FASCINATING HIGH-TECH THRILLER
The creative force behind Ex Machina looks at the excesses of Silicon Valley
Devs
Thursdays, FX/FX Now
At the centre of Alex Garland’s steely cool, eight-episode cyber thriller Devs, a group of elite Silicon Valley coders, ensconced in a hermetically sealed lab that resembles the extremely luxe lobby of a W hotel, have finished creating an unsettling technological advancement. Using quantum physics, they’ve essentially invented a Ring doorbell camera for all of history — surveillance video (and audio) that goes back in time. Neato-burrito.
But I’m more interested in a different upgrade, which affects how viewers will see Devs. It’s an FX show that is not on FX
— at least not for U.S. viewers. Canadian viewers will see it if they subscribe to FX in Canada, but in the U.S., it’s available as a marquee offering on “FX on Hulu” — a new grouping of the U.S. cable network’s content on the subscription streaming service, and just one of a series of outcomes from Disney’s acquisition last year of most of Fox.
Streaming Devs instead of getting to see it on cable makes clear that the ingenuity so many of us have long admired from FX (The Americans, Fosse/verdon, Atlanta, American Crime Story) is probably destined for bigger and better things. Or it’s just another irritating reminder that the future of TV will be unremittingly niche and, for consumers, involve more extractions from the wallet. We shall see.
In any case, Garland, who earned an Oscar nomination for the screenplay of his 2014 directorial debut, Ex Machina, has certainly delivered premium content here. Devs is quietly captivating and beautifully envisioned, propelled mainly by Sonoya Mizuno’s subtly fierce lead performance as Lily Chan, a software engineer at a large but clandestine high-tech corporation called Amaya.
Each morning, Lily and her live-in boyfriend, Sergei (Karl Glusman), leave their cute San Francisco apartment and board Amaya’s employee shuttle bus to the company’s campus — distinguished by an enormous, eerily lifelike statue of a little girl that emerges from the trees. It’s Amaya, the company’s namesake, the tragically deceased daughter of Forest (Parks and Recreation’s Nick Offerman), the company’s enigmatic founder.
Sergei gets good news, direct from Forest and his ever-present chief developer, Katie (The Newsroom’s Alison Pill): He’s been promoted to “devs,” the company’s top-secret development division. Sergei’s first day is a disaster, however. Once inside the devs hive, he is so distraught by what he sees that he breaks a big no-no. It falls to Amaya’s security chief, an EX-CIA agent named Kenton (The Good Wife’s Zach Grenier), to take care of Sergei — and take care of him he does.
Lily’s too smart to buy the company’s explanation of her boyfriend’s sudden disappearance. It’s here that Devs begins to resemble a typical conspiracy narrative, as Lily reboots one of Sergei’s old smartphones and, with help from her heartsick but still deeply loyal ex-boyfriend, Jamie (Jin Ha), begins to unravel a bigger and darker mystery.
Devs is dour from start to finish, which is not a complaint: It’s good to see a serious take on Silicon Valley’s assorted messiah complexes, rather than another satirical riff on geek culture.
The story Garland tells doesn’t always stretch effectively into the episodic format (it drags, in other words, and gets a touch too hammy near the end), but the writing convincingly walks us through the moral quandaries caused by ambitious advances in technology. The theme, about the arrogance of tech, is abundantly clear.
Juggling both the pretentiousness of a mad scientist and the grief of a father, Offerman is working outside the sardonic stylings he’s known for, and he doesn’t always meet the challenge. Fortunately, Devs is engineered to showcase the talents of Mizuno and Ha, whose scenes together give the series the spark it might otherwise lack.
The Washington Post