YMMV / Utopia (US)

• Audience-Alienating Premise: An extremely deadly Synthetic Plague that was created as a False Flag Operation to manipulate a population into taking a vaccine that would sterilize them — and added details like the conspiracy in particular targeting schools, with the wilful and enthusiastic cooperation of doctors — played extremely differently, and much harsher, when the show aired at the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic.
• Never Live It Down: Jessica's cold-blooded and pointless murder of Samantha, one of her own allies, can make it hard for viewers to ever sympathize with her in spite of the show's attempts to climb out of the hole.
• Special Effect Failure:
  • The foley people apparently got confused in episode two. Arby is shown eating chocolate-covered raisins early in the episode, which is silent, as you'd expect. Later, he starts munching on Chex Mix, making crunching sounds as he chews it. Later still, he goes back to eating raisins, which now makes the Chex Mix crunching sound.
  • There's a lengthy shot of Samantha's corpse in episode 4 that is clearly a dummy.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: The British series was already dark enough, with an excess of violence that sounded gratuitous at some moments, and with almost all the characters morally ambiguous, but the American remake managed to increase these aspects even more than they already were, including the fate of the Canon Foreigner Sam and the Adaptational Villainy of Jessica Hyde. In addition to the poor timing of showing the series in the middle of a pandemic, it is not difficult to understand why so many professional critics and viewers were uncomfortable with the project.
• Too Cool to Live: Gillian Flynn admitted that Samantha was written to die, and that after seeing the actor's great performance, she considered bringing her back as an identical twin. Given the show's theme of identical twins, this actually wouldn't have been that implausible.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Jessica Hyde is supposed to shock the viewers with her very unheroic murder of Samantha and then slowly gain back our sympathy over the course of the season. But the murder is so pointless and cruel, with Jessica never showing the slightest bit of regret, that it's quite hard to ever feel sorry for her. It even makes the rest of the cast less sympathetic, watching them seem to completely forget about the murder of their friend even while standing mere feet away from the corpse. None of them ever confront Jessica about it later, though Ian does confront her over the death of Artemis, a morally ambiguous Mercy Killing of a person he never knew.

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