“Synth” is a word that sounds friendly. That is the point. In Humans, the must-have gadget for any busy family is a robotic servant so close to a real person that owning one stops feeling like buying a machine and starts feeling like hiring help. Channel 4 and AMC debuted the series on 14 June 2015, and its eight-episode first series ran to 2 August. Jonathan Brackley and Sam Vincent created it, working from the Swedish drama Real Humans, and the show they built is less interested in whether the robots will rise up than in what it costs a household to keep one in the kitchen.
Trailer, via AcornMediaUS.
Anita Moves Into the Hawkins House
The Hawkins family is the entry point. Katherine Parkinson plays Laura Hawkins, Tom Goodman-Hill plays Joe Hawkins, and their children are Mattie (Lucy Carless), Toby (Theo Stevenson) and Sophie (Pixie Davies). Into that house comes Anita, played by Gemma Chan — a synth bought to lighten the load of work, school runs and everything else a busy family never gets to finish.
The premise is a parallel present, not a far future. Synths are already marketed, already common, already ordinary enough to be a household purchase. That choice does the heavy lifting. Humans does not ask the audience to imagine the technology arriving. It asks what happens once it has arrived and nobody agrees on what it is.
Gemma Chan Plays Two People in One Face
Anita is not only Anita. Chan also plays Mia, and the split between the two is the series’ best piece of casting. Colin Morgan plays Leo Elster, a young man tied to synths in ways the first episodes only hint at. Emily Berrington plays Niska, Ruth Bradley plays DI Karen Voss, and Ivanno Jeremiah plays Max. Ukweli Roach plays Anatole, and Billy Jenkins plays Seraph, also called Sam.
These characters carry the show’s other half: synths who are awake, aware, or somewhere on the road between. The series treats consciousness as a question without a clean answer. Mind uploading, superintelligence and the laws of robotics all get their turn, but they arrive through people arguing in rooms rather than through lectures.
Eight Episodes a Series, Three Series Total
Humans ran three series and 24 episodes. The second, again eight episodes, aired in the UK between 30 October and 18 December 2016. A third was commissioned in March 2017 and aired eight episodes between 17 May and 5 July 2018. In May 2019, Channel 4 announced the series had been cancelled.
That is a tidy run by the standards of science fiction television, and an unfinished one by the standards of its own ideas. The show built a world with laws, markets and a product line, then stopped.
The Domestic Arguments Are the Real Ones
The best material in Humans is domestic. A synth in the house changes who does the work, who gets credit for it, and who is allowed to resent it. Laura’s return to her job, Joe’s unease, Mattie’s suspicion — these are small conflicts, and the show knows they are the real ones. The genre furniture is there to make the family arguments sharper, not to replace them.
It helps that the cast is deep. Parkinson plays exhaustion without making it a joke. Chan has to hold two people inside one face, and she does it. Goodman-Hill gets the least glamorous role and makes it count. Berrington and Morgan carry the harder, more exposed material, and the show gives them enough room to be strange.
The weakness is pacing. Eight episodes is a short order, and Humans spends several of them setting pieces on the board. When the story finally moves, it moves well. Getting there can feel like waiting for a synth to finish a sentence.
What Humans Scores and Why
Humans scores 7.6 out of 10. That is the right number for a show that is smarter than most of its genre peers and slower than it needs to be. The premise is strong, the cast is stronger, and the writing treats artificial intelligence as a social fact rather than a special effect. Brackley and Vincent built something that holds up.
What holds it back is ambition without enough episodes to spend. Three series and 24 episodes is not a lot of room for a story about consciousness, personhood and the laws of robotics, and the show keeps opening doors it does not walk through. The cancellation in May 2019 left those doors open. That is the honest complaint.
The Numbers
- Title: Humans
- Created by: Jonathan Brackley and Sam Vincent
- Based on: Real Humans, a Swedish science fiction drama
- Networks: Channel 4 (UK) and AMC (US)
- Produced by: Channel 4 and Kudos in the UK, AMC in the US
- First aired: 14 June 2015
- Series 1: 8 episodes, 14 June to 2 August 2015
- Series 2: 8 episodes, 30 October to 18 December 2016
- Series 3: 8 episodes, 17 May to 5 July 2018
- Total: 3 series, 24 episodes
- Cancelled: announced by Channel 4 in May 2019
- Genres: Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Drama, Mystery
- Metacritic: 76/100
- Score: 7.6/10
The show’s real subject was never the robots. It was the household — who carries the work, who gets to be tired, and what a family will accept in exchange for a little help. Humans asked that question early, asked it well, and never got the episodes it needed to answer it.
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