If you’ve never seen a Gregg Araki film, well, they’re difficult to describe. The words “surreal,” “transgressive,” and “highly sexual” all come to mind—words that can also be used to describe Araki’s new project with the ever-daring Steven Soderbergh, a TV series called Now Apocalypse for Starz. Created by Araki and co-written by Vogue sex columnist and host of Viceland’s Slutever Karley Sciortino, the series is described as a “coming-of-age-comedy” centered on four friends looking for love and sex on dating apps in Los Angeles. When not busy hooking up, our hero Ulysses “grows increasingly troubled as foreboding premonitory dreams make him wonder if some kind of dark and monstrous conspiracy going on. Or is he just smoking too much weed?”
That’s how the show is described even in such a staid publication as Variety, which quotes Soderbergh as saying of Now Apocalypse, “If this isn’t the craziest thing I’ve ever read, it’s tied for first. We will not be responsible for people’s heads splitting in half when they see it.” Sounds good to us. In a refreshing change of pace for an A-list director, Soderbergh has only gotten more adventurous as the years have gone by, directing such projects as Mosaic, a murder mystery that comes with its own smartphone app, and Unsane, a ‘70s-style psychological thriller shot on an iPhone. As for Araki, he’s been doing a lot of TV in recent years, including a couple episodes of the Soderbergh-produced Red Oaks, which is presumably how the two know each other.
Soderbergh and Araki will executive produce Now Apocalypse, which has been ordered for a full 10-episode season.