On the surface, Almost Human seems to scratch an itch the many interchangeable supernatural procedural shows of recent vintage can’t: it brings the promise of dystopian sci-fi adventures and talking robots… how could it lose?
Well, by being about as bland and personality-free as one might imagine. Almost Human‘s first two episodes might look pretty with its fancy camera angles and expensive effects, but it’s a show that’s all plot and no characters – just a lot of pretty white faces running around talking about vague conspiracies and a syndicate that the show admits is faceless and nameless, just kind of exists to do bad shit to other people. And those people aren’t interesting at all, lead by a frustratingly over-the-top performance from Karl Urban as the Angsty Authority-Resisting White Male Dealing With Personal Trauma (named John Kennex), a character that’s as fill-in-the-blanks as they get.
When we meet John, he’s having a bad day at work, an event that unravels into the series’ big conspiracy as the first two episodes walk us through the connect-the-dots storytelling – complete with two female characters who exist solely to glance lustily after John, and fill our ears with expositional info-dumps connecting the crime-of-the-week to whatever narrative the show needs it to fit to. You know the formula: our protagonists find a crime scene, get a bunch of info from women who know their place in the office, then go downstairs to see the creepy, weird science guy for more info dumps, then the white guy saves the day. That’s the formula here – and Almost Human takes the whiteness a step farther by making the black character literally a slave to the government and the cop he works with, despite the illusion of him having “emotions” or being “different” than any of the other androids.
By the time Almost Human‘s gone through the explosions and poor world-building of the pilot (the entire world is built in the opening voiceover… that’s all there is to it in these first two episodes), the shadowy Syndicate (what a horrible, horrible name) and/or sexbots (I’m not kidding… the second episode is about a sexbot peddler) are defeated for the day, and White Cop and Black Robot exchange smiles, signifying that they’ve connected on some level (over what… who really knows, they just kind of start getting along, even though John hates androids, even his own synthetic leg). They act proud of themselves for the accomplishments they didn’t need any help along the way getting (they don’t even bother thanking their co-workers, though it’s pretty clear John will be sleeping with one of them in the near future), and move on to the next day, another bullet-riddled adventure where robots act just weird enough that one cop notices but none of the five billion other people in the planet do (because he’s “special”, which of course the pilot shoves in our face with some lazy dialogue).
In other words, don’t be fooled: there’s nothing about Almost Human that’s different or bold in any way, shape, or form. One solid Michael Ealy performance as said robot cop can’t save this show: at the end of the day, making our most important emotional connection with a robot isn’t going to make for good drama (even if those robots can be “killed”, as the show makes a point to show us numerous times). The show never digs into the interesting aspects of its premise: who is making these robots – and why have they become so corrupted? In fact, why is every single technological item in the future less secure than anything we have now (with a little elbow grease, a few Syndicate thugs shut down every android in the precinct)? What happened to regular people in the future (and why are cars still pretty much the same, if every other piece of technology has developed at such a rapid rate we “can’t keep up with it anymore”)?
But I digress: take a half second and mute the loud noises and simple dialogue Almost Human throws your way, and try to find one real unique trait about it – I certainly couldn’t. Another crime-of-the-week drama filled cookie cutter characters and fill-in-the-blanks plots (not to mention the vague overarching “conspiracy”, which involves John’s girlfriend we never actually meet): nothing interesting to see here.