Fans are understandably less excited about the Fall TV season thanks to all of the filming delays and lack of original series. Fox is here to save the day, and fight the battle against rogue artificial intelligence. Fans got to learn more about the upcoming thriller, Next during Comic-Con@Home this year. Before the panel was even released, we got a look at the trailer:
Sort of makes you wonder about your smart speaker, doesn’t it? In all seriousness, to me this show stands out quite a bit from the re-treads and reality programming that the Fall TV season looks to be bringing across the board. It’s somewhat necessary due to the pandemic, but it looks like we have at least one exciting series to look forward to.
Looking at the rest of the synopsis: “Silicon Valley pioneer PAUL LEBLANC (Emmy Award nominee John Slattery, “Mad Men,” “Veep”) built a fortune and legacy on the world-changing innovations he dreamed up, while ignoring and alienating the people around him, including his own daughter, ABBY (Elizabeth Cappucino, “Jessica Jones,” “Deception”), and his short-sighted younger brother, TED (Jason Butler Harner, “Ozark,” “Ray Donovan”), who now runs Paul’s company. After discovering that one of his own creations – a powerful artificial intelligence called neXt – might spell doom for humankind, Paul tried to shutter the project, only to be kicked out of the company by his own brother, leaving him with nothing but mounting dread about the fate of the world.
When a series of unsettling tech mishaps points to a potential worldwide crisis, LeBlanc joins forces with Special Agent SHEA SALAZAR (Fernanda Andrade, “The First,” “Here and Now”). Having escaped crime, poverty and a deadly criminal father to remake herself as a force for good, Salazar’s strict moral code and sense of duty have earned her the respect of her team – a talented but contentious group held together by her faith in their ability to defy expectations and transcend their differences, including GINA (Eve Harlow, “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.,” “Heroes Reborn”), a high-strung cybercrime agent; BEN (Aaron Moten, “Disjointed,” “Mozart in the Jungle”), a straight-laced, buttoned-up hard worker, who is boring to the point of being interesting; and CM (Michael Mosley, “Ozark,” “Seven Seconds”), an ex-con hacker with a genius IQ. But the demands of Shea’s challenging job have taken their toll on her home life, where Salazar’s young son, OWEN (Evan Whitten, THE RESIDENT, “Mr. Robot”), has been raised primarily by his father, TY (Gerardo Celasco, “How to Get Away with Murder,” “The Haves and the Have Nots”), a recovering alcoholic.
Now, LeBlanc and Salazar are the only ones standing in the way of a potential global catastrophe, fighting an emergent superintelligence that, instead of launching missiles, will deploy the immense knowledge it has gleaned from the data all around us to recruit allies, turn people against each other and eliminate obstacles to its own survival and growth.”
Thats much more information than we usually get going into a new series. This comes from creator Manny Coto (“24: Legacy”), who will also be one of the show’s executive producers. John Requa and Glenn Ficarra (“This Is Us”) are also executive producers and will also direct.
If you want to see the full Comic-Con panel, go here. Next premieres Tuesday, October 6 at 9pm ET on Fox.
Photo Credit: Fox