Viewers were smacked with several different story strands as one family purchased a brand new Synth delightfully named Anita (Gemma Chan) to do all the household chores, another featured a malfunctioning Synth Odi (Will Tudor) and his owner George (William Hurt), then there was Colin Morgan’s human Leo and his Synth buddy who are on the run.
The show has given us plenty to ruminate on from the start by throwing so many different scenarios and attitudes towards artificial intelligence at us.
Humans presents a vision of the future that may not be too far away
In some cases it’s like Marmite, they are loved or hated them. In other cases they are just a little bit too unnerving for some.
There are no cut and dry answers – each story thread is a debate in itself which is why it is so effective as a TV show.
You kind of imagine that this is what an eight-episode series of Black Mirror would feel like but less bleak. Each episode is likely to continue this wider dialogue of what it means to be human and what would happen if robots did exist.
Colin Morgan stars as Leo in Humans
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But the praise doesn’t end there. It’s hard not to admire the time and effort that’s gone into crafting that Synth walk – you really do feel like the actors playing the robots are just that.
They have so perfectly managed to do the most counter-intuitive thing to acting: coming across as wooden and utterly devoid of emotion. It’s a skill in itself and is so convincingly creepy that it’s hard to imagine that Gemma Chan played a young museum guide fearing for her life in Sherlock or Will Tudor as the mischievous Westerosi rent boy in Game of Thrones.
Humans is an ambitious remake of the original Swedish series Real Humans, the co-production between Channel 4 and US broadcaster AMC has a lot riding on it as it seeks to win audiences on both side of the Atlantic. But judging from the first episode it is likely to do very well.
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