By ANDY GILCHRIST
It’s a fact that The Chronicle has stated several times, but Hollywood seems to ignore: There are too many cop dramas on television. They’re all the same, with only the quirks of the main detectives making a show any different from the rest. In a sea of police procedurals, it takes something truly off the wall to make such a show stand out. But if the concept is too daring and different for audiences to understand, the show will be dead on arrival.
Fox’s newest cop show, Almost Human, has managed to make a successful cop drama by not only making the setting different, but realizing that the characters are more important than the special effects. Truly unique characters, played by very talented actors, make the show instantly something to pay attention to. But it is the future setting and often hard science fiction that makes the show one of the most promising, and easily the most fun, new show on television.
The first episode opens over 30 years in the future, with John Kennix (Karl Urban), an LAPD detective, being seriously injured in a shootout. Nearly a year and a half later, John returns to the force with a bionic leg, despite protests from his captain. In the time John has been gone, a new mandate requires every human police officer to be partnered with an android partner due to crime levels rising at uncontrollable rates. John refuses, having lost his last partner, and leg, due to a robot’s actions.
Enter Dorian (Michael Ealy). An older and flawed model of robot, Dorian has been decommissioned and is set to be transferred to NASA to build spaceships. Seeing an opportunity to connect two mismatched lone wolfs, Captain Sandra Maldonado (Lili Taylor) recommissions Dorian and pairs him with John. Though both initially hate each other, their strengths complement each other perfectly, making them future Los Angeles’ best cops.
The show comes from some of the most talented people in genre television. Made by much of the same crew that worked on Fox’s cult sci-fi show Fringe, the series is produced by the same company that produced Alias and Lost, and is currently working on Person of Interest and Revolution. If nothing else, the people behind the camera have a solid track record that bodes well for the series.
But first off, it is not the first story to put a detective in a science fiction setting. Sci-fi novels from the genre’s golden age of the 1950s regularly paired up these genres, to varying degrees of success. But no one has ever done it better than Blade Runner, the classic 1982 film about a retired detective brought back to hunt down rogue robots in 2019 LA. The show pays tribute to Blade Runner in many respects, most notably in Kennix’s love of noodles, a favorite of Blade Runner’s Rick Deckard.
Almost Human doesn’t break any new ground in the genre, but it isn’t trying to. It merely takes the best parts of the sci-fi cop show and presents the best versions of them. Gadgets, specifically, are a must for any show in this genre, and the show doesn’t disappoint. Androids are obviously at the forefront, but robotic limbs, devices that can superimpose another face digitally over your own, and bombs that can wipe all DNA from the blast zone are used as well.
Another aspect of the futurist parts of the show that works well is that the world still resembles our own in many ways. The cars may look sleeker, but at least they still have wheels. And guns may have been replaced by blasters, but at least they still resemble modern weapons. While technological advances are happening at an incredible rate in our time, just because Apple puts out a new iPhone ever year doesn’t mean we’ll all be getting teleporters and be meeting aliens for coffee in a few decades. By advancing the world realistically, the show allows the viewers to take a sci-fi show a bit more seriously.
But as stated above, it is the performances that make this show a must-watch. While each character starts off as a common cliché, each actor gives more than is simply on the page.
John Kennix could easily just have been a cynical, gravel-voiced, Dirty Harry-esque cop, and by casting Dredd’s Karl Urban, it appears as though that was initially the intention. But Urban brings a sense of humor to the character, making him someone ready to riff with his partner, but who will pull his gun at a moment’s notice. Similarly, Michael Ealy’s Dorian is unlike any android seen in recent memory. Instead of overacting the robotic aspects of the character, Ealy moves freely about a scene and talks like a normal person with tech-based abilities, with the exception of referring to every character as “man.”
Together, these two work perfectly off each other. While Kennix’s jaded cop and Dorian’s level-headed robot do recall such classic buddy cop pairings as Lethal Weapon’s Martin Riggs and Roger Murtaugh, the show actually switches the expectation. It is the experienced Kennix who can be the hothead, while “rookie” Dorian is more mature. But like all great buddy cop duos, they work together perfectly while also learning how to be better cops and people from each other.
Almost Human started off with a strong pilot and has only gotten better in the two episodes that have aired as of this writing. In a fall season that has seen all sorts of hits and misses, Almost Human has risen to the top and is doing its best not just to take the title of best new show, but to stake its claim as one of TV’s best sci-fi shows.
