DEVS

In DEVS, a young software engineer at a quantum computing company becomes entangled with its enigmatic billionaire owner after her boyfriend mysteriously dies on his first day on the job with the company’s secretive Devs team. This is one of the most emotionally powerful and thought-provoking sci-fi stories to come to TV in recent years.

Written and directed by Alex Garland, the show has a distinctive style. Slow burn, character-focused, provocative visuals and music, and progressively mind-blowing ideas that aren’t just thrown at you because they’re cool but viscerally confront you with their full meaning and implications for humanity.

At first, I enjoyed the aesthetic and smart dialogue but wasn’t sure if I wanted to sit through another mystery about a young woman fighting a sinister tech billionaire and company, with all the usual low-hanging fruit. I have to endure toxic levels of Elon Musk on a day to day basis purely through social media osmosis, I don’t need to see another version of him pilloried or lionized. And we all know tech companies very profitably sell control, rage farming, and dumbing-down as some kind of Utopian vision.

The murder, however, is simply a catalyst for fates to become entwined. The real mystery is the machine at the heart of Devs, what it does, and what that means. At first, the billionaire and the Devs team appear to be villainous, but we get to know them as well as we do our protagonist Lily Chan, and it’s honestly the best part of the show. The result is like a Ted Chiang short story, where a sci-fi concept is presented that is easy to digest, but then he says, okay, next course, and goes on digging into the topic until it becomes so thought out and real as to become mind blowing.

The result is just fantastic sci-fi. I recently praised THREE-BODY PROBLEM for its excellent adaptation of the novel’s fantastic ideas while improving on its weaker elements, notably the characters and plotting. DEVS goes far beyond that show, simpler in ideas but making them far more powerful and gut-punching.

Highly recommended if you like smart TV.