TV Pilot: Almost Human Reviewed...

2048 AD.  Two years ago Detective John Kennex (Karl Urban) and his team were involved in a major siege with a group of terrorists. Even with the back-up of logic-driven robotic officers, Kennex’s team were hopelessly out-matched and Kennex was ultimately the sole-survivor: seriously wounded, left in a coma for over a year and his personal life torn apart. Now back on duty, he’s determined to find out more about the shadowy organisation that was behind the massacre and might be bigger than anyone os saying. But he’s re-entering a workforce where many of the human officers blame him for getting comrades killed, the latest robotic versions treat him as flawed in practical ways and where he suspects that there may be leaks within the department that led to his very public failure.

It’s now mandatory he works with a ‘synthetic’ partner and John is assigned an older model, ‘Dorian’ (Michael Ealy) previously ‘boxed’ because of problematic programming.   Undergoing illegal techniques in an effort  to remember all the details from his damaged memory, Kennex is ready to dump his ‘colleague’ as soon as possible, but finds him both surprisingly useful and unusually sympathetic to his methods and trust issues. But the first day back on the job quickly goes from bad to worse when it becomes clear that someone with a grudge against the police is planning to use the latest robotoc technology against them...

Last month, there was an unofficial ‘Dredd’ day with campaigners trying to encourage anyone and everyone to get behind a sequel to 2012’s 2000AD-character adaptation. It’s not likely to happen – after all, if Firefly/Serenity couldn’t generate a second outing, then a relatively lesser-known property with even less box-office stands even less chance. However fans of Dredd may well take solace from this new series that also featuresleading man Karl Urban as yet another grumpy future law-enforcer.

Almost Human channels a variety of well-trod sci-fi themes. The backdrop  is the closest you’ll get to Blade Runner (or a less extreme Mega-City One) with rain-soaked neon, the occasional flying-car but also a mix of the contemporary and the dated:  free-range dirty paperwork mixing with clean mid-air graphics, suggesting some real thought has gone into planning the future’s lineage and development.  Moreso, we’re set to explore some similar  cultural themes mined in films such as AI, including the bigger question of  'sentient' life and whether one can racially-slur or kill a machine. Nor is the ill-suited buddy movie aspect anything new – with past incarnations too numerous to mention, though you might also want to use Alien Nation as a touchstone for this particular production.  

This is a project where there’s clearly been a great deal of money spent to bring it to air.  Yes, those visual effects are nifty and mostly extremely well rendered, but it’s clear that beyond the de rigueur bells and whistles, some of that budget has also been spent on the more subtle aspects of the concept,  the little tactile and nuanced touches that help immerse the viewer in not just the story but the world in which it is happening.

Though all premiere episodes suffer from a slight overload of information-dumping and occasionally clunky exposition to get things moving, this story of cyber-circuitry and bionic buddy-ness feels (ironically) much more organically told than many a  current pilot. There’s a narration at the beginning to tell us about the world we’re entering and, yes,  supporting characters do initially fit the cookie-cutter roles one might expect – such as a resentful cop, possible love-interest , concerned boss, tech-savvy nerd etc – but there’s definitely an effort in performance and casting to make them feel comfortable within the plot - going beyond the archetypes. It’s good to see the much-underused Lili Taylor in a command role and The Office/Pirates of the Caribbean’s Mackenzie Crook could well develop into a nicely off-centred robo-programmer. 

The script and dialogue will need to improve a little, but Urban immediately brings all the right elements to a role that needs to be gruff and damaged without being typically over-sold. Equally Michael Ealy’s synthetic Dorian has enough of an edge to avoid all the ticks and cliché twitches of a Data or Kryten and gives the character a real personality where it might have been easier to have a 'blank' sheet..

Bad Robot and J J Abrams’ productions tend to begin by introducing a big mystery that needs to be solved and though there are several nods to a bigger mythology and a pilot-ending development which suggests a bigger story-arc to follow, Almost Human feels more like a qulaity future procedural than a big sci-fi extravaganza maguffin’d puzzle-box – and it’s all the better for it. The clichés on show  in the pilot can probably be forgiven as defining the genre it is in and the real test will be whether the series will live up to the potential of the pilot episode's ambition – if viewer loyalty can be generated by keeping a similar quality and tone.  

The San Diego Comic-Con crowd, to whom it was previewed, liked what they saw in July. On the basis of its interesting, intricate and well-tooled pilot, I’ll certainly be tuning in for further instalments to see how it moves forward...

Almost Human premieres Sunday 17th November on FOX in the US. (with its second episode the next day). No firm date for a UK broadcast has been confirmed.