FX has revealed a trailer and premiere date for Devs, an original TV show from Ex Machina and Annihilation director Alex Garland. An eight-part limited series, Devs stars Sonoya Mizuno (Garland’s frequent collaborator) as Lily, a software engineer who investigates her mysterious employer (Nick Offerman), believing him to be responsible for her boyfriend’s murder. She and Offerman are joined in the cast by Alison Pill (The Newsroom), Cailee Spaeny (Bad Times at the El Royale), and Stephen McKinley Henderson (Fences) in smaller roles, along with Jin Ha as Lily’s ex-boyfriend Jamie. Behind the camera, Garland wrote and directed all eight episodes, in addition to executive producing.
There hasn’t been a whole lot of marketing for Devs so far, outside of its panel at New York Comic-Con last fall. FX did release a handful of images and a teaser online in conjunction with NYCC, but refrained from setting its premiere date at the time. Now, with the 2020 Television Critics Association press tour well underway, FX has unveiled both a launch time and full trailer for Devs, as part of its announcement for its upcoming programming slate.
The Devs trailer is now online, and it confirms the show will premiere this year on Thursday, March 5. You can check it out in the space below.
Those who’re hoping to gain some insight on Devs’ plot from the trailer are out of luck. This preview is much more of a tone-setter than anything else, hinting at the truth about Offerman’s Forest and his secret Devs program without actually explaining anything. But to be honest, it’s kind of refreshing. Part of the fun of Ex Machina and Annihilation was getting to follow their main characters as they, too, investigated the mysteries at the heart of those films and gradually unfurled the truth. There are even some surface-level parallels between Devs and those movies. Ex Machina also revolved around a reclusive CEO with a large beard and elusive intentions (as played memorably by Oscar Isaac), while Annihilation followed Natalie Portman’s scientist as she set out to discover what happened to her husband (also Isaac) after entering an anomalous zone known as The Shimmer.
After those films and Dredd (which Karl Urban claims he directed, despite being credited as a writer only), Garland has amassed enough goodwill for his fans to trust whatever secrets Devs is sitting on will be worth the journey in the end. He’s never directed a television series before, so it will be interesting to see if the long-form narrative style either benefits or detracts from his typical slow-burn approach. Keeping that in mind: Garland is the sort of storyteller who seems to do best when left to his own devices, so a network like FX (the home of creative-driven shows such as Atlanta and Fargo) may prove to be the perfect place for Devs to call home.
Devs premieres Thursday, March 5 on FX on Hulu.
Source: FX Networks
