Among the many questions that must be answered in a review of Snowpiercer, TNT’s new 10-part adaptation of a French graphic novel, one stands out: How does the television show compare to the 2013 film by Bong Joon-ho, who went on to make last year’s Academy Award winner, Parasite? For audience members who thrilled to the movie’s campy tone and highly stylized violence, I have bad news: The TV series is a far more traditional affair. Yet for viewers who found Bong’s film to be a laughably bad take on a great idea (or who are still traumatized by Tilda Swinton’s searingly awful performance), the verdict is somewhat happier.
Like its feature-length cousin, TNT’s series takes as its starting point a world encased in ice due to a disastrous global warming intervention. Circling the globe in perpetuity are the 3,000 passengers of Snowpiercer, a 1,001-car train whose marvel of an engine is the only thing standing between humanity and total extinction. For fare-holders, the class of one’s ticket determines everything from one’s rations to one’s sleeping accommodations: First-class passengers eat sushi and live in suites while third-classers make do with grilled cheese and cots. For stowaways, or “Tailies,” life is an uninterrupted ordeal of protein mush and windowless misery. But relax, everyone! In the early days, Tailies were forced to eat one another.
Leading the dual societies aboard Snowpiercer are two characters whose relationship drives the show throughout much of its inaugural season. Among the Tailies, informal command belongs to Andre Layton (Daveed Diggs of Hamilton fame), a former police detective whose wife left him for a staff position in third class. Nearer the engine, passengers obey the steely hospitality chief Melanie Cavill (Jennifer Connelly), who may or may not report to Snowpiercer’s unseen creator, Mr. Wilford. When a gruesome murder occurs up-train, Melanie enlists a reluctant Andre to find the culprit. Aware that a criminal investigation will necessarily delay a planned Tailie uprising, Andre vows to use his unprecedented freedom of access in behalf of his fellow stowaways.
As is often the case with television dramas, Snowpiercer’s strengths and weaknesses are both on full display in its early episodes. In Diggs and Connelly, the show has secured a pair of watchable leads to anchor a cast that is uniformly competent. (Alison Wright, who played the unwitting Soviet stooge Martha Hanson on The Americans, is a particularly welcome sight.) In the Snowpiercer itself, the series has on its hands a set designer’s dream: a whirring wonderland of depravity and opulence whose interiors are all the more impressive for being (loosely) bound by a train’s dimensions. Though the show’s writing is occasionally ponderous — “justice never boarded,” one character intones — the questions that attend its concept remain as intriguing as they were in 2013. To what extremes can human beings be driven in the pursuit of survival? Does equality remain an unalloyed good when resources are literally approaching the vanishing point?
Alas, like the film that preceded it, Snowpiercer the series lacks the confidence to pursue the second of those queries as vigorously as it does the first. Thus, while showrunner Graeme Manson dutifully treats viewers to shots of chopped-up organs and shattered limbs, his program has almost nothing to say about the respective ethical positions of the Tailies and their nemeses in first class. The latter are simply wrong — their control of the train’s wealth is not merely problematic but evil. As a result, Snowpiercer falls into the same trap that snared the similarly one-dimensional series The Handmaid’s Tale. Uncomplicatedly good characters can only battle thoroughly wicked ones for so long before tedium sets in.
Yet even if Snowpiercer were to muddy its thematic waters, significant problems would remain. The first, a general lack of character development, might eventually be solved by the introduction of Lost-style flashbacks in which the show turns its attention to life before the freeze. (Through its first five episodes, the series contains exactly zero scenes of that kind.) The second, a dearth of meaningful plot options, is by far the crueler conundrum. Having created a world whose class system is not just harsh but unendurable, Snowpiercer’s writers have little choice but to stage a series of revolutions and counterrevolutions. A murder up-train is a fine thing if one needs to get the protagonist out of the caboose, but what difference does normal human drama make when the planet is a frozen wasteland and the social order that remains is horrifically unjust?
Perhaps the more interesting question, given the rigors of “cancel culture,” is whether Snowpiercer can survive to address these flaws in a future season. Among the complaints that accrued for The Handmaid’s Tale, after all, was Emily Nussbaum’s gibe in the New Yorker that “[its] society is unconvincingly color-blind,” and a similar grenade could easily be lobbed TNT’s way. Will a newly emboldened Twitter Left tolerate a fictional world whose persecuted caste includes white people? Or thrill to the vision of a white passenger encouraging a Korean woman to check her privilege?
Maybe not. Yet should the mob choose to overlook Snowpiercer’s political peccadilloes, viewers could conceivably be in for that rarest of television experiences: a show whose evolution leaves it not just stylish, not just exciting, but smart.
Graham Hillard teaches English and creative writing at Trevecca Nazarene University.
