoped would be part of an Earth Day panel discussion. The pandemic lockdown killed that idea, but Murdoch sparked with Wallach’s notion that we should try to be “great ancestors,” taking actions that make the world better for generations of descendants to come.
The two settled on a documentary project that highlighted more positive stories about people and projects that are actually improving the planet in one fashion or another. Murdoch cited the notion of “protopia,” a word coined by Wired magazine founding editor Kevin Kelly to describe not utopia, but a positive-facing society dealing affirmatively with the challenges it faces.
“All we hear about is fear: What if we get it wrong?” Murdoch said after a Wednesday night screening of one of the Brief History episodes. “Well, what if we get it right?”
And there have been successes, Murdoch pointed out, especially the vigorous and effective societal responses to acid rain and holes in the ozone layer. Turns out, as the episode in the screening detailed, there are many fascinating projects and personalities making a dent in some of the challenges we all face.
Part 2 of A Brief History jaunts from the vast forests of Newfoundland, which are managed by indigenous Innu in traditional ways, to The Netherlands, where a mushroom-growing plant turns mycelia fibers into everything from fake bacon to packaging materials and insulation, to Copenhagen’s distinctive waste-to-energy plant/climbing wall/skiing hill, Amager Bakke, and an interview with its designer, Bjarke Ingels. Other stops include New York, Los Angeles and the Bay Area, and aboard ships cleansing the ocean of soon-to-be-recyled plastic waste.
“The emphasis on the human was the only thing that was interesting to me,” said Andrew Morgan, the series’ Los Angeles-based writer and director. “A lot of people are looking for hope and courage. It just led us to these amazing folks who articulated that in so many ways.”
Wallach, who also hosts the show (his first such role), said the approach is designed to counter humans’ natural “negativity bias” in dealing with perceived threats, a result of millennia of evolution in our fight-or-flight response mechanisms.
“As homo sapiens, much of the hardwiring in our biological systems hasn’t changed in the last 400,000 years,” Wallach said. The series was designed as something of an intervention, to “fight against our base instincts. What we’re trying to do is talk about what’s working.”
The key, Wallach emphasized, is “How do we become the great ancestors our descendants need us to be?”
The screening took place in a theater in Culver City, Calif., the westside Los Angeles suburb where Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV+, HBO, and Sony Pictures Entertainment all have major production facilities a few hundred feet to a few blocks away.
All those outlets have made plenty of documentary projects, but Murdoch said it was important to have the series run on PBS, for its over-the-air accessibility nationwide, and education-first sensibility. She is working with a PBS team now to develop supporting educational curricula to accompany school screenings of the series.
A Brief History’s peripatetic approach reflects the project’s relatively hefty budget and high production values, bolstered by the support, money and connections of all those big names involved.
The creators wanted to “make something that we actually want to watch, that’s as big and beautiful as we want,” Morgan said. “It was just a much bigger scope. It felt like we were making six different films.”
That bigger scope and ambition was helped by support from backers such as executive producer Wendy Schmidt, who is, like Murdoch, a long-time climate activist on her own through Climate Central and other initiatives, and through the prominent foundation she runs with her husband Eric, the former Google CEO.
Toronto-based production and management company Drake’s Dream Crew – perhaps best known for producing HBO’s Euphoria series – was co-founded by the eponymous rap star and former child actor with producer Adel “Future” Nur. They became interested in A Brief History after working with Wallach on a separate science-fiction project, where Wallach was futurist in residence, Murdoch said.
The executive producer list also includes French soccer superstar Kylian Mbappé, who came aboard after show creators reached out, because Murdoch wanted to get a world-class athlete talking about their mindset in dealing with adversity.
“What athletes don’t do is say, ‘We’re going to fail,’” Murdoch said. “We wanted to talk to an athlete at the top of their game. How do you visualize success?”
Still just 25, Mbappé already qualifies as one of the world’s handful of greatest soccer players, for France’s World Cup-winning national team and for his home club, Paris St. Germain. Mbappé not only did the interview, but became “extremely involved” in the overall project thereafter, Murdoch said.
A Brief History is the first project for Murdoch’s production company Futurific, she said, though her husband’s background as a former top executive with his father’s Fox and News Corp. operations means they’re hardly entertainment neophytes.
Murdoch used the screening, whose attendees included project crew members as well as numerous documentary and fiction filmmakers, to call for additional projects of many kinds, including books and comics as well as video. The company is already working with indie comic publisher AWA Studios, which is partly funded by the Murdochs’ Lupa Systems and VC Lightspeed Ventures.