Lily Chan investigates the mysterious death of her boyfriend….

I ducked out of Devs after Episode 1 when it first aired on BBC Two earlier this year. It seemed slow, ponderous, and onerously bogus in its attempts to be profound. Four months later, as we have officially run out of telly, I thought I’d better dip my toes back in the Devs pool, as perhaps the onset of lockdown had put me in a bad mood. Was there a chance that in another life I might be better disposed to it?

I watched the whole saga in three days, and discovered several things. The first is that I think I might still be in a bad mood. The second is that I’m definitely still in this reality.

Thirdly, this is not a show to binge watch. Why? Because it’s so indulgently SLOW… it’s not just slow, it gets slower and slower and s-l-o-w-e-e-e-e-r as it progresses. By the end I was counting to three, not just between every character line, but in between Nick Offerman’s every sentence, a performance unfortunately directed to be reminiscent of a budget Nicholas Cage on largactil.

For sure, it does have some good points. The premise is passingly interesting, and some of the nuts and bolts thriller stuff is fun, but it’s like being stuck in a tent with Brian Cox’s stoner best mate from school, who is permanently off his head and expounding the same AMAAAAAAZING theories about determinism and multiverses again and again and again and again and again and again and again…

YES! FOR PITY’S SAKE ALEX, I GOT WHAT DEVS WAS THE FIRST TIME! YOU DON’T NEED TO REPEAT IT FIVE TIMES IN EVERY EPISODE.

And there are the endless shots of the central characters staring into the middle distance… all talking… in a monotone… as if… nothing matters… and they don’t have somewhere to be. Seriously, the point about drama – all drama – is that the characters have somewhere to be. But fear not, when they’re not droning on like stoned sixth formers who think they’re being profound, we have similarly endless drone shots of a geometric San Francisco to look at…  or Sonora Mizuno (a perfectly fine actress) in her knickers. Sonora has a lot of knickers. They are a range of pastel colours… but I wonder whether Ms Mizuno ever said to Garland: ‘Seriously Alex? Am I in my knickers AGAIN???’

Devs is 8 x 50 minutes, and stone me, it felt like it. Cut down to 4 x 50 it would have been vastly improved, although I’d have settled for a brisk two hours max. This could have been achieved simply by cutting all the repetition and getting the actors to pick up their cues. You may have a tech empire that runs itself, Mr Forrest, but some of us have things to do other than listen to eight hours of cod sci-fi philosophy on a loop.

However, even by sci-fi piffle standards it loses its way. Mostly it’s about determinism, with a quantum computer that can read the past and predict the future (not a spoiler) but abruptly, at the end, the computer turns into a tool for simulating consciousness, which seems to be an accidental by-product that astonishingly no one’s overly interested in except for sentimental reasons. Also not really a spoiler.

By that point Garland is making up the rules as he goes along. This is annoying in any vaguely high concept gubbins, but is especially so here, where the cold reality of there NOT being an alternate quantum world where you choose to do something more useful with eight hours of your life really hits home.

I liked the music hugely though and the guy playing Jamie – Jin Ha – was good. Dry, funny, and particularly skilled at picking up his cues. Crack on guys. We only have one life after all.   6/10

Martin Jameson