Future Tense

Future Tense is an ABC program built around a simple discipline: slow the future down long enough to examine it properly. The show is skeptical, but not cynical. It treats technology, political ideas, social norms, and environmental choices as connected systems rather than separate trends. A conversation about generational labels becomes a warning about stereotypes, weak categories, and the danger of deciding the answer before research begins. An episode on civility moves from road rules to trash talk, Muhammad Ali, referees, and the shifting conventions of public respect. The point is not manners for their own sake. It is how societies negotiate behavior when old hierarchies lose legitimacy and new standards are still contested. Other episodes use natural science to open wider questions. Wood frogs, frozen tissue, biobanking, and cryopreservation become a route into conservation, organ storage, mortality, and the persistent fantasy of coming back from death. Future Tense also has a strong memory for abandoned promises. Hyperloops, solar roads, Google Glass, and commercial spaceflight are revisited not as punchlines, but as examples of what happens when hype, money, hardware, and unclear purpose collide. The show is equally interested in old frameworks. Magna Carta, golden ages, trade, openness, and social contracts appear beside arguments about corporate responsibility, climate change, poverty, inequality, discrimination, and technological regulation. Its best episodes hold hope and restraint in the same frame. Existential risk is answered with existential hope, while digital growth is challenged by calls for digital degrowth. The pacing is deliberate and radio-shaped, with Anthony Fennell guiding complex material through interviews rather than turning it into punditry. For PlayNext users, Future Tense fits the lane between critical tech analysis, public philosophy, and historically literate current affairs.