Description
Since 2000, quality long-form television drama has demonstrated a profound attraction to IR topics, from The Wire’s interrogation of the local effects of transnational criminality to Occupied’s imagining of a Russian invasion of Norway. The visualization of place and space has become increasingly central to the storytelling process of such geopolitical TV series, with the screening of meaningful landscapes serving as an indispensable enhancement to the sensory feedback loop enabled by the advent of Television 3.0. As television outpaces film as the primary dispositif through which individuals imagine and understand the world around them, how showrunners treat the challenges of the Anthropocene is critical to the popular culture-world politics nexus as we draw closer to the survivability moment for the current global system. Drawing on Mirzoeff’s (2016) notion of the ‘see change’, or the problem of learning to see the effects of the Human Epoch on the planet, my paper assesses the possibilities and questions the limitations of ecocritical series to help viewers grapple with the totality of our interwoven ecological crises. Employing Apple TV+’s See (2019- ) as a tool to think with and through the Anthropocene, my analysis interrogates the series’ speculative geographical imaginary wrought by the end of Homo sapiens’ reign as a singularly disruptive force on the planet (some 500 years in the future the meagre remnants of humanity are all blind due to a twenty-first-century pandemic). However, turning See’s representational paradigm upon itself, I critique the prosaism of the series’ (visual) politics, both from the ocular-centric perspective of its visual culture and its inability to imagine a world that does not mirror the ‘Western’ extractivist, patriarchal, and ableist nature of contemporary geopolitics.
