[2][3] The show was written by Dennis Kelly and starred Fiona O'Shaughnessy, Adeel Akhtar, Paul Higgins, Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, Alexandra Roach, Oliver Woollford, Alistair Petrie, and Neil Maskell.
[10] A community of comic book fans believe the graphic novel The Utopia Experiments predicted several disastrous epidemics, such as mad cow disease (BSE).
They find their lives systematically dismantled, while The Network operatives kill anyone in their way as they hunt for the manuscript and someone named Jessica Hyde.
Meanwhile, other characters find themselves ensnared in The Network's orbit, and through their interactions with its agents, the organization's purpose and secret plot come into focus.
As rumours of "Russian flu" proliferate worldwide and a variety of groups and individuals close in on the protagonists, they try to solve the web of mysteries and conspiracies around them.
[22] Despite taking up just one line in the pilot script, director Marc Munden has described Lee’s distinctive yellow bag as “a sort of jumping off point for the rest of the colour palette” for the show.
These varied recordings included the sounds of rhino excrement, a Chilean trutruca, and the voice of director Alex Garcia Lopez.
According to Tapia de Veer, "it was more about catching spirits on tape than organizing notes; an approach that helped articulate the mad complexity of Utopia’s characters and abstract yet emotional situations.
[20] Tapia de Veer said in an interview with the Royal Television Society that Utopia first resonated with him in part because of his time growing up in Pinochet’s Chile.
In the second series, locations used included Barnsley Interchange in Barnsley, Temple Works in Leeds, The Chocolate Works in York, the Yorkshire Dales National Park, the Hepworth Gallery in Wakefield, and various spots in Leeds city centre, which doubled as London by superimposing London landmarks on the horizon.
In the second series, the show used various news footage from the 1970s including the assassinations of Aldo Moro, Carmine Pecorelli, Richard Sykes, and Airey Neave.
In particular, several events from a 10-day period in 1979, including the Three Mile Island accident and the collapse of the Labour government, had been combined as a jumping off point for the second series.
The network's official statement was: Utopia is truly channel-defining: strikingly original, powered by Dennis Kelly's extraordinary voice and brought to life in all its technicolor glory through Marc Munden's undeniable creative flair and vision, the team at Kudos delivered a series which has achieved fervent cult status over two brilliantly warped and nail-biting series.
[29]As well as receiving poor ratings, the planned HBO adaptation meant the British version never aired in America, according to director Marc Munden, preventing the show from gaining a larger audience.
[31] Mark Monahan of The Daily Telegraph described it as "a dark, tantalizingly mysterious overture",[32] while Sam Wollaston of The Guardian called it "a work of brilliant imagination", "a 21st-century nightmare" that "looks beautiful", but also wondered about the gratuitousness of its violence.
[54] The album entitled Utopia (Original Television Soundtrack) was released 7 October 2013, on both CD and MP3 download by Silva Screen Music.
In February 2014, HBO ordered an American adaptation of Utopia, to be co-created and directed by David Fincher, with Gillian Flynn as the writer.