A depressing exposé of the dark side of viral fame
Adventures in Futureland (Channel 4) made me feel very old, very quickly. Comedian Jamali Maddix was our conduit into the reality of life for online influencers whose ground zero was Los Angeles, as potent a visual signifier of vapidity and soullessness as you could find. There, he met two children who had found fame through viral videos that must have once been fun to make. Their lives were now devoted to churning out “content” either out of contractual obligation to the brands they represented or from desperation to stay in the game. They looked scared, bored, exhausted and hyped, often all at once. Aspirational, this was not.
Lil Terrio was trying to leverage the remnants of a profile established after a video of his dancing went viral when he was just five. Now a sullen, confused and obese 10-year-old, far away from the family in Atlanta who had moved into a five-bed house on the proceeds of his fame, Terrio lived out of hotel rooms. Evenings were spent with his manager, playing video games and eating takeaways, days involved trudging the streets, looking for recognition and beefing with rivals imagined and real. Terrio claimed to enjoy being famous, but this wasn’t fame, more chasing the memory of it as it disappeared over the horizon.
Fourteen-year-old Danielle Cohn seemed superficially happier with a career spawned by her lip-synching videos, but the unspoken threat of a similar fate loomed large. She had big brand contracts and 14million fans, although their ardour was fickle. Cohn spoke with unconvincing breeziness about stalkers and haters, while Maddix voiced concerns about Cohn’s mother running her social media accounts. Her (presumably childless) new manager declared that, “As a mom, you just have to sit back and really examine who you think can take your child to the next level.” With so many people riding her coattails, how could she step off the hamster wheel?
As easy as it was to blame mums, dads and management, Maddix was smart enough to implicate both the bankrolling brands forcing these children to live in never-ending reality shows, and the audiences demanding they conform to expectations. Thus 10-year-old Terrio talked dirty and bragged dully about his bling, and Cohn’s videos obscured the line between innocent fun and disturbingly sexualised.
I sensed that a couple of Maddix’s ideal quarries had eluded him, and an interview with Terrio’s family would have provided valuable context. But his understandable cynicism was crucially tempered by genuine concern for children who were offering up to massive audiences lives they had barely begun to comprehend.
Without Jane Austen’s name attached to it, Andrew Davies’s adaptation of (ITV) would have been an amiable, escapist romp. With it, expectations run a little higher; whatever Austen might have made of her never-completed story, it almost certainly wasn’t this. At the halfway point, eight episodes feels a couple too many, and the seductive promise of those early episodes is being frittered away, subtlety sacrificed for show-and-tell.
The arrival of Miss Lambe’s paramour allowed the slavery angle to be hammered home yet again; the business of establishing Sanditon itself, whether through Young Stringer’s cherished pagodas or Sidney’s society contacts, tried the patience; and the contrived sundering and splicing of Charlotte (Rose Williams) and Sidney (Theo James) edged into the ridiculous – their latest tiff over Sidney’s use of slave labour almost certainly just the latest misunderstanding on their rocky road to romance.
If Williams and James respectively feel too green and too one-note to convince, the supporting performances at least offer diversions. Alexandra Roach had fun as a hypochondriac fusspot-cum-comic relief, Anne Reid was effortlessly watchable as the haughty overbearing widow, Kris Marshall charmed as the scatterbrained dreamer. But after four episodes, these archetypes have scarcely evolved.
The truly intriguing characters to emerge from the morass of cliché and underdevelopment came courtesy of Lily Sacofsky and Charlotte Spencer, whose subtle, intriguing performances blurred the boundaries between manipulative ingénue Clara and vulnerable schemer Esther. Amid the piano recitals and implied incest, their entwined destinies offered compelling reasons to patronise Sanditon a little longer, but it feels far flimsier than one might have hoped.
Adventures in Futureland Sanditon