- Network: FOX
- Series Premiere Date: Oct 6, 2020
Critic Reviews
- Critic score
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- By date
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Slattery is fine in this bland AI thriller.
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Despite its timely trappings, Next works best as an empty-calorie thriller, with plot points that only hold together if you don’t think about them too much.
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“Next” finds smart ways to illustrate the full breadth of neXt’s capabilities. ... In these moments, “Next” becomes a surprisingly effective horror thriller, with each episode finding new ways to convey just how catastrophic this technology could be. It’s a shame, then, that “Next” isn’t this streamlined throughout. In its attempts to flesh out the world and characters it’s portraying, the show keeps throwing in more complications and backstory that threaten to swallow the rest of the stories whole.
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The plotting is similar to “Little Shop of Horrors.” Just sub in a digital assistant for the talking plant (and remove songs). When the concept gets stretched to become a series, it loses steam fast.
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Slattery’s presence makes it a watchable mess.
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If it's a crazy artificial intelligence series you're looking for, hunt down Person of Interest, which at least figured a way to give its maniacal machine a personality and relatable decision making progress. Next is too much artificial, not enough intelligence.
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Ultimately, when it’s not deadly dull, “Next” just doesn’t make sense.
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The best thing I can say about NEXT is that it moves breathlessly, building momentum in 24 fashion. ... By the time the series gets to its third or fourth episodes, the writers seem to have run out of ways to make inanimate objects scary and the bad guys are people basically brainwashed by the AI into going after our heroes. ... Nothing here is smart enough to stick. It's a distraction cosplaying as prescient.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 6 out of 11
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Mixed: 4 out of 11
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Negative: 1 out of 11
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Oct 14, 2020