Photo Illustration by Erin O’Flynn/The Daily Beast/FX
Shows don’t come timelier than Class of ’09, an eight-part FX on Hulu drama, premiering May 10, that concerns the potential benefits and pitfalls of artificial intelligence—including the moral questions it raises and the ramifications it may have on the human workforce. Arriving as companies such as IBM are opting to not hire new workers for positions that will be replaced by A.I. in the coming few years, it’s a limited series with its finger so firmly and urgently on the pulse of our present (and future) reality that its fiction plays not as pure make-believe but, rather, as a vision of a possible tomorrow.
Better yet, Tom Rob Smith’s show has more going for it than just prescience. Set during a trio of time periods, it focuses on four individuals struggling to figure out (and define) who they are while simultaneously navigating a law enforcement system dedicated to identifying threats to the public. A
ll three of these strands are intertwined in various narrative and thematic ways, highlighting the ethical and practical dilemmas that drove characters to embark on their respective courses, and exposing the fundamental means by which the personal affects the professional—and, as a result, the national. Inventively conceived and deftly executed, it’s a crime saga that comes across a modernized, multi-layered spin on Philip K. Dick’s (and Steven Spielberg’s) Minority Report.