‘Sense8’ and the absence of disruptions in postmodern television

The last production of the Wachowski brothers, ‘Sense8’, exemplifies with its narrative
and its production a new way of understanding the development of a story. With a
bigger budget and more locations for every episode than ‘Game of Thrones’, ‘Sense8’
introduces us into eight characters living in eight different countries who are
interconnected on a mental and sensory level. Besides these characters trying to explore
and understand their new abilities looks like TV itself is trying to analyze the postmodern
situation of its media.

The opening of the show with shots of the different cities ocurring one after another
without a common nexus already present us the basic scheme of ‘Sense8’: a globalized
and limitless world in which transitions have been substituted by a new kind of identity
based on the superposition (and new ways of making and understanding television)

Back in 2009 Joss Whedon’s ‘Dollhouse’ presented us the capacity that some
corporations had of adding personalitties and skills to a particular person using a
technological device, a chair that was able to erase and modify the human’s psyche.
‘Sense8’, although it has inherit the cyberpunk’s concerns of ‘Dollhouse’, is now free of
any ot those technological devices. The interconnection that is more and more common
in our society does not need any plot in order to look real, neither big conspiracies in
the background.

The show not only blurs the geographic and onthological limits of its characters and
locations, but also plays with its narrative structure and the way the characters are
created. The cinematographic stereotypes of every country are reversed so we find, for
example, a hyper-masculine star of a mexican soap opera who is secretly gay, or a young
indian woman who challenge the traditional bollywood’s love story and looks for its own
freedom.

‘Sense8’, as we have seen, creates a complex story by mixing all the plots, locations and
characters into one homegenous product. By doing this, and also refusing to accept the
stereotypes of each country, Netflix turns itself into a distorting mirror of our globalized
and postmodern society.
In these societies, stories desintegrate into multiple and isolated points. The next
question arises: is there still a secret map that links them all together? Can we still find
the initial and final point? ‘Sense8’ does not bother with this issue and prefers to
wanders around without no clear goal, no final point.

The philosophy of Byung-Chul Han focuses into this matter: the desintegration of time
and narrative in postmodernism, the transformation of the world into a touchable
screen that is connected with everything but alone at the same time.

Sociologist like Zygmunt Bauman or media scholars like Henry Jenkins and Jason Mittell
have also study the incresing complexity of our cultural products, understanding these
changes as symptoms of a major shift. Using them, both philosophers, sociologist and
media scholars as my theorical framework, the result will be as complex and
interconnected as the object of study.