What better way to begin the new year than with a show about the end of it all? However, Carol & the End of the World isn’t the typical adrenaline-filled, apocalyptic nightmare that typifies the genre. Much as I’m a fan, that sort of thing would be a littleheavy to ring in 2024 with.
Instead, Netflix’s new limited series is a melancholic rumination on how people respond to existential catastrophe and the voyage of self-discovery that happens when all bets are off and the world faces its final curtain.
It’s also highly amusing, in its own dry, quiet way. One of the biggest laughs in the first episode comes from a simple thumbs up.
The series, which is streaming now, follows the titular Carol, a slightly depressed 40-something, as she lives through the final seven months until a looming planet crashes into the earth, destroying it in the process.
While everyone around her is outside living their best lives she’s attempting to keep calm and carry on while also feeling crushed by pressure to make the most of every moment.
Her sister is off travelling the world having high-octane adventures, her parents have entered into a throuple with her father’s nurse and embraced naturism and everywhere she looks people are skydiving, raving, participating in orgies and living like there’s no tomorrow. Which, soon enough there won’t be.
Paralysed by her newfound - albeit time-restricted - freedom from responsibility, and expectation Carol flounders. As the world’s institutions and corporations crumble around
her she drifts aimlessly. Inventing activities she’s pursuing, like learning to surf or play the bass, to keep people from worrying about her.
Her world changes when she stumbles upon the one functioning office building left in the city. Riding the elevator she eventually finds a floor packed with office staff beavering away silently at their desks. In a world where chaos reigns, it’s business as usual.
Entranced, she enters and quickly finds herself employed as an administrative assistant, given her own desk and several stacks of documents to photocopy. She doesn’t know who she’s working for and, bizarrely, neither does anyone else. Even more strangely, no one else seems perturbed.
Martha Kelly as Carol in Carol & The End of The World. Photo / Netflix
In this aspect, it borders on Apple TV+’s brilliantly mind-bending workplace-thriller Severance. Especially in the episode where the psychedelic dreams and mundane reality of three various characters intermingle. Although, unlike Severance, it doesn’t hold tightly to its mysteries.
Instead, Carol & the End of the World is a gentler, more global take, on director Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, the dourly intriguing 2011 film starring Kirsten Dunst that has the same premise of global destruction via planetary collision, and the mundane daily workplace trivialities of Ricky Gervais’ The Office. It also shares that show’s smart sentimentality.
Don’t be put off by the fact that it’s animated. It’s a strange, unique series that moves at its own measured pace and can almost be considered a character study. Even minor characters that only appear briefly are fleshed out and given full arcs that often - but not always - end on a poignant, hopeful note. It has a depth and heart that most live-action shows do not.
The series is an engrossing oddity. Humorous, clever, risque, sophisticated, pleasingly weird and not afraid of getting emotional. Carol’s time may be running out but this is a show that will be talked about for a long time.
