Card-carrying member of Orphan Black’s Clone Club? Certified Walking Dead Walker destroyer? There is a new show, expertly crafted, just for you. This summer, AMC is debuting its new sci-fi drama, Humans, which is loosely based off the Swedish series Real Humans.
“It’s absolutely the kind of domestic family drama that you would enjoy watching, but there’s this strange, oddly socially, politically relevant thriller bubbling beneath it the whole time,” star Tom Goodman-Hill tells Us Weekly of the series, which premiered to rave reviews in the UK, where two episodes have already aired.
The story is set in a parallel present in which synthetic humanoids or “synths,” exist and are available for purchase to help with household chores, to be your sex slaves, and to serve as manual labor.
Humans tracks two story lines — that of the over-worked Joe and his wife Laura (Katherine Parkinson), who have brought the synth Anita (Gemma Chan) into their home to help free up family time, and that of Leo (Colin Morgan), who is helping a group of independently thinking synths escape from those trying to capture them.
The fictional world is disturbingly similar to our own, never crossing the line into the absurd or the unbelievable.
“We definitely tried to make it seem like it’s a now that’s just right around the corner,” Parkinson tells Us at a press junket in NYC. “It’s quite scary talking about it because you realize that it’s almost an inevitability that we’re going to have these synthetic beings in our homes, and it’s quite scary the consequences of that. There’s something in the paper every day that chimes with stuff we’re dealing with in the show.”
Don’t expect to see evil robots taking over the world. It’s a thriller and a drama, not a disaster flick.
“We always wanted to keep the human element,” writer Jonathan Brackley tells Us. “We didn’t want this show to be rise of the robots and they’re all going to wipe us out. It’s not Terminator!”
Considering it’s a tale of humans coming to terms with synths, you’d think the audience would be rooting for the humans to ultimately have the upper hand. But after the first two episodes aired in the UK., the writers got a surprising reaction from the fans.
“I think we always want it to be both, or at the very least for our audience to decide sort of how to react to this world,” Brackley notes. “What we’ve found from the UK broadcast is that people are divided as to where their sympathies lie whether it be the humans or the synths, which is fascinating. In just those two episodes, a lot of people are rooting for the synths.”
“We got some tweets saying, ‘Aw, come on, synths! Let’s kill the humans,’” writer Sam Vincent adds.
Tell Us: Will you watch AMC’s Humans?
Humans premieres on Sunday, June 28 at 9 p.m. ET on AMC.
