Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Now Apocalypse’ On Starz, Where A Guy Navigating Life In L.A. Has Foreboding Dreams

Starz has done a good job of giving us offbeat, but very watchable, shows over the past few years. Its latest, Now Apocalypse, created by Gregg Araki and executive produced by Steven Soderbergh, is one of the most offbeat yet. Read on to find out if it’s just as watchable as Vida and some of the network’s other dramedies…

NOW APOCALYPSE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A guy is on his bike in a dark, industrial area, and a voice over says, “I’ve always had the simultaneous fear of, and attraction to, the unknown.”

The Gist: Ulysses (Avan Jogla) is a young guy who’s trying to figure out what his life in L.A. is going to be. He moved out with his college roommate Ford (Beau Michoff), who’s an aspiring screenwriter. Uly does a vlog as a mind dump because it seems like social media has co-opted any other creative outlet, and he tells it that he once semi hooked up with Ford in college and “if he had even one sexually ambiguous molecule in his body, we’d probably be married.” But Ford is what Uly calls a “Kinsey 0”; he currently is hooking up with Severine (Roxane Mesquida), an astrobiological theorist who has a top-secret government-adjacent job.

Uly has these dreams where he walks through this dark industrial landscape and he hears cries for help that sound vaguely sexual, but he always wakes up before he sees what it is; one time he had the fantasy while having sex. His best friend Carly (Kelli Berglund), an actress who works as a cam girl on the DL, listens but has her own issues. Her vapid actor boyfriend Jethro (Desmond Chaim) yells weird things during sex and wants her to meditate.

Meanwhile, Uly keeps getting ghosted by an online date named Gabriel (Tyler Posey), but when they finally meet —Gabriel is way late— they hit it off, and give each other hand jobs in a dark area near the restaurant. When that happens, something in the sky looks like it explodes, and Uly and Gabriel both feel something amazing happened.

Our Take: Now Apocalypse is the vision of Gregg Araki (Mysterious Skin), and Steven Soderbergh is one of its executive producers. Araki, who directs the first episode, has set up a group of friends that are a little quirky but not so much as to be distracting. They all have issues, but they’re pretty light issues — Carly is bored of being a cam girl, Uly feels unsettled, Ford thinks he’s too dumb for Severine — which sets them up as being generally OK with things, not brooding young millennials who don’t see how good they have it.

It’s likely because Araki himself is close to 60, so he filters his point of view through his younger characters, mixing millennial angst with real adult maturity. But there’s also something more at play here, which is what’s the most intriguing: Uly’s visions apocalyptic visions may be more real than we’re led to believe, so seeing this story of L.A. milennials trying to figure themselves out connected with a doomsday backdrop adds enough of an element to make us keep watching.

It also helps that Jogla and Bergland aren’t playing the usual Peak TV aimless jerks. Sure, Carly runs lines with one of her masturbating cam customers, but she’s more bored than cynical. And it’s refreshing that Uly wants an actual relationship, despite his desire to hook up as much as possible, and he holds out hope that this thing with Gabriel can work… especially after the mind-blowing hand job.

Sex and Skin: All sorts of simulated sex and nudity — Uly is in the midst of sex with a guy as he wakes up from one of his apocalyptic dreams. Ford and Severine are doing reverse cowgirl as Uly walks in, and everyone is nonplussed. We see Carly have odd sex with Jethro.. And Carly takes her top off to help the guy she’s running lines with get off.

Parting Shot: Uly finally sees who’s in trouble in his dream, and it sure looks like it’s him, getting it from behind from a lizard-esque alien.

Sleeper Star: We like Bergland as Carly because she plays bored so well; she even tries to glam up her roommate’s Tinder profile. We like this line about a pic on her roomie’s profile: “You look like you’re hosting a reality show called Extreme Brunch… or something.”

Most Pilot-y Line: Not loving how Ford randomly meets a producer named Barnabas (Kevin Daniels) who sees him hacking away at his screenplay in a coffee shop. Why Ford? Is it his cheekbones? Or is this producer for real?

Our Call: STREAM IT. Now Apocalypse has the right combination of quirk, mystery and funny performances to keep us intrigued.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

Stream Now Apocalypse on Starz