Despite supposedly being all about predicting the future, the 2002 film version of Minority Report is mostly about Tom Cruise running around. It was like he was jealous of Harrison Ford in The Fugitive and demanded that Steven Spielberg give him a movie with even more running plus cooler clothes. In fact, Minority Report the movie has such a cool aesthetic that Fox decided to base an entire TV show off of it.
How tired are you of hearing that such-and-such-show is a “procedural?” Yeah me too. But sorry! Minority Report the TV show is mostly a procedural with a weird dose of nostalgia for a movie that’s not really even all that classic.
Light spoilers for episode 1 of Minority Report.
In both the original Philip K. Dick short story and the 2002 film, a “minority report” refers to contradictory or tangential versions of the future. The idea is this: certain precognitive people (“Precogs”) have visions of future crimes which allows law enforcement to bust bad guys before a crime—usually a murder—occurs. This new version of Minority Report keeps that mythology as a central premise, but weirdly puts the concept of “precrime” into the past. Here, the precrime justice system has actually been dismantled by the government. This idea of the good-ole-days of sci-fi perp-busting is set up glibly by two cops, one who says, “GIRRRLL…precrime was way before our time! Now we just clean up messes.” It’s pretty weird for such a great sci-fi premise to be rendered as retro in your very first episode, but that’s what Minority Report is all about. The Precogs are out of business and crime is like, a serious problem, man! Lets get some Precogs working for the police again! But shhhh, it’s going to be secret Precogs on the sly!
Comparing Minority Report the TV show to Minority Report the movie seems like the obvious way to go here, but other than the aesthetics being vaguely borrowed from the film, and the fact that it’s supposed to be a sequel, there’s almost no thematic similarity. In an early scene our primary cop protagonist Lara Vega (Meagan Good) busts out Tom Cruise’s hand-swippy virtual reality interface—which really at this point is something we associate more with Tony Stark in the Iron Man movies than we do with Cruise. An oh-so-subtle click-track takes over the score of this scene, making investigating crime with retro holograms like dancy cool, I guess? Not to be mean, but it’s almost like Vega is acting like she’s on a catwalk in this scene and when her colleague begins a sentence with the aforementioned “GIRRLLL” line it’s immediately hard to take any of what you’re seeing seriously.
What is Minority Report about then? Basically this: getting rid of the Precogs was clearly a bad idea because preventing crime with clairvoyant visions is awesome. But, don’t worry! Even if you want to employ one Precog illegally to prevent crime, it’s still not too easy! This brand of soothsaying is totally the standard hazy visions of the future Captain-I-sense-treachery BS; minus GPS coordinates or exact intersections. In all iterations of Minority Report (or really any half-assed future dream story) this kind of piecemeal prophecy can seem very contrived very quickly. Once Vega teams up with Dash (a former Precog) it’s all about using his visions with her no-nonsense police know-how to prevent disasters and murders. You don’t actually need to be precognitive yourself to see where this is going: mysteries which seem less like real mysteries but more like TV puzzles that have no connection to reality.
I bet in an early pitch meeting at FOX, somebody probably described this show thusly: “It’s an exciting police drama with a psychological sci-fi twist! Plus, vague brand identity to something people might have heard of!” There’s no way to prove this brand of cynicism was present in the inception of this show, but it certainly feels that way. Minority Report reads more like a Minority Report “product” than a fully realized fictional universe. If I were the person in the pitch meeting, I would have tried to sell the show to studio heads like this: “It’s sort of like that show Continuum only with less complicated paradoxes, no actual time travel, and really dumbed-down dialogue.” I’m not saying lead actors Meagan Good (Vega) and Stark Sands (Dash) aren’t trying to sell the material, it’s just they’ve been given a kind of watered-down version of something that was once only kind of interesting to begin with. If Dash’s blurry visions of the future are a metaphor for the show’s longevity, I’d say they’re in trouble right away. Precrime might have been shut down in this future, but it’s only going to get shut down again unless they start taking it a little more seriously.
In the super-famous Philip K. Dick short story “We Can Remember it For You Wholesale,” people’s memories are tampered with to provide them with more interesting memories than they could have experienced otherwise. The problem with this process is that it makes everyone’s heads a little more jumbled up than they would be ordinarily, in short, rendering everything in one’s mind feeling fake and half-baked. When it comes to the cultural consciousnesses concerning something like Minority Report, the effect is similar. We vaguely recognize what we’re seeing on the screen here. We kind of already know where it’s going. But we’re infinitely jarred because it seems like we’ve done all of this already and someone is trying to brainwash us.
