Humans (2015 TV Series) - Episode 1 Review

"I'm watching you."
"I'm watching you too Laura - you're right in front of me."

With those words, many Channel 4 viewers had shivers down their spines. Channel 4 has been advertising their new drama series Humans for quite a few weeks now with a rather interesting marketing campaign. With many teasers featured in the adverts, its difficult at first not to confuse the TV spots with actual technology ads - in turn making the synths feel almost real.
Add some eerie full length trailers to the teasers and suddenly you're intrigued. I didn't know what to expect from Humans, its certainly not Channel 4's typical kind of drama - and I can't say whether it will last long, look at Utopia - but maybe its that its so unique for British Television that quite a lot of people did tune in for it.
The first episode had over 4 million viewers tuning in - a lot of people for any series (Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell on BBC One had 1.8 million), particularly a Channel 4 one. It certainly seems to have caught peoples' attention, including my own.
Artificial intelligence is a fascinating concept in Science Fiction, being something that can take up hours and hours of a film or television series to just scratch the surface of the themes and ideas writers could play on. The philosophical concepts are by far the most fascinating, and the ones that Humans likes to focus on. In fact, the episode ends with a scientist explaining that making robots feel is impossible because we don't even understand how we feel. The first episode constantly begs the question of what is human and what is robot, and it'll be interesting to see explored in future episodes.
The story follows three main threads: a family buying a synthetic called Anita; an old man and his own synth trying to relive old memories, which seem to be being forgotten by the both of them; and a mysterious character (played by Merlin's Colin Morgan) trying to find his synths, ones he believes can feel emotions.
Its not exactly light entertainment by any stretch of the imagination, but is certainly fascinating to watch. To see such flawed human individuals compared to these almost impeccable synths is a fascinating examination of humanity as a species. The science fiction real-world concept of the synths replacing human jobs is eerily plausible and realistic to the point where all this could happen in a few decades' time.
The acting was good all round, but the standouts for me were the actors playing the synths - the creepy green eyes, the scarily smooth body movements and the subtle voice modulation all made them feel so real as robots. They moved and spoke as one would imagine a synthetic to do, and the complete blankness of them made all the more terrifying.
I can't say much for the story and characters as of yet, as it all felt very much like set-up, but with an intriguing premise, a perplexing cliffhanger and some fascinating directions to go down, Humans is something I'll be coming back to next week. 8/10