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Lily Chan (Sonoya Mizuno, who was Oscar Isaac’s dance partner in “Ex Machina”) is a software engineer at a company called Amaya, run by the mysterious Forest (Nick Offerman). Amaya is like any number of Silicon Valley companies trying to do something that the rest of the competition in the tech sector isn’t even considering. There’s an elite branch of Amaya called “Devs,” and Lily’s boyfriend Sergei (Karl Glusman) is basically promoted to that exclusive department in the premiere. He goes to work in Devs, meeting fellow elites like the mysterious Katie (Alison Pill) and kindly Stewart (Stephen McKinley Henderson), but only after a serious grilling by security head Kenton (Zach Grenier). After his first day in Devs, Sergei disappears, and the show becomes Lily’s story, trying to figure out what exactly happened to her boyfriend and how it's related to what they do in Devs.

We know the answer to the first question when it happens but the exact nature of the tech research in Devs unfolds slowly, dominating the mystery of the first half of the season. And it does so in a manner that feels more like a ‘70s conspiracy thriller than a traditional sci-fi film. There are covert meetings with dangerous people under bridges and in parking garages, and bursts of shocking violence in “Devs.” Garland has a storytelling model and Lily is cut from the same cloth as Domhnall Gleeson’s character in “Ex Machina” and Natalie Portman’s in “Annihilation,” the observer who then changes what’s being observed. He’s fascinated by human interaction with technology but not in a cold, observant way. There’s a push and pull between individuality and determinism in all of his work, and he digs deep into how systems are shaped by human input, need, and emotion.

Clearly, there’s a lot to chew on in “Devs,” but some of the performances can feel a bit overly familiar. Offerman gets better but starts the season as a bit of a tech messiah archetype that we’ve seen before. He’s a character meant to hold so many secrets as to his purpose in the first few episodes that his mysterious nature almost tends to parody. Similarly, Mizuno feels like a blank slate early in the season but she’s asked to do a lot in the back half of the year and she ultimately worked for me. What I liked most about the cast of “Devs” is how much Garland chose to work with a very tight ensemble. A lot of creators think high-concept TV means dozens of arcs, subplots, and speaking roles—“Westworld” often fell victim to this—but “Devs” is comparatively focused, allowing Garland, who wrote and directed every episode, to really sketch out each of his speaking roles into interesting characters.

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