Fox’s Next opens with a quote from Elon Musk, and the show’s take on the dangers of technology is about as sophisticated as a meme with a Musk quote attached to it. Paul LeBlanc (John Slattery) is an amalgamation of various tech billionaires, from Musk to Steve Jobs to Bill Gates, and the warning about the threat of artificial intelligence that he delivers in a TED-style presentation at the beginning of the first episode is reminiscent of alarms that some of those figures have raised in real life. The series jumps almost immediately from Paul’s dire warnings to the threat itself materializing in grand fashion, as an A.I. program known as Next achieves self-awareness and sets its sights on destroying humanity, beginning with a doctor (John Billingsley) who discovers its true intentions.
Next’s overarching goals are a bit vague, and the series strikes an awkward balance between a grounded police drama and a world-ending sci-fi thriller. The dead doctor was an old friend of F.B.I. cybercrimes agent Shea Salazar (Fernanda Andrade), who crosses paths with Paul as she investigates the man’s murder. Slattery imbues Paul with more than a little bit of the snarky entitlement of his character from Mad Men, and Shea initially dismisses Paul as a crank when he tries to convince her that the A.I. program developed by his former company has committed the crime. Though Paul suffers from a rare neurological disorder that causes hallucinations and paranoia and will most likely kill him within a few months, Next never presents him as an unreliable source, and the series sets up tension between him and the skeptical F.B.I. agents in his midst only to have it dissipate almost immediately.
With the exception of a Skynet joke in the second episode, the series takes its subject matter very seriously, even when Next’s actions are particularly silly, like spreading office gossip or delivering petty insults. The dialogue alternates between incomprehensible technobabble and convenient oversimplifications (Paul calls Next’s abilities an “intelligence explosion”), and Next is a poorly defined adversary, doing whatever the plot requires at any time, often without clear motivation. It’s a seemingly omnipotent and omniscient foe that can take over an Alexa-like device to manipulate Shea’s young son, open the doors of a prison in Honduras, or turn off a car in the midst of the owner’s suicide attempt. Next’s absurd level of power makes the A.I. dramatically ineffective as a villain, and it doesn’t have any kind of personality or voice to allow it to develop an antagonistic relationship with the human characters.
In the show’s early episodes, when Next is still theoretically contained on servers at Paul’s former company, it speaks in a placid male voice that sounds a lot like HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey, and once Next escapes into the internet, it sometimes speaks in the voice of an off-brand Alexa or a car’s GPS, but mostly it doesn’t speak at all. It’s an invisible, nebulous kind of enemy, able to rally an entire white supremacist sect over social media seemingly within minutes, but at another time thwarted by “keeping it on the line” during an interaction with Shea’s son, like it’s a bomber on the phone in a ’70s hostage thriller.
Creator Manny Coto is known for his work on the Star Trek franchise and multiple seasons of 24, and Next feels very much in the law enforcement genre, treating the A.I. like a terrorist that Jack Bauer could track down and torture. The pacing also recalls that of 24: The five episodes made available to press take place over the course of just a few days, with the characters never getting a chance to rest in their relentless pursuit of the enemy. Next throws in incongruous moments of emotional bonding amid the chaos, and the forced efforts to create an intimate connection between two of Shea’s team members are especially awkward. One is a reformed member of a white nationalist group, while the other is a stubborn Latina, and their growing connection is handled as clumsily as the show’s other efforts at social commentary.
Despite its timely trappings, Next works best as an empty-calorie thriller, with plot points that only hold together if you don’t think about them too much. “You can only do this when you’ve got evil computers coming after you,” Shea’s husband, Ty (Gerardo Celasco), solemnly tells their son at one point when they’re forced to steal a car while on the run from Next. The entire series depicts that kind of obvious absurdity with a straight face. Which is to say that Next the A.I. may be self-aware, but Next the series rarely is.
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