Storytelling and Sustainability: How top Hollywood creatives weave climate themes into hit TV shows and movies
Image Credit: Courtesy of Universal / CBS / Pixar A breakdown of 10 recent hit TV shows and movies that reflect the range of storytelling around issues involving climate change and environment themes.
The futuristic series starring Sydney Chandler, Timothy Olyphant, Alex Lawther and Essie Davis revolves around questions of human versus synthetic and the grave threat of viral contagions for the planet.observed that among the intriguing themes explored in the latest spin on the durable “Alien” franchise is “that while this universe already contains bionically enhanced humans and completely artificial, yet lifelike, robots , what prodigy is cooking up are synths implanted with a pre-existing human consciousness, a project with the end goal of putting a price tag on eternal life.
”Noah Hawley, the “Fargo” veteran who is creator and executive producer of “Alien: Earth,” outlined his ambition for the show to “All I tried to do,” Hawley told us, is think one or two steps ahead. Is it realistic to think that billionaires are going to be trillionaires? The planet is heating up, and the seas are going to rise — it’s going to be a hot, wet planet that we live on.
”The TV series adaptation of the beloved video game franchise began with a story about post-apocalyptic Los Angeles ravaged by nuclear devastation.
“The big and small screens are stuffed full of post-apocalyptic adventures, yet despite that cluttered landscape, few shows and films stick out to offer something unique for viewers. However, in ‘Fallout’ for Prime Video, a thrilling adaptation of the beloved video game series, creators Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner present an off-kilter and fascinating look at humanity in the 23rd century.
: “Despite the absurdity of this setting, Robertson-Dworet and Wagner manage to embed a visceral truth and emotion about humanity, greed and sacrifice as themes throughout the narrative. Episode 2, “The Golden Rule,” opens in Shady Shade during Maximus’ boyhood. What unfolds in the following scenes is so touching and heartfelt that it will likely bring even the most stonefaced viewer to tears.
” The hit drama series follows the lives of firefighters for the Golden State’s highly regarded Cal Fire, aka California’s Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. In depicting the work of firefighters, the show’s storylines naturally demonstrate the growth in severity and volume of wildland and urban blazes as well as the importance of mitigation efforts.
As a writer, Thieriot’s vision for a series revolving around the young adults and the prisoners who work for Cal Fire in times of need led him to team up with TV drama veterans Joan Rater and Tony Phelan to create “Fire Country. ”The Jerry Bruckheimer Television series was a success for CBS from the start. It has yielded the spinoff “Sheriff Country,” which debuted last October.
In January 2025, as Southern California faced the most destructive wildfires in generations with the Palisades and Eaton blazes, the “Fire Country” team was quick to launch a PSA urging Americans to donate to the Red Cross.
“We would like to extend our deepest gratitude to all of the firefighters and first responders who are risking their lives and tirelessly battling the wildfires in southern California. You are true heroes,” “Fire Country” star and co-creator Max Thieriot told viewers in the PSA.
“Hoppers” was a nice surprise at the box office for Pixar in March as a wholly original property that drew family crowds and repeat business. The storyline revolves around a classic David-versus-Goliath battle to stop a greedy mayor from authorizing a modern development plan for a protected beaver habitat.
The stakes are ratcheted when a brilliant science teacher invents a form of mind-melding, or “hopping,” that allows 19-year-old animal activist Mabel to put herself in inside the head of an animal-like droid to gain perspective on how our furry friends really interact with humans.
“If ‘Hoppers’ were simply the story of this loony-tunes experiment, it might have been a standard daffy sci-fi fairy tale. But all of that is merely the pretext; the movie runs with its premise while scarcely giving it a second thought. At loose in the glade, which is now her home, Mabel looks and sounds like your basic everyday digital-cartoon forest animal. But what we know is that she’s an avatar.
What places “Hoppers” in the first rank of Pixar movies is that the story, while insane enough to begin with, keeps twisting and turning with let’s-try-it-on surrealist nonchalance. The director, Daniel Chong, has crafted a tale of woodland creatures fighting to save their habitat that plays like “Bambi” on crack. And I mean that as a compliment.
“Hoppers” never stops surprising you in rudely antic ways, and that’s the essence of its delight. ”“She does not take no for an answer, which I think we all need a little bit more of, especially young women who are told to just sit down and shut up for most of their lives. Being shown a character that never does that is really inspiring and empowering… what a cool thing it is that I get to play her.
”The series went against the tide of video game to TV adaptations, captivating critics for building moments of hope and human connection into the zombie-apocalypse drama genre.
“The people living through “The Last of Us” are, in a sense, blameless: They’re enduring a zombie apocalypse brought about when the cordyceps fungus leaped into humans, turning many people into brain-dead vectors for sharing and spreading their disease. There’s a reassuring quality to this version of an end: There seems, perhaps, nothing that could have been done differently, no preparation that might have been made.
And some 20 years after society fell, those who remain appear shell-shocked in moments, unable to believe what they lived through. Though there’s plenty of violence in the squabble for limited remaining resources on HBO’s new dystopian drama, the characters we meet often present as if they’re victims of circumstance, cursed to remember what they once had. ”Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann, creators and executive producers of HBO’s “The Last of Us. ” Mazin is also showrunner and a director.
After Season 1 of “The Last of Us” raked in 24 Emmy nominations in July 2023, Mazin was humble about the long odds against the show becoming such an all-around smash.
“Anybody who says they’d expect what happened with ‘The Last of Us’ would be possibly a sociopath,”No one should think, ‘The show will be seen by 30 to 40 million people and it’ll get all these Emmy nominations. ’ We would have been thrilled with just good viewership numbers and good reviews, but it’s been overwhelming. ”Bella Ramsey’s character of Ellie provides a key POV for the series and a cautionary tale for the future.
