UTOPIA
Amazon Prime Video, 3:00 a.m. ET
SERIES PREMIERE: This series has a long and unusual history. The story comes from Gillian Flynn, who wrote the bestselling novels Gone Girl and Sharp Objects – which were adapted, respectively, into an outstanding movie and TV miniseries. Before writing her novels, she was a TV critic for Entertainment Weekly – and now she’s serving as a TV series showrunner, by adapting for the U.S. her story Utopia, which previously begat a U.K. adaptation in 2014. It’s about a group of comic-book nerds who come in possession of an underground graphic novel whose conspiracy-laden plot may be more fact than fiction. And remember – even though the plot concerns a global pandemic, Utopia was written, and first produced for TV, so long ago that Flynn can’t be accused of pandering, or reacting to current events and headlines. Only of a spooky amount of prescience. John Cusack and Rainn Wilson star