TV Review - Next (2020)

Last year, ABC put on the air a great, science-fiction series called Emergence (2019). It was about a woman who worked for the police who was investigating some crimes related to a tech company and what turned out to be the release of artificial intelligence, in the form of androids or robots that looked absolutely human. The series became a great adventure series that was about family, feminism and identity that demonstrated the heights of what good network television can do. As I watched the first, three episodes of this series, I got the same vibes as when I watched Emergence. Those vibes were that this series represented the heights of what good network television can do. The reason I got those vibes is the plot and themes are also similar to Emergence.

Fernanda Andrade (The Devil Inside and Sons of Anarchy) stars as Shea Salazar, a special agent with the FBI's Cyber-Crime Task Force. She's actually the head of that task force, as she oversees about a half-dozen or so people in her unit. She's based in Portland, Oregon. She's also married with a son. She's dedicated to her work and to her family. Both become threatened when she encounters a tech developer.

John Slattery (Mrs. America and Mad Men) also stars as Paul LeBlanc, the tech developer in question. He's basically a computer genius who created artificial intelligence or A.I. He's a middle-aged developer, a man in his 50's or 60's. He's in the same group with guys like Bill Gates who has become a billionaire based on the computer company and technology he made. He's very sharp and very, very smart, but he is sick. He's physically sick, suffering from what he believes is a terminal illness. However, before he potentially dies, he's determined to stop the A.I. that he believes has the ability to kill people and in fact has killed people.

The A.I. was stored at a facility with an air gap. When that A.I. is learned to have gotten out of the facility, Paul teams up with Shea in order to find the A.I. and shut it down. Created by Manny Coto (Dexter and Star Trek: Enterprise), the series does a good job of generating the same dread and terror of HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Yes, it's an oft-explored type of terror that's been done in so many sci-fi films and TV shows, that of the killer computer. Often, it's exemplified as a killer robot, such as The Terminator (1984), but, having it represented as just existing on the Internet, presented a kind of horror for the 21st century.

Michael Mosley (Sirens and Scrubs) plays CM, a convicted hacker working with the FBI as a condition of his sentence. Gerardo Celasco (How To Get Away With Murder and Passions) rounds out the cast as Ty Salazar, the husband to Shea and a mechanic who has to go on the run with their child when the A.I. starts to target people that Shea knows. It actually becomes a really engrossing thriller as Ty and others try to avoid the A.I., and it's difficult once it's clear how much computers run our lives now.

Rated TV-14-LVD.
Running Time: 1 hr.
Tuesdays 9PM on FOX.