After an old friend is killed, FBI agent Shea Salazar is diverted from her investigation into a paedophile ring…

The ever-reliable John Billingsley is the focus of the first few minutes of this intriguing new series from Manny Coto that doesn’t – as yet – say anything too innovative on the subject of artificial intelligence, but puts the various pieces together in a way we’ve not seen before. With the various threads set up in the pilot, you can see why Fox took it to series – and why they felt justified in holding it back to the 2020/21 season, when there’s not going to be anywhere near as much new material as usual.

Billingsley plays Dr Richard Weiss whose death is caused by someone or something taking over the camera at a gas station, the controls of another car and then his hospital treatment. Weiss saved Salazar’s life (as we’re told in some of the episode’s inevitable infodumps) and she wonders why Weiss had the name of tech genius Paul LeBlanc on a post-it. That puzzle leads her to learn about neXt, the, er, next generation of artificial intelligence that LeBlanc had worked on, and which he believed had been destroyed. And which does not take kindly to being investigated…

The plot rattles along, with a lot riding on John Slattery’s LeBlanc – who may have been attracted to the project by a time-sensitive element of his character. He’s a jerk, but he’s a jerk with good cause to worry, and bounces well off Fernande Andrade’s FBI agent – someone who we know will think outside the box, given she has a convicted criminal working on her taskforce.

Verdict: You can count the inspirations of this out easily, but Coto has proved – with Enterprise, Odyssey 5 and much more – that he knows how to blend the techspeak with human drama, so this will be worth investing some time. 8/10

Paul Simpson