The Future Of Review 2022 Tv Show Series Cast Crew Online
A CGI animation of a faceless person walking through a futuristic automatic sliding door. “Here’s a familiar routine,” says narrator Jurnee Smollett, “You come home from work and yell, ‘Hello! I’m home!’” A CGI dog comes up. “What do all those barks and wiggles actually mean?” Smollett asks.
The Gist: The structure of each episode is similar: Interviews with experts are interspersed with talks with everyday people who have something to say about the topic. In the dogs episode, for instance, the filmmakers go to a dog park and talk to a few owners, and also speak to an expert dog trainer who is very attuned to the different non-verbal cues people’s pooches use to communicate. There is also a “celebrity” interviewee in each episode: In the dogs episode, we hear from rapper and dog breeder Big Boi, and in the dating episode we hear from Love Is Blind’s Giannina Gibelli.
The episodes set up the issue and what researchers are exploring — ways to translate barks and wiggles into English, or dating apps that nudge people into “meet-cutes” — and shows what’s possible in the near future and distant future.
The Future Of isn’t a show that’s trying to get too deep into a subject. Between Smollett’s conversational narration, the rudimentary CGI animations showing some of the concepts being developed to the funny interviews with both experts and everyday folks, plus the “celebrity interview”, the show isn’t trying to go into all the ethical and other implications of what these future concepts might bring about.
For instance, in the “dogs” episode, there is a brief mention by an expert that we may not want to know what our dogs are saying with their various barks and wags and wiggles, because we might not want to know. But another expert says that how we treat animals changes if we know we can communicate with them. But each issue, which could fill an hour episode all by themselves, are just mentioned in passing. Same in the dating episode; having “meet-cutes” engineered for people requires a ton of personal data collection that people might not be comfortable with.
But that’s not really why you watch shows like The Future Of. They’re little vignettes that you can either binge in a short period when you don’t feel like watching anything that requires too much concentration, or they’re good to pop on when you can’t decide what you want to see next. Like its cousin series Explained, The Future Of is designed to give you that feeling of “Huh. Interesting,” and maybe a tidbit of interesting information to put in the back of your brain to read about later. It’s mostly there to entertain first and inform second, and it accomplishes that goal pretty well.
