There are a handful of brilliant-yet-relatively-obscure works whose relative obscurity I ascribe almost entirely to the vagaries of chance, or at least "chance" in the way we think of, say, inclement weather. A sixty percent chance of snow is not 60% as defined like a constant in a program, but as an artifact of hundreds of thousands of variables and interactions that are impossible to understand or internalize in any systemic and coherent way. (Happy Endings, my favorite sitcom of all time, is a show that — if you replayed the universe ten times over — would have become a smash hit at least once or twice, but the dice just never quite landed on the right number.)

And it is partially through this lens that I find Pantheon so interesting, at least at a meta-textual level. But first, let's talk about the show itself.

Pantheon is a terrific show, screaming right out of the gate with a competence and ambition that I am shocked I had never heard of it before, and shocked still that it's not an ur-text for science fiction fans everywhere. Developed from a Ken Liu series of short stories ^[1], Pantheon draws inspiration (and lampshades it nicely) from everything from Serial Experiments Lain and Ghost in the Shell to more American fare like The Matrix and Blade Runner. There are works of science fiction that are obviously dumb and uninterested in in anything but aesthetic; this is, I'd say, the exact opposite. It is very interested in exploring ideas and themes, and doing so in a way that doesn't feel laborious (like parts of the aforementioned Lain can) nor facile (like Devs, which shares a lot of DNA with this show). Characters are written and voiced extremely well; the show deftly balances the Really Big Ideas it has about where the world might be going and the very real personalities of the folks impacted by it.

You should watch Pantheon; very few people have. It was released on AMC+, a streaming service that I did not even know existed, and then moved to Netflix a few years later. Perhaps if Netflix was the original distributor, this would have been the kind of smash hit that, say, Invincible became; it certainly seems poised to be embedded deep within the zeitgeist, and yet it toils away in cult-classic obscurity.

We live in a weird time, content-wise. There was a brief five-year period in which almost every media corporation was happy to throw unfathomable amounts of capital at creators of all repute under the vague promise of "amassing a catalog", and that was immediately followed by our current era where these media corporations are outright incentivized to completely hide some of their work so as to declare it a loss and harvest some tax breaks. I suspect there are dozens of Pantheons flitting around, buoyed by barely-there licensing deals, glittering gems waiting to be discovered and preserved.

★★★★