Devs (2020 – created by Alex Garland) is an FX TV mini-series you can watch on Hulu. Among the cast, we can quote Alison Pill (Katie) and Nick Offerman (Forest). You can see the former in the excellent Star Trek Picard (2020 – created by Kirsten Beyer, Michael Chabon, and Akiva Goldsman). The latter is best known for his character Ron Swanson in Parks and Recreation (2009–2015 – created by Greg Daniels and Michael Schur).
Where these TV series are/were excellent, Devs is, unfortunately, a floater. It is sluggish, and it is a pile of sci-fi mumbo jumbo and other technical garbage! Also, it is so slow that I fell asleep only 15 minutes into the second episode. I will not give details about the story to avoid spoiling your viewing experience, but I am usually quite resistant to the avant-garde or even Z series shows. For example, I sat through The Turin Horse (2011 – directed by Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky). All of it! But Devs, I can’t take it anymore. Maybe my issue with Devs is that they dumped on the viewer a pile of crap such as artificial intelligence, cryptography, hacking, and quantum computing! Words completely void of sense.
Overall, I think that the producers should have aimed for the Comedy and Parody category instead of Drama, Sci-Fi, and Thriller. The single non-meaningless line in S1:E1 is heard when Forest answers a question about the number of qubits the quantum computer has: “A number that seems pointless to express as a number.” I suspect it is an Easter egg slipped-in by Nick Offerman as it definitively sounds like Ron Swanson. A few samples so you can make your own opinion: “It’s pointless for a human to paint scenes of nature when they can go outside and stand in it.”, or “I’d wish you the best of luck, but I believe luck is a concept created by the weak to explain their failures.” So, is there anything to save Devs? Well, I can only commend the production team for showing code from the IBM Qiskit package – used to develop quantum circuits and software – within some Python code. Thank you for not scrolling group.c on the screen!
