Woo wee!! AppleTV is on fire!! Just yesterday we got a teaser for Ted Lasso season 3 which premieres just a month away on March 15, woo hoo!! And now we’ve got another must-see series that premieres two days later.

From writer, director, and executive producer Scott Z. Burns (Contagion, An Inconvenient Truth, The Report), Extrapolations is told over a season of eight interconnected episodes and produced by Michael Ellenberg’s Media Res. It will make its global premiere on Apple TV+ with the first three episodes on Friday, March 17, followed by one new episode every Friday through April 21.

Check out the trailer:

Full synopsis:

Extrapolations is a bracing limited series that introduces a near future where the chaotic effects of climate change have become embedded into our everyday lives. Eight interwoven stories about love, work, faith and family from across the globe will explore the intimate, life-altering choices that must be made when the planet is changing faster than the population. Every story is different, but the fight for our future is universal. Are we brave enough to become the solution to our own undoing before it’s too late?

Wow, only Apple would have the $$$$$ to get so many A-listers from both TV and movies… here they are in order of appearance (take a deep breath):

Yara Shahidi, Kit Harington, Daveed Diggs, Matthew Rhys, Heather Graham, Sienna Miller, Tahar Rahim, Meryl Streep, David Schwimmer, Neska Rose, Judd Hirsch, Cherry Jones, Edward Norton, Michael Gandolfini, Indira Varma, Diane Lane, Adarsh Gourav, Gaz Choudhry, Keri Russell, Gemma Chan,  Marion Cotillard, Forest Whitaker, Hari Nef, Eiza González, Tobey Maguire, Ben Harper, Murray Bartlett, and MaameYaa Boafo.

Phew!!

I’m thrilled for Scott Z. Burns who’s a Minnesota native and a graduate of the University of Minnesota! MSP Mag coined him ‘the most important Minnesotan filmmaker since the Coen Brothers’ and I’d have to agree.

I went to see an event at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival (MSPIFF) featuring Mr. Burns a few years ago when The Report was screened there. He’s definitely a gifted writer/director whose film Contagion had a resurgence during the pandemic given how close it was in predicting what was going to happen.

We’ve seen romance, sci-fi or horror anthology, so why not a climate change anthology? The premise is certainly intriguing though the trailer starts out with such a pessimistic take on the global climate. As we see Sienna Miller aboard a futuristic airplane, Marion Cottilard quips…“Human history … is the story of one terrible catastrophe after another… what makes you think the world is going to get better?” but it’s also hopeful and defiant, “We cannot give up and go home for one simple reason: We already are home. This is our only home.” Yara Shahidi yells to a big crowd.

I appreciate the diverse cast and multicultural storylines, as well as the thoughtful and sensitive tone of such a divisive topic, unlike the brash satirical approach of Don’t Look Up that beat us over the head with its preachiness. The trailer sure is promising, hopefully the series lives up to it!

Are you excited to see Extrapolations?

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