Kiefer Sutherland’s new Paramount+ series, Rabbit Hole, explores the dark side of social media, and it does such a wonderful job of depicting the dangers that the stars are washing their hands of Facebook and Instagram altogether.
“It’s made me more determined to have absolutely nothing to do with social media at all,” said star Charles Dance. “I mean, I never did anyway, but I’m certainly not going to do so now!”
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The show, which debuts later this month, follows Sutherland’s John Weir through a twisty mystery of corporate espionage. The “master of deception” makes a career out of tricking “powerful forces,” but he meets his match when one of those forces frames him for murder.
The entity he works against has the “ability to influence and control population,” according to the official synopsis, per Variety.
That control works through technology. And as Kiefer Sutherland noted during Rabbit Hole’s premiere at SXSW this week, there is no better way to manipulate the masses than through social media.
Kiefer Sutherland Calls ‘Technology’ the ‘Real Nemesis in our Society’
Creator John Requa explained that the plot is based on current times and the perceived disinformation that spreads on various social media networks. Watching that trend play out reminded him and his co-creator, Glenn Ficarra, of Watergate-era entertainment.
At the viewing, he said that “paranoid thrillers” became a thing after the scandal because the public stopped trusting the government, and they see the same type of mistrust happening right now. So with Sutherland in mind, they penned the eight-episode series.
The former 24 star was thrilled to join the project after learning the premise. As he shared, he had been “hoping” to act in a project like Rabbit Hole because art reflects reality.
“They were going to use this backdrop of technology as being the real nemesis in our society, and how it’s being potentially used for bad. And then they started to define what they wanted the character to be,” he told the audience. “He was very smart and he had all of these great facilities, but then they started to describe this character that was in the very beginning episode going to 180 degrees and go from the hunter to the hunted. Those are great opportunities for an actor to play.”
“Technology is making it easier and easier to access other people’s personal information,” he continued. “And with that comes it opens up a whole new world where we have to create a kind of level of security and it also creates a huge amount of opportunity for some things to go poorly.”
Paramount+ subscribers can watch Rabbit Hole when the first episode on drops March 26th.
