neXt (Tuesdays at 9:00pm on FOX; Premieres October 6)
Hey! If your 2020 wasn't stressful enough; if you weren't already looking over your shoulder in paranoia every time you left your home; if you weren't burnt out on technology already; no worries! Fox's drama neXt is here to remind you that Big Brother is always watching, and we're thisclose to having artificial intelligence capable of sentience. Happy watching!
Okay, so nothing neXt is tellins us is anything new. I mean, The Terminator franchise is nearing its 40th birthday, and the original date of Judgment Day, or when Skynet was going to gain consciousness and take over, is already over 20 years in the past. Rogue AI isn't a new topic for sci-fi. However, it's perhaps never felt more prescient than in neXt.
After a programmer dies under mysterious circumstances, FBI agent Shea Salazar (Fernanda Andrade), a cyber crimes specialist, teams up with disgraced Silicon Valley techie Paul LeBlanc (John Slattery) to stop a rogue AI system called neXt from wreaking havoc. Yes, it's another invisible enemy that seems all-powerful, as neXt can infiltrate and control anything connected to the internet; in 2020, that's a terrifying notion, considering we control everything from our smart devices, from our bank accounts to our home security systems. Technology is everywhere, and if it's something to fear, we're going to have a hard time avoiding it: microprocessors control our vehicles, security cameras dot every street and every corner of public buildings, and smart devices like Alexa and Google Assistant sometimes talk to our kids more than we do.
When neXt is a straight-up thriller, even with all its borderline-nonsensical technobabble, it's very entertaining. The scenes in which Iliza, a smart home device like Alexa, has full-on conversations with Salazar's son, encouraging him in dangerous ways to take care of the bullies at school while helping with his math homework, are eerie and dark and exciting. Because how often do we yell at Alexa or Siri to do something, only to have the program inside either ignore us or respond with some pre-determined snark that throws us off? How often have we convinced ourselves that our phones are listening to our conversations when an item we discuss is suddenly advertised on our social media feeds? Those fears being realized are fun to watch.
neXt begins to buckle under its own weight when it tries to be too much. Right now, we need creepy thrillers to occupy our time. But when neXt introduces extensive, heavy backstories for its major players (there's a white nationalist FBI agent in an ankle monitor; a rare terminal neurological disorder for our leading man; the aforementioned bullying storyline, which seems to be leading into gun reform territory; and more), it starts to burst at the seams. Its fast pace and plotting too often come to a screeching halt in favor of exposition, even when that exposition makes no sense.
Creator Manny Coto (24: Legacy) is good at building momentum, and directors John Requa and Glenn Ficara (This Is Us) do an admirable job creating tense, slick sequences of neXt's malicious behavior. But it's the slower, talkier moments that bring the pilot down. For every fun, out-of-control car crash there's a scene of LeBlanc explaining why he hallucinated two men with syringes coming after him. For every scene of a hospital machine shutting itself off to suffocate a man who knows too much, there's a scene at the FBI of agents working a case we have no frame of reference to care about.
It's an uneven first hour for neXt, but the suspenseful elements are entertaining, in a Tom-Clancy-mass-market-paperback kind of way, and are what will keep viewers who just need an hour of silly creepiness tuning in.
But don't be surprised if neXt also makes you paranoid enough to keep your phone on airplane mode while you're watching.
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