Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Next’ On Fox, Where John Slattery Tries To Stop The AI That He Developed From Destroying The World

You know the phrase (which we’ve used more than once) that says “[Actor’s name] is so good, I’d watch [him/her] read the phone book”? John Slattery is one of those actors; even before he starred as Roger Sterling on Mad Men, he was known for a meticulous approach that came off as a casual affect that has been extremely effective. When he’s given a part that plays to those strengths, he usually hits it out of the park. But would you watch Slattery do his thing in a show where he’s good and everyone/everything around him is… not so good? Read on for more…

NEXT: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: “Stanford University. Six months ago.” A man is giving a lecture about how the developers of the atomic bomb didn’t know whether their creation would ignite the atmosphere and kill all life on earth, even when the A-bomb was deployed at the end of World War II.

The Gist: The man doing the lecture is Paul Leblanc (John Slattery), who co-founded the Silicon Valley company Zava with his brother Ted (Jason Butler Harner). Ted fired his brother when Paul started raising caution flags about the AI the company was developing; the lecture is about how AI code, if left unchecked, can destroy mankind.

Six months later, a man in Portland named Weiss (John Billingsley) is seemingly paranoically escaping something, turning of his phone and looking for paper maps. Yet surveillance cameras follow him around, and a car that went into self-drive mode T-bones his, sending him to the ICU. He later dies mysteriously.

FBI Special Agent Shea Salazar (Fernanda Andrade), to whom Dr. Weiss was a father figure, finds Paul’s address in Weiss’ car and has him come to the bureau. She shows a video Weiss shot of weird code that he found on multiple domains. Paul figures out that it’s his code; it’s the AI he wrote before being fired. It’s self-learning, so that it learns to rewrite itself faster and faster with every iteration. Even though she’s wrapping up a massive sex trafficking case, Paul convinces Salazar to go with him to Zava’s Palo Alto headquarters and talk to his brother Ted.

There, Salazar and Paul meet NEXT, the digital assistant that will use the AI code to be more robust than Siri, Google or Alexa. But, as we find out that Paul has a sleep disorder that will kill him in months, and gives him delusions and hallucinations, Salazar finds out that one of the NEXT team’s developers filled the AI’s request to have a router connected to its server farm so it could escape the “box” it was in. In exchange, NEXT gave the developer gambling tips to help him get out of debt.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Next has a bit of a Person Of Interest vibe, where there’s going to be a case of the week that has to do with how the AI Paul developed is running amok. The AI here is more out of control than in Interest, but it’s still driving the action.

Our Take: If Next, created by Manny Coto (Dexter), didn’t have Slattery at its center, it would be a pretty awful show. But Slattery’s presence makes it a watchable mess. There’s a reason why this show is a holdover from Fox’s 2019-20 fall slate, despite the presence of the Emmy-nominated Mad Men star. Its “technology is evil” message is delivered with the subtlety of a smack upside the head, and there are some parts of the first episode that left us a bit flummoxed, not the least of which was some pretty head-smackingly dumb dialogue.

But Slattery… man, he can take the stiffest-seeming dialogue and make it sound natural and part of his character. As Paul LeBlanc, he is playing Roger Sterling-style arrogant prick — when NEXT’s project leader tells him to stop using a condescending tone with him, he says, “Well, that’s my only tone” — but when he tells Salazar about his disorder and how he’s making sure that his daughter doesn’t have it, he throws “ums” and looks and hesitations in to make the monologue his own.

It’s the only part of the first episode that feels credible. We have Salazar’s team, including a convicted hacker named CM (Michael Mosley), who recognizes that the FBI’s servers are getting hacked, but didn’t have any plan in place to protect the data from the trafficking case. Then there’s Salazar’s husband Ty (Gerardo Celasco), who’s trying to keep their son Ethan (Evan Whitten) from being bullied; it seems that “Alicia,” the family’s digital assistant has gone rogue and persuaded Ethan to grab his father’s gun for revenge. All of that feels flat to the point of being cartoonish; there’s not much there to establish any of these characters in a way that you want to do anything but roll your eyes at.

Then there’s Andrade as Salazar. There are times where she seems to be a decent agent and there are others where she does things that make you throw up your hands (see the “Most Pilot-y Line” section below). Even though she’s not an IT expert, she somehow has to tell Ted and his lead developer that the self-destructing subroutine Paul told NEXT to execute didn’t work because it’s too smart to execute it. You’d think that explanation would go the other way, but Salazar goes from good agent to AI programmer in two seconds. Those kinds of jumps strain the show’s credibility past the point where we want to watch. That being said, she and Slattery do make a good team, so perhaps some of that will be toned down in the subsequent episodes.

Sex and Skin: Nothing.

Parting Shot: Having been given the code to his dad’s safe by Alicia, Ethan reaches up and finds his father’s gun. That’ll show those bullies what’s what!

Sleeper Star: We’ll give this to Dann Fink for doing the creepy voice of NEXT. It’s not HAL creepy, but it’s pretty damn close.

Most Pilot-y Line: Jaw shaking with rage, Salazar stares down NEXT’s camera and demands that he restore the FBI’s files. “Or I’m going to burn this place to the ground,” she says. And when it keeps saying it doesn’t understand, she says, “I know you’re in there. Do you hear me?” as if the computer’s response is going to change at all.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Next is definitely salvaged by the presence of Slattery, but there’s not enough going on outside of his presence to recommend the show.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.

Stream Next On Fox.com