Starring Nick Offerman as bearded tech-bro enigma, FX’s Devs has a lot going on

Lily (Sonoya Mizuno) and Forest (Nick Offerman) are an employee and boss decidedly on two different sides in Devs, but their interactions are very workforce-y polite in the early season. [credit: CR: Raymond Liu/FX ]

Sci-fi writer/director Alex Garland has some strong feelings about modern science and technology. If you haven't yet seen his visually stunning and ideologically complex films, Ex-Machina and Annihilation, let's just say he holds some skepticism about things that evolve beyond human control. But Garland evidently also has some feelings about dealing with film studios and production companies (many of which may not fancy the unflinching outcomes of his stories). So for his latest idea, he turned to the mini-series masters at FX to make his TV debut: Devs, an eight-part miniseries that seems to take Garland's emerging mythos and apply it to the tech/research industry itself.

A quantum leap

Devs boils down to the story of an individual against an organization. Software engineer Lily (Sonoya Mizuno, the actor behind Kyoko in Ex-Machina here again working with Garland) works at Amaya, an ambiguous but clearly industry-leading quantum-computing company. CEO Forest (Nick Offerman, Parks & Recreation) started Amaya with a clear vision unbeknownst to most employees after the death of his young daughter (hence the company name), and now he employs the best talent he can find no matter the cost or the unorthodoxy involved. Staff includes folks like former political-security-vet-turned-chief-of-security, Kenton (Zach Grenier), devs both young and old like teen-ish Lyndon (Cailee Spaeny) and maybe-old-boomer Stewart (Stephen McKinley Henderson), and Lily's talented Russian boyfriend Sergei (Karl Glusman).

Things get moving when Sergei gets some big news. After demonstrating an algorithm able to predict the movements of a simple yet living organism several seconds into the future, he's promoted immediately to Amaya's devs team. Most Silicon Valley companies have a devs team, of course, but at Amaya this is the absolute cream of the crop—and the team remains a mystery to all unworthy of the office. Whereas most of Amaya sits in modern architecture among a beautiful Northern Californian forest, the devs' facility is a decent distance from the rest of the campus. Its foreboding, highly secured design makes it look like a hybrid of Fort Knox and the Parthenon. (The production design of this facility is a highlight; it's over-the-top, indulgent, and looks like a temple, which subtly emphasizes the importance of what's happening and how team members should revere this project.) When Sergei gets invited, he immediately accepts—but he can't tell anyone anything about the process or work, including Lily.

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