Utopia

Dennis Kelly's Utopia launched on Channel 4 in January 2013 across two six-episode series in 2013 and 2014, was cancelled by Channel 4 after the second series, and remains one of the most stylistically distinctive British television commissions of the 2010s. The series was nominated for the BAFTA TV Award for Best Drama Series in 2014 and won the Broadcasting Press Guild Award for Best Drama at the 2014 ceremony. An American remake, also titled Utopia, was developed by Gillian Flynn for Amazon Prime in 2020 but was cancelled after a single season.

The series is created and entirely written by Dennis Kelly, the British playwright behind the West End musical Matilda (with Tim Minchin) and multiple stage plays at the Royal Court and the National Theatre. Kelly's involvement with the property remained throughout both series; the Channel 4 cancellation in late 2014 was a commissioning decision rather than a creative one, and Kelly has spoken openly about his unhappiness with how the show was concluded.

The cast is led by Adeel Akhtar, Alexandra Roach, Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, Paul Higgins, Fiona O'Shaughnessy, Neil Maskell and Stephen Rea. Cinematography is by Lol Crawley (later The Brutalist) and Ole Bratt Birkeland; the score is by Cristobal Tapia de Veer, the Chilean-Canadian composer whose work on this series (particularly the percussion-and-vocal-distorsion approach to scoring genre television) was widely imitated and led directly to his subsequent work on The White Lotus seasons one and two, both of which won him Emmys for Outstanding Music Composition. The visual style and saturated colour palette were widely treated as the most innovative on British television in the early 2010s.