What You Should Be Watching: AMC’s ‘Humans’
“Humans” on AMC comes from the brilliant minds of Jonathan Brackley and Sam Vincent (“Spooks”), who, adapted the story from Lars Lundstrom’s critically acclaimed series “Real Humans.” The show originally aired on Swedish television but after seeking permission from the creator, Brackley and Vincent worked on filming the show by winter of last year in partnership with AMC for America and Channel 4 in the U.K.
Set in London in the present day, the world pretty much functions similarly to how we know it. Except, households have home companions known as Synths. They look and talk just like humans, but they are actually androids that can be purchased at an appliance store.
Synths are programmable, just like a typical computer machine you’ve bought and opened for the first time. However, there are other Synths running on the lose and have been trafficked for other “jobs.” The real situation, it seems, is not how simple as it appears to be. These rebel robots and their group figure into a grand story that makes “Humans” quite compelling. It brings to light ethical questions that may be true to how some things in the world operate today.
“We wanted to show a broad span of this world. That’s what interested us so much about the original. There’s so many fantastic and wonderful ideas about AI and the future [in Real Humans] and we thought we could bring our own take to it,” said Brackley via Newsweek.
The series, which is already on its fourth episode in the U.K. and second episode in the U.S. , stars William Hurt, Tom Goodman-Hill, Katherine Parkinson, Gemma Chan, Colin Morgan, Emily Berrington and Will Tudor, among a host of other actors.