It’s fairly harmless and not offensive at all, but the new Minority Report feels like corporate-generated déjà vu. Which, sadly, is a pop-entertainment endgame that is all-too predictable.
Ryan Britt is the author of Luke Skywalker Can’t Read and Other Geeky Truths. (Plume 11.24) He’s written for The Morning News, VICE, Electric Literature and The New York Times. He’s a longtime contributor to Tor.com.
I keep seeing references to the Philip K. Dick novel “Minority Report”. Not a novel.
Someday, people are going to figure out that the real mother lode for SF screenplays is the short story.
I liked it quite a bit. It’s a logical continuation of the movie, even if its lead characters’ point of view about Precrime is sort of the opposite of how the movie turned out — although the complications and moral questions of the process were raised, and hopefully the ethical ambiguity of psychic crime prediction will be explored.
While several characters are returning from the movie, the only returning actor is the one playing Wally the caretaker. The others have been recast, though Laura Regan resembles Samantha Morton enough (from what I recall of her) that I can buy her as the same person. I like Meaghan Good as Detective Vega. She comes off as a competent detective and a reasonably charismatic lead, and is also really hot. The pilot maybe played up her sex appeal a bit much, with the bikini photo and the plunging necklines and such, but I’m not complaining. The tech-support woman with the tattoo on her face is pretty hot herself.
I liked the futurism. The environment wasn’t quite as consistently high-tech as it was in the movie, and I doubt the show will be able to sustain the level of CGI that the pilot was able to feature, but it was a reasonable continuation within those limits. But the futurism is good in another way, namely in acknowledging the demographic trends of the American population and giving us a nicely diverse cast, much more so than the overwhelmingly white cast of the movie. Also — “Washington Red Clouds” instead of Redskins. I like that.
It does feel like a routine procedural, but it won’t necessarily stay that way. I find that most shows these days start out feeling like ordinary procedurals, because that’s what’s in the comfort zone of the network suits and the mass audience — but often that’s just the initial soft sell to ease people into a show before it starts getting more creative and unusual. We should expect the first few weeks of a new show to feel like conventional procedurals, but that doesn’t mean they won’t turn into something more interesting later on.
In this case, it sounds like there’s a deeper arc being seeded here with Agatha and Arthur talking about how someone has a plan to take the precogs again.
For me it’s not “procedurals with a SF twist” that bug me, it’s “SF with a procedural twist!”
Like, take “Limitless”, never saw the movie but at least was mildly interested in the concept, thought a sequel based on a different person taking the drug could be a great series, until the description continued “and uses it to help the police solve crimes every week!” And my interest drops to zero.
Or Lucifer, based on the comic, has “who is bored and unhappy as the Lord of Hell and resigns his throne and abandons his kingdom for the beauty of LA” which is great until they tack on “where he gets his kicks helping the LAPD punish criminals.” Oh, great, so it’s going to be ANOTHER show about an outsider helping the cops solve crimes. Good thing, too, because they were really near to actually trying something original.
I don’t even mind procedurals, I watch a few, and the “outsider helping the police because of a special talent” can be a fun premise in shows like Castle or the Mentalist, but…stop $@@@@@!$ing up good SF premises by turning them into police procedural knockoffs.
Minority Report is the only one of this trend that is actually a natural fit, in some ways, but I skipped it for another reason: I hate “I can see the future, and so every week we’re going to show you something that I see and then eventually get there so I can change it or maybe not just to give an occasional surprise” plots, on principle.
“It’s a sequel, so that thing that was stopped in the original story is now in the past” seems reasonable to me, not weird.
As does “while we no longer lock people up for crimes they haven’t actually committed yet, visions of the future are really helpful solving crimes when they are committed”.
“Has a reasonable premise” and “is a good show” are different things, of course.
@4/armb: I agree — it’s a valid followup. Precrime ended, but that doesn’t end its impact on society. There would be an aftermath to its cessation, and to the things the program did while it was in effect (like the brain damage to the cryogenically frozen prisoners, as we saw). And there’s the question of what happens to the precogs for the rest of their lives. The movie was satisfied with saying “They went to an island and lived happily ever after,” but that can’t be the end of the story. Exploring who they became when they grew up, how they used the abilities they still had, seems a reasonable story to tell.