Saving the World in the Nick of Time

Making films and TV About the Climate Emergency ☛

“Hmmm… tricky…”

I’m at a UK-based Film and Television Market and a panel of mainly TV executives have just been asked how they’d respond to being pitched scripts on the subject of the climate emergency.

“We don’t want to preach to people.”
“We don’t want to scare the audience”
“It’s probably safest to stick to metaphor, like ‘Don’t Look Up’.”

This last comment is particularly disappointing, coming as it does from a representative of probably the edgiest TV station in the UK.

To put this in context, the record of recent film and television at tackling the climate crisis has been really rubbish. The last major film on the subject—Don’t Look Up—tackles the issue, as that Exec observed, via a metaphor: an asteroid heading for Earth that everyone is ignoring. The film studiously avoids mentioning climate change, but we all know what it’s about. Coming right up to date, forthcoming release The End We Start From also avoids the ‘c’ word, but again we can easily guess the cause of the catastrophic floods that it depicts. To see a major movie that is happy to directly address the climate crisis you have to go back to The Day After Tomorrow… 19 years ago. And there’s been very little in between. A recent study from the University of Southern California analyzed over 37,000 film and TV scripts from 2016-2020 and found that only 2.8% made any reference to climate issues. So, what lies behind this caution?

Putting my context in context: actually both film and TV have been doing great… if you include non-fiction. Big screen and small, every aspect of environmental issues has been covered so exhaustively that there are film festivals dedicated exclusively to such films. In the last year a particular shout-out to the hard-hitting Finite: the Climate of Change and to Josh Appignanesi’s comedy-doc My Extinction. Some of these docs, like the BBC’s The Blue Planet, have been credited with causing a major shift in public opinion, specifically on the issue of oceanic plastic. And Channel 4 has just tasked three of its top presenters with speaking out on green issues in The Great Climate Fight.

To go back to the concerns presented by that panel. Without a doubt any drama that preaches on a political topic loses its audience… except, perhaps, those audience members who are already converted. But the assumption that any drama about the climate emergency will, by definition, be preachy confuses me. British television has a proud history of making hard-hitting political dramas that have moved the dial on many pressing social issues. From Cathy Coming Home leading to the foundation of the homeless charity Shelter to Queer as Folk shifting social perceptions of homosexuality, discussions of race like The Buddha of Suburbia and I May Destroy You, Edge of Darkness exposing the nuclear industry, not to mention Threads, The War Game, Traffik, The Boys from the Blackstuff, This Is England… I could go on. Did the producers of those shows set out to preach or did they set out to make ground-breaking drama?

Scaring the audience is a more interesting question. A lot of thought amongst those who talk about climate communications suggests that positive hopeful messages are much more effective than scary stories. The main initiative in the UK that promotes climate-related screen narratives is dedicated to hopeful stories. Prominent academic Katharine Heyhoe speaks convincingly on this approach too. Their research looks solid, and they may well be right, but I see two basic challenges with this approach. One is that most drama needs conflict and jeopardy. Obviously there are triumph-over-adversity story-lines, so we can get over that problem. The bigger and trickier challenge is that in reality the climate outlook just isn’t hopeful, so coming up with a story which both accurately reflects the issue and provides hope feels like trying to square a circle.

Besides, scary or downbeat stories can be effective. You only have to look at the TV dramas I’ve listed above to see that there are relatively few with happy endings, indeed the ones with the greatest social impact are probably the bleakest. Cries of pain get heard. Indeed, I’d credit the BBC’s Edge of Darkness with priming my interest in environmental issues and informing my opinions on nuclear power.

‘Edge of Darkness’ (1985)

There is also the question as to whether challenging stories about the climate crisis would really paralyze people with terror. Our current emergency is not the first event that has threatened the end of civilization. Between the 1950s and the 1980s the prospect of life as we know it being wiped out at the touch of a button was a clear and present danger. Despite the unthinkable consequences of nuclear armageddon, filmmakers had few qualms about asking audiences to think about them. From Dr Strangelove, Failsafe and Seven Days in May (all 1964) to more commercial 80s films like The Dead Zone, The Fourth Protocol and WarGames, via at least three Bond movies, screenwriters didn’t shy away from making nuclear war the big stakes, at a time when that was still a very real possibility. Even so, I doubt that many people got emotionally triggered by Octopussy.

‘Octopussy’ (1983) TRIGGER WARNING: this image contains a nuclear trigger.

If, however, you wanted drama that fully brought home the potential horror of a nuclear attack, those films were made too. Threads—considered by many to be the most shocking and impactful piece of TV drama ever made—did not hold back from showing the full horror of a nuclear winter.

To be fair, one approach offered by the panel at that film market was including climate issues in the background of dramas on other subjects. Having TV characters model good climate citizenship, showing them doing their recycling, installing solar panels or maybe giving up beef for environmental reasons. I guess this is the climate equivalent of diverse casting: rather than draw attention to an issue, normalize it. I’d broadly support this, although it does feel a bit like offering swimming lessons as the Titanic is sinking.

This brings me to the other argument, possibly the elephant in the room at that Market: would audiences actually watch dramas about something so depressing? It’s a reasonable question, and understandably unvoiced: who wants to go on the record as saying that they won’t cover a major issue because they don’t think they can make money from it?

Well, back in the day Threads achieved a very healthy 40% audience share—6.9 million viewers—followed quickly by a repeat on BBC1; the viewing public of 1984 were obviously made of sturdy stuff. The Day After Tomorrow grossed $552m off a $125m budget. Don’t Look Up is the second most popular film ever on Netflix, totting up 360m viewing hours in its first 28 days. Going back to that University of Southern California study, they surveyed American audiences and found that 48% said that they’d actively like to see more more depiction of climate issues, against only 22% who said they would not. It’s possible that respondents were over-reporting their willingness to watch, that if actually presented with dramas about climate change they might yet swerve them, but even if half that number would switch on, that’s still a very decent audience.

There’s only so long that film and television drama can go on ignoring this issue. 74% of the British public are worried about climate change (in the US the figure is 54%) making it the second biggest issue in the public consciousness right now, after the cost of living crisis. I can think of no other major social issue that has been so under-served in screen fiction. The climate emergency is not going away any time soon; it is absolutely inevitable that we will be dramatizing what the Secretary General of the United Nations has called “the defining issue of our time” in the very near future.

Why not start now?

Copyright © Guy Ducker 2023

Edited by Dr Sara Lodge