Can these key players in ‘neXt’ save us all?

Paul LeBlanc (John Slattery) is the brilliant, volatile, socially maladjusted tech pioneer who created neXt. He was forced out of his company, Zava, after realizing the danger neXt posed and trying to shut the project down. He suffers from a degenerative brain disorder that prevents him from sleeping, causes hallucinations and makes him irritable and paranoid.

“He’s not a people person,” Slattery said. “So he’s had his head in some kind of tech his whole life, that’s where he succeeded, that’s where his passion was, so it wasn’t in a social setting, and you know, that gets multiplied.”

Special Agent Shea Salazar (Fernanda Andrade) leads an FBI cybercrime unit and stumbles upon LeBlanc and neXt while looking into the mysterious death of her old mentor.

“She’s the youngest agent to have her own unit in the FBI and when you meet her she has just lost somebody very dear to her in a kind of sketchy situation,” Andrade said. “So when she goes to investigate it, it leads her to Paul LeBlanc … They’re wildly different people. They somehow need each other and complement each other in strange ways and I think they ultimately become a good team.”

Ty Salazar (Gerardo Celasco) is Shea’s husband, who has been laid off from his job and stays home raising their young son, Ethan.

“Ultimately he becomes a huge protector for his wife and his son, especially his son,” Celasco said. “So because of the AI that’s technically affecting all of our lives, he really has to be in charge of making sure that his son is taken care of because it not only affects the older characters of the show, but I mean, he’s being targeted as well.”

Ethan Salazar (Evan Whitten) is Shea and Ty’s young son, who is targeted by neXt through an Alexa-like smart speaker in the family’s home.

Ted LeBlanc (Jason Butler Harner) is Paul’s short-sighted younger brother, who takes over Zava after Paul is forced out and continues the neXt project.

“I think Ted definitely loves and is concerned about his brother’s mental health because there’s a precedent of mental illness that’s happening with Paul,” Harner said. “And also he’s trying to save the business, and sometimes Ted’s more fragile ego can get the better of him because he’s had to do so much cleaning up for Paul.”

Abby LeBlanc (Elizabeth Cappuccino) is Paul’s daughter. They have a troubled, distant relationship, and she gets along better with her uncle, Ted.

“I am sort of like this emotional Achilles heel for

Paul,” Cappuccino said. “But we have sort of an estranged relationship, and I feel much closer to my uncle than to him, so you can watch how that plays out in the season and just how the dynamic shifts in that sort of familial triangle.”

Gina (Eve Harlow) is a high-strung data analyst with Salazar’s cybercrime unit who has a contentious relationship with hacker CM.

“What I liked about this character, actually, is that she’s a very, like, vivacious, kind of spunky character, which you wouldn’t necessarily associate with someone who is an FBI data analyst,” Harlow said.

CM (Michael Mosley) is a brilliant hacker who got arrested and started working with Salazar’s FBI cybercrime team as part of his probation. He wears an electronic monitoring ankle bracelet and is mistrusted by some of his colleagues, including Gina, who dislikes him because of his previous associations with a hate group.

“He used to be kind of like a white nationalist and like maybe even a little on the domestic terrorism spectrum, and I think he started to kind of back away from that kind of mode of thinking,” Mosley said.

Ben (Aaron Clifton Moten) is a computer analyst with the FBI cybercrime team, whom the show’s producers describe as a “straight-laced, buttonedup hard worker, who is boring to the point of being interesting.”