Reviewed: The One-Hundred

The Future: Ninety seven years ago the world went to hell in a proverbial radioactive handbasket. Fortunately many of the world’s countries had orbiting space-stations and in the intervening years they came together to create a society that is attempting to survive until it is safe to return to the surface. Everyone was assigned jobs and judgement for those who don't work within the authority's rules can be severe and harsh. ANY crime committed by someone over the age of eighteen can lead to them being put to death – more specifically, blown out of an airlock. Those miscreants under eighteen can expect imprisonment in cells and limited rations. 

What the general population doesn’t know is that supplies and technology are starting to fail. The human race will not be able to survive the next several generations needed to outpace the possible radiation below on Earth. But with basic scanning of the environment below blocked, options are limited. The decision? The station will send a hundred of the youngest, healthiest petty criminals on a one way trip to the surface. If they live, then plans could be made to send more. If they die… well, that’s more resources left for those on the station. 

The hundred include the daughter of the station’s chief medical officer (in trouble because her late father - himself ‘airlocked’ -  wanted to tell the populace the truth) and the son of the station’s commander who got himself included out of guilt. Needless to say, most of the exiles survive the pod’s fall to the planet. But once they arrive their problems may only be beginning. How will they survive their new rural environment and what else may have survived all those years as well?  Divisions happen quickly until the exiles face danger from both without and within…

Oh, good grief… where does one even start? 

The sort of show that encourages you to go back and add rating points to everything else you’ve ever reviewed merely to reward them for NOT being ‘The 100’, this is quite unbelievably wretched viewing for anyone over the age of twenty or with a discerning bone in their body. Though any television drama usually requires some suspension of disbelief, the sheer laziness and shorthand stupidity on show here - from the positively creaking script and dreadfully shallow archetypes all the way back to a bizarrely illogical premise itself (apparently based on a Young Adult book, which one can only hope was somehow better) -  is enough to make you wonder what adled executive saw The Hunger Games and thought it wasn’t quite 90210 enough for the masses. 

The space-station side of things is full of actors you'll recognise from other shows:  LOST allumnus Henry Ian Cusick (he gave up Scandal for this???) is an opportunist, uber-pragmatic would-be leader, subverting the will of the injured actual commander, Grey's Anatomy's Isaiah Washington, while Paige Turco (most recently 'Zoe' in the infinitely superior Person of Interest) is the doctor navigating the fine moral and political line to keep her banished daughter alive. Kelly Hu, largely wasted in the pilot,  also tries to be the voice of reason but fails. Those sent to  the surface are the dysfunctional colours of Benetton, cast for their diversity, at least within the specific needs of vital statistics.  Those with a better finger on the pulse of soap-stars may recognise Eliza Taylor (from Neighbours), Marie Avgeropoulos (last season's Cult), and Thomas McDonnell (Suburgatory). But even ignoring the fact that the main characters from the hundred young ‘criminals’ all look like their biggest crime is forgetting to exfoliate before their Pilates class, their collective actions on landing back on Earth feel more like a  summer-camp for the maladjusted and a day-release trip to a creaking theme-park ride (yes, shaking seats and dry ice followed by rope-swings and animatronic animals, oh my…). EVERY expense has been spared here except the lighting and make-up departments.  

Ruthlessly echoing every Young Adult demographic'd movie in recent memory and simultaneously managing to shamelessly pillage the likes of Avatar for one particular corny scene, this feels like an Earth 2 for the Twerking generation or a Lord of the Flies for those who think that’s just the name of a new reality show. In fact it’s hard to remember ANY recent series that is so utterly oblivious of its innate cheesiness, so obvious in its influences and so ridiculously flawed in every way from from start to finish...

A complete fumble in the jungle of irony-free Golgafrincham* proportions, this is - just like the space-station far above -  lacking in real atmosphere, gravity or any sense it will be able to sustain itself for very long. Given this forty-four minutes of adolescent purgatory and hormonal posturing there IS no hope for the human race.

Horrible.

The 100 debuts on The CW this week in America. Channel Four has bought the rights for the show in the UK. 

*(Extra points if you get the reference without Googling...)