Particularly in an election year, I know I’m tied to my screens more than normal, hoping that I can get a sense of where the country and, by effect, the world is heading. For a lot of people over the past decade, the nonstop campaigning and chaos of our political system has instilled a kind of constant dread about the future, compounded by looming environmental disaster and geopolitically uncertainty. And sometimes it feels like all we can do is accept that the train is slowly crashing. But what if we could do something about it?
In 2023, Kurt Andersen teamed up with Larry Doyle and Steven Soderbergh to create Command Z, a sci-fi comedy web series about a group of workers from the ruined world of the future who are given the opportunity to send their minds back to 2023 to right the ship. Their perhaps impossible mission? Convince the movers and shakers currently ruining everything to become better people. The show features a cast of very funny people including Michael Cera, Roy Wood Jr, Chloe Radcliffe, JJ Maley, and Liev Schrieber and, beyond its humor, is full of insights about what exactly is going wrong with a society that seemingly can fix itself but first has to want to do so.
I spoke with Andersen about Command Z last year where this conversation originally aired on Riverside Chats. We’ve repurposed it for today’s episode because all of the show’s anxieties are just as relevant today as they were a year ago. You can find all of Command Z’s episodes here.
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25. Kurt Andersen's Plan to Save the World