by Jesus Ibarra

From the creators of Fringe, comes Almost Human a show set in 2048 where science and technology has advanced so far that crime has risen to unmanageable rates, forcing police officers to be paired up with lifelike combat androids. Part police drama and part science fiction, Almost Human stars Karl Urban as a gruff Detective John Kennex, who is forced to pair up with a discontinued model of androids who were created to be as human as possible and known as DRN’s. Michael Ealy has the incredibly hard job of portraying Kennex’s android partner, Dorian.

Like Fringe before, this show takes a view that science and technology will advance at such a rate that we will begin to see deleterious effects in society. Unfortunately, this show is much heavier on the procedural aspects than Fringe, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The pilot, although incredibly cliché, gives the back story of Kennex and properly introduces Dorian as the android partner.

I’ll start by highlighting the good aspects of the show, now that is has aired about five episodes. The production values are amazing, so much so that it really does look like the near future. All the special effects are spectacular, and one of the great things is how readily attention is paid to little things like how holograms would be used in court to protect a witness, artificial hearts and limbs and police tape being holographic. Probably the best thing is the two leads chemistry. Michael Ealy and Karl Urban have great chemistry that gives their interactions authenticity, but still highlights the fact that Ealy portrays an android.

The last great strength of this show is its focus on futuristic crimes. It uses great ideas from science and technology to create some great crimes/crime scenes that again feel as though this takes place in the future. My two only real big complaints are that Fox decided to air the episodes out of order, so we missed out on some character development because the characters shifted a lot from the pilot to the second episode.

The other aspect I have a problem with, is so far the three big question marks from the pilots have yet to be answered or even addressed, which feels strange considering all three play heavily into the lead characters. Aside from these two problems, the show is actually pretty good, so I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend this to sci-fi and procedural fans.

You can watch episodes on the show website.

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Jesus Ibarra is 21 years old; with a love of all media, he’s always on the lookout for the best finds. You can read more of his reviews on his website.