Devs Came 5 Years Too Early
Alex Garland’s spooky, techy mystery was ahead of its time.
Imagine a show focusing on a young man starting a new job at a mysterious tech company, working for a department shrouded in high levels of security. At first, the job seems normal (if a little off) but eventually, it becomes clear that there’s a greater mystery involved centering around that man’s significant other. Also, the series is directed by a prestigious filmmaker best known for movies, and stars a Parks and Recreation actor stretching their dramatic muscles.
You’re thinking of Severance, right? But this also describes a underrated and way under-remembered FX on Hulu series from an acclaimed director that took the mystery box series to new heights, even if it premiered at the worst possible time.
The entire feel of Devs is ghostly and creepy in the best way possible.
Devs follows Lily (Sonoya Mizuno), a young tech worker with a 9-5 job at tech conglomerate Amaya. Her boyfriend Sergei (Karl Glusman) gets a job in Amaya’s secretive “Devs” program, a department so secluded the entire office is deep in the forest and enclosed in a Faraday cage. Sergei doesn’t know what exactly he’s working on in Devs, but Amaya CEO Forest (Nick Offerman) assures him he’ll “figure it out.” But when Sergei mysteriously disappears, Lily tries to find the true purpose of Devs and realizes it’s far more complex than she would ever realize.
Devs was written and directed by Annihilation and Ex Machina’s Alex Garland, and that tone drips throughout. The show’s entire vibe can be described as “haunting” and “atmospheric,” full of desaturated colors and a minimalist style. The lighting especially is incredibly well-crafted, from the fluorescent halo-like rings to the gold haze of the Devs office.
The secret weapon of Devs is its lighting design.
Adding to that “prestigey” feeling is the star-studded supporting cast. Stephen McKinley Henderson plays, as ever, a wise voice of reason, Allison Pill plays the designer of Devs itself, and Cailee Spaeney plays a Devs technician. The world may be distant from our own, and the worldbuilding can get abstract, but each character feels fully-formed, their own North Star in a confusing world.
The plot may be meandering like late-stage Westworld, but at the heart of Devs is a desire to use technology to feel control and comfort. It’s not a spoiler to reveal that the very title of the series is misleading: it’s not “Devs” like short for “developers,” it’s “DEVS” like “deus,” Latin for “god.” These workers aren’t just trying to push the envelope of what AI technology is capable of — they’re literally playing God.
So if Devs is so similar to Severance, why didn’t it reach the same level of success? The answer probably lies in just poor timing. This series about a strange workplace premiered just as people stopped going to their own workplaces, and its themes of chaos and entropy may have struck a little close to home when it felt like the world was falling apart. But five years on, Devs feels like a 2025 series unstuck in time, from its abstract premise, to its almost surreal ending.
