2030 LOOKS JUST LIKE TODAY
Last night, I watched Century City, the new lawyers show set in the year 2030. The idea of the show is promising but, like most critics I was unimpressed. The show's characters were awfully flat and the setting was almost exactly like today. Real lawyers in the future would take for granted legal, cultural, and technological developments that strike us as strange. It's the background, not the cutting-edge issues, that makes the present feel different from the past. A 1978 show about 2004 might have featured a plotline on cloning. It wouldn't have routinely shown 40-year-old new parents of twins or business people walking down the street talking to no one, with wires hanging out of their ears. It wouldn't have Starbucks, or Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, or rock-and-roll megachurches. (Come to think of it, today's networks haven't discovered rock-and-roll megachurches either.)