I don’t like to dwell on the relationship between the past eighty-something days of the new Trump Administration and the exponential rise in my TV consumption, but it would be disingenuous to deny that there’s a correlation. The impulse to retreat from reality, even when its absurdity increasingly threatens to outstrip fiction, might have contributed to my recent decision to binge-watch the Brazilian sci-fi drama “3%,” a Netflix original series whose first season was released last November. Set in a postapocalyptic future, the show, which has been renewed for a second season, due out later this year, seems initially of a breed with its more glossy teen-dystopia cousins “Divergent” and “The Hunger Games.” But, in the course of eight episodes, it proved to be a darker, grittier show than I’d expected, and one that resonates in uncomfortable ways with our dystopian American present. (So much for escapism.)

“3%” begins in the world of the ninety-seven per cent, where an unexplained catastrophe has ravaged most of the world, referred to only as the Inland, and mutated what remains into ruinous, crime-ridden slums. The only hope for a better life lies in an idyllic island in the Atlantic Ocean, known as the Offshore, where abundance and egalitarianism reign. To gain admission to the coveted paradise, twenty-year-olds on the mainland must submit to the Process, a battery of stress tests that assesses their emotional, cognitive, and physical aptitudes. The competition is pitiless; only three per cent pass muster each year, while the rest barely manage to subsist.

The series was created by the Brazilian writer Pedro Aguilera and directed by a team that includes César Charlone, the cinematographer who earned an Oscar nomination for his work on the 2002 movie “City of God.” It’s no coincidence that São Paulo, where “3%” was filmed, consistently ranks among the world’s most unequal cities, or that Brazil as a whole is racked by the kind of corruption and abysmal public policies that reinforce the country’s extreme hierarchy of haves and have-nots. The rich traverse the skies in private jets, while the poor struggle in favelas, the shantytowns that have come to symbolize the city’s impoverished. It’s the kind of disparity that’s played out to varying degrees all over the world in recent decades, not least in the U.S., where those in the top one per cent earn an average of over a million dollars a year, more than three times as much as they did in 1980. Americans in the bottom fifty per cent, on the other hand, earn an average salary of sixteen thousand dollars, a number that hasn’t budged in over three decades.

“3%” isn’t only interested in pointing out the obvious. Instead, it offers up a thriller-paced portrayal of the morally complicated business of trying, with scientific precision, to create a more judicious society. Ostensibly, the Process is the great draconian equalizer. In America, we call it the college-admission process, which every year submits eighteen-year-olds to a harrowing competition against their peers, with the assumption that their success or failure will be key in determining their prospects for the future. Harvard and Stanford admission rates these days are five and four per cent, respectively—only slightly better odds than the acceptance rate of the Offshore.

Except, of course, very little is truly equal about the college-application process, which to a great extent perpetuates the advantages of a privileged class. In the world of “3%,” by contrast, neither an applicant’s lineage nor his family’s generous contributions holds any sway over the Process. Face-to-face interviews and tests of aptitude (in lieu of the S.A.T.s, Inland youths are asked to make nine perfect Rubik’s Cubes in under three minutes) are only the beginning. As the elimination rounds proceed, candidates undergo increasingly devious means of evaluation. At one stage, the applicants are divided into groups of eight, locked into a single room, and asked to decide among themselves the one person who must be left to return to the Inland. If they cannot communally agree within ten minutes, no one advances.

The mastermind behind the Process is a poker-faced eccentric named Ezequiel (João Miguel), who seems to have studied “The Lord of the Flies” for leadership tips, and has fastened with fervor onto the power and prestige of his position. “You create your own merit,” Ezequiel pronounces, an ominous edict that echoes through the series like a sinister refrain. The Offshore began as a haven for “the deserving,” the applicants are told. In the world of “3%,” the notion of merit is raised to a holy rite, the “true path to building a superior society”; Ezequiel happens to also head the papacy, in charge of inducting or excommunicating those seeking salvation in the Offshore.

The world of “3%” mirrors our own in its condescension toward those who don’t make it. According to Ezequiel, “Envy and resentment have fuelled those who, in the name of a false and hypocritical equality and with populist ideas, aim to destroy everything we have achieved.” Ezequiel is referring to an underground resistance movement protesting the formalized stratification of society, but the sentiment may well summarize the feelings of many conservatives who believe that the impoverished are victims of nothing but their own indolence. “His motivation to pass wasn’t strong enough,” one of Ezequiel’s agents says of a candidate who doesn’t make the cut.

The show begins as a meditation on inequality but becomes an interrogation of the very meaning of a meritocracy, that metric most vaunted in the modern capitalist world. Ezequiel holds fast to the notion that merit can somehow be distilled and measured, if one only devises the right maze of tests and administers them to every member of society in the same way. Underneath the sheen of idealism, though, is a more brutal belief: that the undifferentiated masses deserve to be culled and quarantined, and that the society of the “worthy” has a right to protect itself from the lowly and undeserving.

“3%” suggests that this approach is not only cruel; it is also a supreme delusion. As the series unfolds, it becomes clear that a few bad apples have already penetrated Xanadu: the Offshore’s first murder has recently taken place, calling into question the effectiveness of the Process. A woman named Aline (Viviane Porto) is sent to monitor Ezequiel, and a power struggle is revealed at the highest echelons of Offshore leadership. The “chosen ones” who gain admission to the Promised Land, meanwhile, learn that securing their prized place in society comes at a terrible price. At the start of the Purification ceremony, where a fresh crop of inductees prepare to leave their home in the slums, Ezekiel reveals that all newcomers must submit to sterilization, and those who refuse automatically forfeit their spot among the three per cent. This policy, Ezequiel explains, is a way of preventing the nepotism that plagued their society before the Process was instated. “We don’t have kids in the Offshore precisely because heredity was the biggest injustice that sustained the outrageous world we lived in,” he says to the astonished young faces before him. “Because this way you will know for certain that you’ve earned the privileges that you fought for and deserve.”

This is lunacy masquerading as logic, but American viewers today might see a kernel of its appeal: a leader could never elevate his unqualified daughter and son-in-law to positions of power if he didn’t have any kids to begin with. In both the show’s stringently meritocratic world and in our only nominally meritocratic one, though, the results are eerily similar: a segregated society, governed by a Gospel of Success that depends upon holding many people back as much as allowing a few to thrive.