In pursuit of the elusive climate drama

IN THE NEAR FUTURE IMAGINED BY THE Apple TV+ sci-fi drama Extrapolations, humans have discovered how to communicate with humpback whales.

- Judy Berman

One scientist, Sienna Miller's Rebecca Shearer, even translates a female humpback's song into English via the sonorous voice of Meryl Streep (who also plays Rebecca's mother). That's the good news. The bad news is that the creature is the last of its kind. Rebecca works for a company that is scrambling to preserve the genetic footprints of species that are going extinct because of global warming so that they can be reintroduced when someone figures out how to cool the world.

This juxtaposition of grand-scale catastrophe with glimmers of innovation and hope is typical of Extrapolations, an ambitious look at the potential fallout of climate change from Contagion writer and An Inconvenient Truth producer Scott Z. Burns. Featuring Diane Lane, Daveed Diggs, Edward Norton, Marion Cotillard, Forest Whitaker, Gemma Chan, and many more A-list talents, along with Streep and Miller, the eightpart series follows a rotating cast of characters through interconnected vignettes set between 2037 and 2070. It's a humane, carefully constructed but often frustrating project-and one that illustrates why insightful art about the climate crisis has proved so elusive.