“Ellie is a teen who’s never known anything but the post-fall world. Through her eyes, we see the landscape as, effectively, a funny kind of normal: Raised from infancy to be part of the defense against the ever-encroaching undead threat, Ellie is scared of the fungus people, but not shocked by them. ”Sterling K. Brown stars in the twisty thriller from “This Is Us” creator Dan Fogelman.
Nothing is as it seems, especially in Season 1, but what is clear is that daily life has been forever by a devastating climate event.
“‘Paradise’ is about how people deal with crisis, how you move on when the world has been flipped upside down and you don’t necessarily see a way to move forward but there is. And how you cope with a sense of loss with a new normal,”“Paradise” creator/EP Dan Fogelman has a three-season vision for the show. The sense of near-normalness that has been gradually peeled away across Seasons 1 and 2 has added to the series’ impact.
“Our goal here was always to kind of show a town that felt like idyllic Americana, like a lot of money has been spent trying to make this look like a place you want to live that still has a little bit of a patina on it,”“It’s where rich people live and a lot of money has been spent making it look bucolic and normal. ”Star Ryan Gosling may inspire a generation to pursue the sciences with his winning performance as a brilliant-but-misunderstood biologist thrust into the role of — what else?
— saving the sun and the stars from dying. The science itself may be fiction, but the impact of this tale on young minds is real.
“He’s a middle-school science teacher in nubby sweaters, because his research as a molecular biologist was rejected by the establishment as too radical. But it turns out that he was right about everything.
“When the sun begins to lose heat, he’s recruited by the powers that be in Washington, represented by Eva Stratt , an official of stoic Euro command who’s the head of the Hail Mary project to save Earth. A mysterious line has been found linking Venus and the sun. It’s dubbed the Petrova line, and Ryland discovers that it’s made up of single-cell organisms, called Astrophage, that can be used as rocket fuel.
”In a recent interview, Lord and Miller admitted that there was a nearly four-hour cut early on. The final film runs two hours and 36 minutes.
“Our first official test screening went great, but we do a lot of earlier screenings for friends and family and other filmmakers and writers,” Miller explained to the“This movie was massive. When we finally got the assembly cut down to under four hours long, we subjected some filmmaker friends of ours to a three hour and 45 minute cut of the movie, which was embarrassing.
”Puppeteer James Ortiz, a veteran of New York theater, knew how vital it was that Rocky exhibit a strong personality — otherwise a significant portion of the movie would fall flat.
“Rocky is super intelligent and has a mind like a computer — you never have to say anything twice to him,”“He’s a brilliant engineer. But his soul, to me, always felt like that of a little brother. There’s a little bit of this anxious, 14-year-old boy who really wants to be invited to the party.
”Netflix released “Remarkably Bright Creatures” just in time for Mother’s Day, and it joins a long line of narrative and nonfiction stories about humans bonding with octopuses. Sally Field’s Tova works as a cleaner for an aquarium. She comes to greater understanding about life and love through her connection with the eight-legged Marcellus as well as the two-legged young man, played by Lewis Pullman, that she encounters on the job.
Writer and director: Olivia Newman, Shelby Van PeltField says she was drawn to the story because it touches on the urgency around climate change and man-made pollution.
“Human beings have an extraordinary connection to creatures. I always choose things because they somehow affect me. In a lot of ways, is about the planet and losing these creatures and losing the sea life. These marvelous, magical creatures that live in the ocean.
”The much-praised drama series revolves around the last 10,000 people on Earth who have survived a toxic event by living in a huge underground silo. Rebecca Ferguson plays a plucky mechanic who suspects that those living underground don’t know the full story.
“Inside, the residents know nothing of the world above, only the daily work needed to keep the silo functioning. Outside, something happened that made the surface above them uninhabitable, and their only view of that wasteland is a static live shot of a tree weathering the aftermath,”“Silo” creator and executive producer Graham Yost is one of TV’s most versatile dramatists. His past series include FX’s “Justified” and Apple TV’s “Slow Horses.
” “Silo” is adapted from the best-selling novel series by Hugh Howey.
“I said I wanted another vast space where you get a sense of openness because, otherwise, it can get claustrophobic,” Yost says. “When we, as the writers room, told Hugh about that idea, he just loved it. ”In Season 2, star Rebecca Ferguson’s Juliette found herself in a test of wills with Steve Zahn’s Solo.
“She just wants to get the heck out of there, and he needs her to stay and help. They are constantly compromising each other’s needs, and this big dive was the last straw that needed to happen for him to get what he wanted and for her to get what she wants. But a third factor that they haven’t taken into consideration just punches them both in the face.
”The story of a robot, Roz, who is forced to adapt to her surroundings when she winds up on an inhospitable island earned three Oscar nominations, for animated feature film as well as original score and best sound.
“There’s never been an animated movie that reflects the world in quite this way. While the animals are somewhat disappointingly designed , the expressionistic environments can take one’s breath away.
“Sunsets, sea views and changing seasons suggest scenic calendar art come to life, as Sanders’ dynamic camera swoops through those spaces. He tends to frame scenes from a respectful distance. Allowing the environment to dwarf his characters gives things a slightly cosmic feel, subtly reinforcing how overwhelming the world can be to a ‘wild’ robot and her savage companions.
”“From the very beginning, I was concerned that people wouldn’t see this movie the correct way if you treated it like a normal CG film,”“It’s a deceptively sweet and simple book, but with incredibly complex things going on emotionally, and we wanted that to be reflected in the visuals. ”
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