The Name of the Game “LA 2017” (January 15, 1971)

As this loosely-structured reporter drama wore on it passed into a fascinating experimental phase – one episode, “All the Old Familiar Faces,” used a pop quintet as a kind of Greek chorus – but the one that went way, way far out is “LA 2017,” a grim speculative fantasy directed by a young Steven Spielberg.  Overcome by fumes, influential publisher Glenn Howard (Gene Barry) drives off the road and wakes up fifty years hence, when humans have fled underground to avoid a toxic miasma that emerged without warning from the seas.  There isn’t much plot, but writer Philip Wylie makes good use of the ninety-minute length to work in a lot of satirical and poignant details on the nature of a post-outdoor society: religion has been replaced with computers that spit out answers to every question, someone says “They’re running some new patterns on television,” and there’s a great Philip K. Dick-type moment when one of the last surviving aquarium fish dies.  Despite some sweet-talking from the bigwigs Howard realizes that the U.S. has become a totalitarian nightmare, subject to full-time video surveillance, and vows to join the underground.  The “vice president of Los Angeles” (Barry Sullivan) tells him off, though: “In your day, you knew about the environment.  What did you do about it?”  And the special effects are better than An Inconvenient Truth’s.