The big blackout will be televised: Apocalyptic series for when the lights come back on

Much laughter and mockery ensued when Ursula von der Leyen’s European Commission urged citizens to stockpile an emergency kit (water, medicines, canned goods, a stove, a battery-powered radio) in the event of potential threats from war, climate change, natural disasters, or other causes. There were also those who were enraged by the Orwellian invention of the Civil Protection mobile phone alerts. What could we possibly have to worry about, those of us who in less than five years have experienced a global pandemic and the lockdown, Storm Filomena in Spain, a devastating flood, and two not-so-distant wars with enormous global repercussions?

To prove Von der Leyen and the gas stove manufacturers right, the Great Iberian Blackout caught us by surprise. It was nothing we hadn’t already been told by TV fiction, but we thought it was a fantasy. Conveniently, Netflix has just released Zero Day, in which a cyberattack causes (brief) power outages that paralyze all activity. To top it all off, mysterious insurgents threaten the entire population, with messages sent to their cell phones, repeating the same thing over and over again. It will fall to a retired former U.S. president (Robert de Niro), recruited to help the sitting president (Angela Bassett), to deal with the crisis. But we haven’t had time to watch it, and Monday was a bad day to start.

The series that best reflects what happened Monday is the Spanish drama Offworld (2022). It tells the story of how the population faces a lasting energy collapse, the result of a solar storm, which is making survival increasingly difficult. It does so through five stories, in as many episodes, each directed by an established director (Rodrigo Sorogoyen, Raúl Arévalo, Alberto Rodríguez, Isa Campo, and Isaki Lacuesta). It is very well-made, as was the podcast series on which it was based: The Big Blackout. The latter was even more disturbing, because the audio narrative is more like a novel (which you imagine) than a series (which you watch). As we know, in a monumental crisis, the radio is the failsafe, as evidenced by those who have a battery-powered one, or the people who were stuck in their cars in the traffic jams.

Offworld has been compared to the equally interesting French miniseries The Collapse, which also jumps between different micro-stories. Here we are not told what happened or why, but we see the system collapse and the spread of disorder, looting, riots, and despair. In Mr. Robot, it is precisely the hackers who unleash chaos by sabotaging the technologies used by the financial system, initially with the aim of overthrowing capitalism, but the situation backfires, as was easy to predict.

There are other distressing dystopias on the streaming platforms, but they point to other risks, particularly that of rampant authoritarianism. Democracy doesn’t go out overnight, like electricity, but that possibility should also torment us. Of these, don’t miss Years and Years, a miniseries about the spiral of populism that had to be released quickly in 2019, before reality got the better of it. The height of fearsome authoritarianism is Gilead, the theocratic and repressive country formerly known as the United States where The Handmaid’s Tale takes place. The film Civil War goes one step further: viewers experience a civil war in the United States without knowing the reason, but in reality, the reason doesn’t matter once you’re already involved.

We’ll talk about political risks another day. What’s evident today is that our way of life wouldn’t withstand a lasting energy collapse. But instead of riots, what we’ve seen most in the streets during the blackout has been civility. Perhaps we’re better people than the TV shows portray us, and we don’t wait for the lights to go out to plunder, but rather we ask our neighbors if they need anything.

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