Genre: Documentary
Actor: Bill Gates
What’s Next is undeniably educational. Each episode dives deep into a different timely topic and gathers experts, along with Bill Gates, to dissect the most pressing issues arising from those topics. Namely, each of the five episodes in this series is dedicated to AI, misinformation, global warming, class inequality, and diseases. Guests include the likes of Bernie Sanders, Mitt Romney, Mark Cuban, Lady Gaga, and James Cameron. But while Gates’ philanthropic interest is admirable, these topics are ultimately too thorny and divisive to cover properly. Often, it feels like Gates is justifying his stance—he’s pro AI and capitalism, naturally—and so achieves an unintended effect. Instead of seeming hopeful and objective, he and his series come across as defensive and fearful. It’s also quite impersonal, for something that has Gates’ name attached to it. I get it, he’s a student of life, but you can’t help but wonder if this is just another way the ultra-rich like to boast their wealth. I have so much time and money I might as well try to solve the entire world’s problems, he seems to say through the series. Props to Gates for not shying away from the glaring class issue and even interviewing anti-billionaire Bernie Sanders himself. But if that scene reveals anything, it’s that these problems are abstract to him. Does he think he’s too rich? One interviewer asks him. Is the current capitalist system working? Sanders piles on. Gates only grimaces, but his silence gives the answer away.
