While a blend of The Matrix and Westworld might seem like a guaranteed success, Prime Video’s underrated cyberpunk sci-fi series lasted a mere eight episodes before it was unfairly canceled. It is fair to say that sci-fi TV has gotten a lot more ambitious in recent years. The historic success of HBO’s Game of Thrones franchise proved that viewers were willing to invest time and patience in complex genre storylines, prompting a slew of sci-fi shows that pushed the boundaries in terms of complexity and ambition.
From Apple TV’s Asimov adaptation Foundation and the same streaming service’s Silo, For All Mankind, and Severance to Netflix’s cyberpunk series Altered Carbon and its eight-season masterpiece Black Mirror, all the major streaming platforms tried their hand at mature, dark sci-fi shows for adult audiences. While the above shows are great, there is one Prime Video series that successfully married Westworld’s time-twisting storytelling with the alternate realities of The Matrix, and its swift cancellation remains a criminal choice.
Released in 2022, The Peripheral focused on Chloë Grace Moretz’s Flynn Fisher, a gamer with the ability to access a secret world of alternate realities. The Peripheral shifted between a dystopian timeline set in the near future and a post-apocalyptic timeline set further into the future, as Fisher tried to navigate both realities. Fisher’s main story initially takes place in 2032, but her ability to see alternate realities let her explore her own 2099 future simultaneously.
The Peripheral’s Cyberpunk Story Is A Complex and Ambitious Sci-Fi Plot
With a stacked cast that included Jack Reynor, Katie Leung, and Charlotte Riley, The Peripheral was an admirably ambitious sci-fi series with a lot to say about artificial intelligence, virtual realities, and societal collapse. Like Netflix’s earlier cyberpunk series Altered Carbon, the show owed a creative debt to the formative works of the sci-fi subgenre, and Fisher’s role as an ersatz detective often brought to mind Deckard from Philip K. Dick’s sci-fi noir Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
However, it should have come as no surprise that The Peripheral’s plot was so shaped by cyberpunk classics, since the show was based on a book by one of the subgenre’s earliest pioneers. The Peripheral’s plot was adapted from Neuromancer author William Gibson’s 2014 novel of the same name, creating a strange feedback loop in terms of its inspiration. The Matrix trilogy was heavily influenced by Gibson’s 1984 Neuromancer, a novel about a hacker who takes part in a risky heist to retrieve access to an online virtual reality known as the “Matrix.”
The Peripheral’s Original Author Inspired The Matrix Trilogy
Thus, The Peripheral’s similarity to The Matrix movies comes in part from the fact that the Matrix franchise itself borrowed from Gibson’s earlier book. There are substantial differences between Gibson’s vision of a fictional cyberpunk future in Neuromancer and The Peripheral, as the march of real-life technology changed the author’s depiction of virtual reality and online existence in the three decades between their original publications.
However, the time-twisting story of The Peripheral means that the show still works as an inventive, unpredictable mix of The Matrix and Westworld. Like that HBO series, The Peripheral uses its two timelines to wrong-foot viewers, while its noir-tinged mystery story makes the Prime Video sci-fi series an even better fit for this Mystery Box plotting than Westworld’s Neo-Western story.
At a time when shows like Netflix’s ambitious sci-fi epic Three-Body Problem have proven that complicated genre storylines can be accessible to mainstream audiences, it was a surprise and a shame that Prime Video canceled The Peripheral as fast as it did. The streaming service scarcely gave this blend of The Matrix and Westworld time to develop its salient themes, meaning viewers will now never know how good The Peripheral’s plot might have gotten with time.
- Release Date
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2022 – 2022-00-00
- Network
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Prime Video
- Showrunner
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Scott B. Smith
- Directors
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Alrick Riley, Vincenzo Natali
- Writers
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Scott B. Smith, Jamie Chan, Greg Plageman, Bronwyn Garrity, William Gibson
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Chloe Grace Moretz
Flynne Fisher
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