Steven Soderbergh surprises again with an unannounced sci-fi series released on his own website

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If someone asks you if you’re watching the new Steven Soderbergh series, the correct reply is which one? The now veteran filmmaker, who turned 60 earlier this year, not only has the knotty crime drama Full Circle currently airing on Foxtel and Binge, but without warning he has also just released Command Z, a low-budget act of science-fiction invention, through his website extension765.com. As ever with Soderbergh, his ideas outrun release schedules.

Director Steven Soderbergh at the Tribeca Festival in New York in June 2021.Credit: EvanAgostini/Invision/AP

The Academy Award-winning director is a masterful visual stylist, but his most fascinating professional trait is his fascination with tinkering. Soderbergh likes to take apart and reassemble genres, industry preconceptions such as marketing, and the durability of stars’ appeal. Making a mysterious series available to stream through his website for a one-off cost of about $12 ($US7.99) is very much on brand for Soderbergh.

Self-financed by Soderbergh, with all proceeds going to the charity Children’s Aid and the Boston University Centre for Antiracist Research, Command Z is a subversively sly double bill of satirical jibes and ingenious suggestion. With eight mini-episodes that clock in at roughly 95 minutes in total, it’s neither a segmented movie nor weekly appointment viewing. The nimble structure feels just right for the reality-shifting narrative.

Set in the middle of this century, it finds a trio of American workers – Emma (Chloe Radcliffe), Sam (Roy Wood jnr), and Jamie (J.J. Maley) – reporting to a facility where their now digitised billionaire boss, the AI form of Kerning Fealty (Michael Cera), reveals that he needs to move their consciousness via a wormhole and psychedelics to 2023, so they can briefly inhabit the bodies of those closest to the people whose actions will contribute to the fraying of the United States and a disastrous global environmental collapse.

You never see the outside world of Command Z’s future, but the references are pure dystopian deadpan: the unbothered workers arrive in protective suits, Sam won’t date anyone who lives on the other side of “the seawall”, and a headline reads “Venezuela Merges with Nabisco”. The targets of this temporal influence campaign are barely enhanced archetypes of today’s headlines, such as a rapacious hedge fund mogul, played by Liev Schreiber, with a taste for firing people and eating panda bear.

Michael Cena in a screengrab of the sci-fi parody Command Z.Credit: extension765.com

The show was inspired by journalist and broadcaster Kurt Andersen’s 2020 non-fiction book, Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America, and Andersen is a producer and screenwriter alongside the likes of Larry Doyle, who got acquainted with wild conceptual comedies by penning classic episodes of The Simpsons. In play here is a workplace comedy’s wit, the shifting possibilities of a brain-bending thriller, and reductively bizarre technology – Kerning’s almighty time-shifting device is housed inside a washing machine.

It’s tailor-made for Soderbergh’s relationship with television. As a cineaste who won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival for Sex, Lies, and Videotape when he was 26 years old, he’s never been interested in the small screen’s conventions. When Soderbergh worked on the 2014 cable television series The Knick, he directed all 20 episodes over two seasons, giving the show a rarefied technique. Soderbergh also made a pair of sharp Netflix movies, High Flying Bird and The Laundromat, back in 2019, avoiding box-office demands by embracing streaming.

Soderbergh is also intrigued by the idea of a screen itself. His 2017 HBO series Mosaic, a murder-mystery starring Sharon Stone, was actually delivered in two iterations. The first was a standard si x-part series (written by his Full Circle collaborator, Ed Solomon), the second was a mobile phone app that allowed viewers to follow the story from the perspective of two different characters, complete with push notifications for additional material.

Command Z was originally conceived to also inhabit personal phones. At a media briefing earlier this month, Soderbergh explained to journalists that the show was put together for the video-sharing platform TikTok. Almost 20 portrait-style instalments were shot, before Soderbergh decided that the format didn’t suit his storytelling intentions.

“The amount of time you have to hook somebody with a TikTok video is … we’re talking seconds. Especially if you want the algorithm to keep pushing it out to more people,” he told IndieWire. “It just became obvious once we looked at all of these videos: these are not gonna get shared. These are not gonna get pushed anywhere.”

Using TikTok makes sense when you consider its young and vast user-base. Behind the 1 per cent potshots and sardonic encounters of Command Z is a belief that changing the future for the better is possible on both an individual and incremental level. “I’ll take that,” Emma declares when one of their forays into 2023 results in a small reduction in the average global temperature of 2053. The status quo of environmental anxiety can be challenged in unexpected ways. Steven Soderbergh has the same ethos when it comes to television.

Command Z is available on demand at extension765.com.

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