Sci-fi thriller offers a glimpse into our dystopian futures
TV’s Incorporated filmed in Toronto, co-produced by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon
The year is 2074, climate change has ravaged the planet and multinational corporations control 90 per cent of the globe.
This is the sunny scenario playing out in Toronto, although you might not immediately realize that Showcase’s new futuristic thriller Incorporated was filmed here. The series, which premieres Wednesday at 10 p.m., opens with a shot of a man in an elevator, whimpering under a black bag covering his head and flanked by two armed guards.
It’s pretty tense, this latest offering from famous best friends-turned-coproducers Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. It stars Sean Teale as a man named Ben (who is also sometimes called Aaron), living a double life to find a woman he loves from the inside of a corporate hellscape.
Oh, and Teale’s character is the reason his colleague is crying in the bag.
“It was a stressful six months,” Teale tells the Star via email. “Aaron/ Ben is constantly in incredibly compromising situations (and) having to think on his feet under duress . . . He’s a man stuck between a rock and a hard place in a world far more unforgiving than ours.”
This futuristic Toronto is ghettoized geographically by stratum into green and red zones, with self-driving cars, malware sabotage and news reports broadcasting that Canada, of all places, is building a wall to keep out Americans, since 12 million U.S. citizens are already living here illegally.
It’s a world where food porn is conspicuously worked into the narrative and human dogfights and hologram sex workers populate and animate the red zone neighbourhoods by night.
If you like blood, vomit and violence, this first episode should be enough to draw you in. And so might Teale’s character — a hacker on the inside — although it’s not immediately clear who he is fighting for, or why.
But since this press hack was only given the pilot episode to watch, we’ll have to take Teale’s word for it that “ultimately (Ben’s) quest is noble.”
Due to the nature of his environment, he’s forced to make calls he didn’t think he’d have to, Teale says, and “eventually he starts to question if the ends justifies the means.”
Poverty and suffering are powerful motivators, the audience learns dur-
“(Aaron/Ben is) a man stuck between a rock and a hard place in a world far more unforgiving than ours.”
SEAN TEALE STAR OF INCORPORATED
ing episode one.
But the “speculative fiction” of these sci-fi circumstances isn’t meant to be read as an allegory.
It’s meant to be entertaining first and foremost, Teale says, though he will admit to noticing “a lot of freaky coincidences” between this fiction and reality.
“We filmed the pilot months before statements (about building a wall) were made and found it astonishing,” he says. “I kept coming across so many things our show predicted during the shooting, from global issues to the technology, so huge credit to the creators and writers.”
Apparently the plot line only gets more intense as the story amps up, but Teale is light on any revelatory details, simply promising “some big twists and turns.
“As the facade begins to slip, those around him and the audience will start to see more,” he promises. Whether Aaron/Ben can last or not remains to be seen.
“But I can assure you,” Teale says, “if the road behind was troublesome, the road ahead is harsher!”