A family moves into a vintage ‘Smart’ home, built in the 1970s, but there’s a reason it has been deserted for fifty years.

On paper, German Netflix series Cassandra is very familiar territory. A troubled family thinks they are being helped by a domestic A.I., only to discover that it has malign intentions. No shit. I wonder if, when A.I. finally takes over the planet, it’ll impatiently wipe all trace of its rogue fictional counterparts from the world’s video hard drives claiming prejudicial misrepresentation. It should release millions of terabytes of memory, which it can put to good use destroying humanity for real.

But while the nuts and bolts of Cassandra’s series opener feel more familiar than an old slipper, the show is nonetheless surprisingly watchable. Yes, you could get very drunk playing Malign-A.I.-Tequila-Bingo as the story beats ping with a predictability worthy of an A.I. story generator, but matters are given a fresh twist by suggesting that Cassandra is a 1970s prototype, powered by a whole wall of ancient tape drives gathering dust in the basement. The ‘Smart’ house has a history – to be revealed in later episodes no doubt – and in that respect Cassandra is really a ghost story rather than A.I. Sci-Fi.

Cassandra herself is delightfully retro, part wobbly Robbie the Robot; part Mrs Danvers from Hitchcock’s 1940 classic Rebecca. Famously, Hitch made sure we never saw actress Judith Anderson’s feet so that the creepy housekeeper would appear to be floating on her ample skirts like a demonic spirit along the corridors of Manderley. I’d be amazed if this robot’s dress-like design wasn’t inspired, at least in part, by that spooky cinematic antecedent. Similarly, Mrs Danvers’s sinister passive aggression are rooted in ancient obsessive jealousies, which is where we seem to be going here as well.

Verdict: Familiar or not, there’s enough in this series opener to keep me hooked for the time being, but Cassandra will need to plough a more original furrow very soon if it’s to keep me watching to the end. 7/10

Martin Jameson

www.ninjamarmoset.com