Extrapolations review: Apple TV Plus' climate change drama is a star-studded slog

Extrapolations is a challenging endeavor, but perhaps not in the way series creator Scott Z. Burns intended. Apple TV+’s bloated, boring anthology tests patience and willpower over eight excruciatingly long episodes. The show, which premieres March 17 and features extensive talent, centers on climate change and its horrific impact on the planet, so it’s incredibly relevant and oddly fascinating. However, all its noble ideas are buried under a derivative script and confounding performances. No amount of Prestige Drama shenanigans—and there are plenty—can save this chore of a TV show.

Burns’ prescient 2011 film Contagion, about a global pandemic and the race for vaccines, established that he’s well-versed in tackling intense stories about real-world dynamics. But what we have here is not a two-hour film with a tight, scientific narrative and message. Rather, Extrapolations stretches out key themes over multiple episodes, storylines, characters, locations, and years. And while there’s plenty of melodramatic dialogue and loads of predictable twists, there’s never any real payoff. The global warming concept is pivotal and well-intentioned, but the execution is a hollow Emmy-bait exercise.

Set between 2037 and 2070, Extrapolations sheds light on the disasters awaiting humanity if climate change isn’t taken seriously. The main villain here is big tech and corporations like Alpha, run by CEO Nick Bilton (Kit Harington). It’s an omnipresent company with its hands in everything, from grain production and water supply to holograms and smart home devices. He’s the connecting thread between each outing, but Harington’s stoic performance is thankfully limited mainly to the finale (he also briefly appears in a couple of early episodes, although it’s easy to forget that fact.)

In the show’s version of the future, a wildfire-ravaged Earth suffers as the temperature rises. But also: Cancer is cured, Mars has been colonized, and America has survived the war on democracy (minus Texas, apparently). Try as he might, Burns crafts a world that’s wide-ranging but inconsistent. The show often feels like a mix of Black Mirror and Upload. A few episodes are heavily entrenched in environmental disasters, like trying to save the last humpback whale or the heavy air pollution in India, while others are character-driven stories (two couples at a tense dinner party in San Francisco, or a man experiencing memory loss in London) with climate disaster being only in the backdrop. Extrapolations juggles these arcs poorly, leading to feelings of whiplash and frustration when the show should spark genuine emotions.