Lily and Sergei both work for Amaya, a tech company in the Bay Area. When Sergei leads a team that perfects predictive AI, he’s promoted into the ‘Devs’ unit. Working in a walled off, secure facility at the edge of the campus, Devs do the most important work in the company.

The first problem is, no one will tell Sergei what that work is.

The second problem is that when he finds out, it terrifies him.

The first ten minutes of this are going to be very hard work for a lot of people. Alex Garland continues his love affair with ideas and his distanced correspondence with emotion and the end result is very hard to like. Sergei and Lily are cold, Forest, Amaya’s CEO is cold. Everyone is a messenger bag and a smirk. Everyone has an intellectual shiv in their back pocket ready to lash out at the first person to question their intelligence. In fairness, that’s a pretty accurate depiction of what I know of dev culture. Plus, in moments like the cheery and awkward conversation they have with the homeless man who sleeps in their porch, the series gives you a steely, clear eyed look at a city that really is divided that starkly.

It’s a beautiful show too. The ziggurat-esque Devs workplace is opulent and weirdly alien with its utilitarian work spaces. The surreal image of Amaya’s vast mascot looming above the trees like a chirpy kaiju punctuates several scenes. The stunning moment where Sergei is confronted by Forest and his security chief, Kenton, in a forest of trees seemingly vanishing into horizontal portals above their heads. The show is never less than beautiful and rarely less than intriguing.

But for all that you’re going to take, if you’re like me, the entire first episode to care. The show is insectile, cold, like watching a group of incredibly clever predators in a Mexican standoff. It’s only in one of the final scenes that that shifts. Forest, horrorstruck and grieving over something he’s had done, sits in a field of gold monoliths, silently weeping. He’s joined by Katie, the Devs development head, and the pair talk about the morality of what happened. Nick Offerman and Alison Pill are two of the best actors of their generation and here they show why. Pill is focused, calm, measured, a world away from her gloriously frantic work on The Newsroom or Picard. Offerman is almost silent and yet completely emotionally open. Two frail humans taking a moment’s rest among the machinery of the impossible. When the show’s like this? It’s completely engrossing. Hopefully that’s the direction it’s going.

Don’t get wrong there’s a lot to recommend here. Sonoya Mizuno is excellent as Lilly, especially in the second half of the episode and Karl Glusman’s Sergei is arrogant, nervy and ultimately very sympathetic. But it’s that ‘ultimately’ some people will struggle with. I did. But stick with it, I did that too.

Verdict: I suspect the tone is the point and opening up, of Devs, of these people of this world, is the journey. 8/10

Alasdair Stuart