Westworld, Star Trek: Picard, Devs, and other series are making the same mistake.
FX sharedDevswith Hulu, pitching the miniseries as prestige bait for the chattering class.
Season 3 ofWestworldwas HBO’s new hope for a buzzy, sexy-violent epic.
John P. Johnson/HBO; Raymond Liu/FX; James Dimmock/CBS
And they were all terrible.
All these showslookokay decent-sized budgets, solid casts, theme-y dialogue and they exude a uniform unhappiness.
Necessary to point out, of course, that each series has its supporters, and defensive fandoms.
My brilliant colleague Kristen Baldwin putDevsonher mid-year top 10 list.
And anyone who lovesStar Trekhas lived through bad first seasons.
AndPicard’s finale climaxes with genocidal time-traveling megamachines.
Actually, that’s the second straight neo-Trekseason to end with bad robots.
Last year,Discoverystared down an all-powerful security system: Skynet for Starfleet, basically.
Meanwhile, ambient techno-paranoia informs the newTwilight Zone’s mood.
I get it: We are all scared of phones, and bots, and the Algorithm.
Yet by demonizing technology, these projects oddly exonerate the peoplebehindthat technology.
CEOs with tragic origin stories inWestworldorDevsare puppets for machines they can’t control.
Higher-tech powers inBrave New Worldand “You May Also Like” control whole civilizations comprised of unaware humans.
will evolve beyond humanity.
skeptic Elon Musk, who recently complained loudly about coronavirus stay-at-home orders.
His Fremont, Calif., Tesla plant reopened and employees started testing positive for COVID-19.
Wouldn’t evil A.I.
be smart enough to listen to Dr. Fauci?
As a billionaire genre enthusiast, Musk is probably dwarfed only by Jeff Bezos.
Yet the old glowing haze informs the depictions of Big Tech in these latest science-fiction dramas.
That rig can anticipate everything, everywhere precisely like the year’sotherbig quantum computer rig,Westworld’s Rehoboam.
Picardhas its own problems in this area.
and besides the obvious way-too-lateTerminatorripoff, the A.I.
has the embarrassinglyTron-ish moniker Control.
Actually, the aggressively nonsensicalWestworldfinale winds up arguing that societywillcollapse without the sacred orb.
The merely infuriatingDevsfinale ends with Forest explaining his own new godhood.
This is not just a one-percenter issue.
For him, though, it’s also an excuse to do anything he wants to do.
How many terrible things have been done in Christ’s name?
These shows offer an easy escape for everyone watching the computers have gone mad!
Those series are thrillingly unencumbered by any genre expectations.
Coming soon to Fox:Next, where a messianic founder chases a rogue A.I.
(At this point, wouldn’t it be better to chase the rogue messianic founders?)
This is why I keep on coming back toBlack Mirror, the greatest science-fiction series of the digital age.
That’s science; the rest is just fiction.
A version of this article appears in the August issue ofEntertainment Weekly,on sale now.
