Science fiction auteur Alex Garland joins the ranks of directors who have migrated from features to long-form prestige television. Garland’s eight-part miniseries, Devs, is the maiden enterprise in Disney’s new FX on Hulu initiative, where FX programming appears exclusively on the Hulu streaming site without broadcasting on the regular FX channel first, concurrently, or even ever. The premiere of Devs launched with two episodes and has since been followed by the release of a single episode each week.
At the heart of Devs is a mystery, but it’s not the mystery the protagonist thinks it is. Lily (Sonoya Mizuno) works as a security programmer for an awesomely powerful tech conglomerate, Amaya, the kind of tech conglomerate national governments pay deference to and not the other way around. Her boyfriend, Sergei (Karl Glusman), has an aptitude for coding and mapping organism behavior, and he’s offered a promotion to work in Amaya’s top-secret development sector, known as Devs. After one day on the job, Sergei disappears. The company presents it as a suicide to Lily, but the viewer knows what really happened. While she’s trying to figure out what became of Sergei and why, the viewer is engaged in a higher order of intrigue altogether: What on earth is Devs working on?
Devs combines the mad scientist noir elements of Ex Machina, Garland’s directorial debut, with…
