Humans · Season 1 · Episode 1 · 14 June 2015
S1E1 Episode 1
THE MOMENT Anita's eyes in the kitchen at night - the moment the show commits to the idea that this is not a horror story but something harder to classify.
The premiere builds the Synth world in the background while keeping the foreground domestic and recognisable: a family buying an android helper and discovering that the product they purchased is more than the catalogue described. The show's restraint in its pilot is its biggest early achievement - it does not rush to declare what it is, letting the uncanny accumulate.
Full episode analysis below. Spoiler-light verdict above.
Updated
Humans premiered June 14, 2015 on Channel 4 to 5.4 million viewers - the highest-rated new drama on Channel 4 that year - earning an 89-percent Rotten Tomatoes score from 62 critics who found the show's restraint its defining achievement. The Hollywood Reporter called it 'a keeper.' The premiere builds the Synth world in the background while keeping the foreground domestic and recognisable, letting the uncanny accumulate without announcing itself as horror or science fiction. Gemma Chan's Anita, the Synth whose eyes at night are the episode's decisive image, establishes the show's philosophical question through a performance of managed stillness that the episode does not explain or underline. Jonathan Brackley and Sam Vincent's adaptation from the Swedish series Real Humans transferred the premise without losing its intimacy, and the Channel 4 broadcast numbers confirmed an audience that found the material both accessible and genuinely unsettling.