Chewing On Amazon's Imperfect But Compelling The Feed

Putting a computer chip and software directly into your brain seems like a really bad idea. That much should be self-evident, but science fiction would have us believe it's an inevitability. Should it come to pass, the near-future sci-fi drama series The Feed presents a surprisingly plausible depiction of how the technology would change the world and the dangers it would present.

Based upon a 2018 novel by author Nick Clark Windo, the television adaptation was produced for Virgin TV in the UK, where it first aired in September 2019. Amazon Prime picked up the streaming rights for the American market and released the entire first season on November 19th without much fanfare, and it has lingered there with seemingly little attention paid to it for two months now. 

The story is set in a slightly futuristic world where the populations of developed countries are implanted with technology that allows their brains to connect to a massive online social network called The Feed. With just a thought, a person can call a friend, or share their memories (called "mundles") with anyone they choose, or even everyone. It's like Facebook or Twitter, but with even fewer barriers to filter problematic thoughts from public consumption. Should someone die, their mundles will supposedly be saved forever in cloud storage as a form of virtual immortality.

In the world of The Feed, the social network itself was developed by a man named Lawrence Hatfield (David Thewlis), who is now one of the most powerful men in the world and keeps as tight a rein over the technology as he can. Wife Meredith (Michelle Fairley from Game of Thrones) runs the business operations of their company with ruthless efficiency, pushing to spread the network to third-world nations that have resisted it. Son Tom (Guy Burnet, recently featured in Counterpart) wants nothing to do with the family business, and in fact works as a therapist helping people struggling with the effects of Feed addiction. Despite that, he's still daddy's favorite. His brother Ben (Jeremy Neumark Jones), meanwhile, has stayed close to the family in a senior position in the company, yet has never quite been able to attain the approval or affection he so desperately craves from his father. This has led him to some risky behavior, including installing illicit software into his mind.

All this family drama is upended when the Feed is hacked by a mysterious group known only as Takers, who are able to hijack people's brains and control their actions. Meredith tries to downplay these incidents to the media, while Lawrence labors to get control of the situation before it gets worse. Eventually, secrets are revealed that threaten the end of the Feed, which would in turn endanger all the institutions, both public and private, that have grown to rely on it.

Many of the themes in The Feed have been explored in previous science fiction stories. The Feed itself resembles the neural networks in the Ghost in the Shell franchise more than a little. Nonetheless, the primary pleasures in the show come from witnessing the way it extrapolates how such a technology would affect society. Some of the little details, such as the way cameras, phones, and televisions have become obsolete when everyone can connect mind-to-mind, flit by without hardly calling attention to themselves. Others are more significant. The GUI interface for the Feed is intuitively and appealingly designed in a way that seems like a natural extension of today's smartphones or tablets.

The Feed isn't the flashiest sci-fi show of the season (that distinction goes to another show you may have heard about), and the story falls victim to some predictable tropes before the end, but it's generally well written and performed, and makes for an enjoyable ten-episode binge that has the potential to go to some interesting places if it's lucky enough to get renewed for another season.

On a superficial note, the show also has some very striking 4K HDR image quality that looks great on a home theater screen. That counts for something, too.

Josh Zyber has written about TV, movies, and home theater for the past two decades. Most recently, he spent more than nine years managing a daily blog at High-Def Digest.