The Fate Of Amazon’s New Sci-Fi Series Has Been Decided
Amazon Prime's The Peripheral has been renewed for a second season.
Prestige television adaptations of literature have been all the rage since the breakout success of Game of Thrones. One of these latest endeavors has been the Amazon TV show The Peripheral, which adapts the William Gibson novel of the same name and stars Chloë Grace Moretz. Now, major fans of the show have some major news: Deadline reports that the show has been renewed for a second season.
Produced by both Warner Bros. and Amazon Studios, The Peripheral is a show with an interesting premise. Chloë Grace Moretz plays a woman in the near future (2032) who is living in the rural United States and balancing her time playing video games and trying to keep her fractured family together. When she gets a chance to play a trial of a new game, she is shocked to discover that it seemingly transported her to a postapocalyptic future, and the actions she takes in this “game” start having consequences for her in the real world.
The plot of The Peripheral may sound pretty strange, but it’s par for the course for William Gibson, author of the original novel. If you don’t already know, Gibson is most famous for writing Neuromancer, arguably the most defining novel regarding the entire cyberpunk genre. Gibson is also an accomplished futurist, and in Neuromancer he coined a term that eventually became part of our daily vocabulary: cyberspace.
While you don’t have to become a Gibson scholar to understand The Peripheral, those familiar with some of the author’s work will instantly recognize the themes that the show tackles (including whether blending technology with flesh ultimately makes someone more human or less human). At times, those themes intersect quite seamlessly with some of our present-day concerns. For example, the show at times addresses the familiar Gibson theme that interacting with the world digitally may have a negative effect on our empathy (something that rings true for any gamer that has ever been screamed at by a 12-year-old on a headset during a game).
Of course, one of the reasons The Peripheral can do a second season at all is that, like other television adaptations of literature (most particularly The Handmaid’s Tale), the show isn’t afraid to veer away from just rote adaptation to do something new. On occasion, this may annoy Gibson loyalists who would prefer every moment on the show to correspond with a moment from the text. However, it’s a great way to get more people to tune in because, whether or not you’ve read the book, you have no way of knowing what’s going to happen next.
We don’t yet know when a second season of The Peripheral will drop, but it’s exciting to see that Amazon is still willing to invest so much in creating original content. The streamer may even pick up a few of the subscribers who are fleeing Netflix due to its threats to change rules about account sharing. At this point, we’d be happy for a peripheral to transport us decades into the future so we can learn which exact business decision it was that finally ran Netflix into the ground.
