Everyone loves a good mystery. Detective series like Sherlock or Dark Winds present the characters with a case to be solved and have them jump through a few hoops before arriving at the answer. It’s a formula that’s repeated again and again, because it works.

And then there are some shows where the mysteries aren’t meant to be solved, where every answer leads to more questions, and which leave you with your head spinning. These mind-bending series can stick with you for much longer, and one of the best has gone deeply underappreciated.

Devs is the best-kept secret on Hulu

I can’t believe how many people haven’t watched!

Devs introduces us to Lily (Sonoya Mizuno), a software engineer working at a cutting-edge tech company called Amaya. She is dating Sergei (Karl Glusman), a fellow engineer who gets recruited into Amaya’s ultra-secret Devs program. But once he vanishes into the Devs building, he never comes out. Lily sets out to find out what happens, and learns far more than she bargained for.

On one level, Devs is a thriller. We learn that Sergei was performing corporate espionage, which makes the show feel like a spy drama. Kenton (Zach Grenier), the head of security at Amaya, is willing to go to shocking lengths to protect whatever secrets they’re hiding. Lily has a history of mental illness and drug use, which makes us wonder if everything she says can be trusted.

These layers are all entertaining, but at its core, Devs is a mind-bender of a show that will have you questioning your own reality.

Eventually, we learn what exactly Devs is working on (this is your last chance to avoid spoilers): a powerful computer that has modeled reality in such minute detail that it can predict anything that is ever going to happen, or rewind time to show the user what something was like 10, 1000, or one billion years in the past. Everything, after all, operates on the laws of physics, from the outcome of a coin flip to the firing of neurons in your brain. If you can model everything, you can predict everything, perfectly. It throws a major wrench into the idea of free will, and if it gets out, it could destabilize the entire world.

There are plenty of things to compare Devs to

But it’s in a class of its own

There are other surprises we’ll leave it to you to discover, although we should mention that Parks and Recreation veteran Nick Offerman turns in a fantastic performance as Forest, the fatalistic CEO of Amaya who will probably have you thinking of some of our real-world tech titans as you watch.

There is a long history of shows and movies like Devs, media where a big part of the appeal is that it will blow your brain out of the back of your head. The Matrix movies did this in the late ’90s and early 2000s, positing that we’re all living in a computer simulation controlled by sentient machines who use us as batteries. The Matrix was also a power fantasy, because we naturally followed the one character who was special enough to break through the simulation and reclaim his free will.

Devs is grimmer than that. It’s more like Severance, an Apple TV show set in the bowels of a massive office building run by the mysterious Lumon Industries. Like Amaya in Devs, Lumon has created technology that calls into question some of the fundamental assumptions that human beings make about themselves and their places in the world. The difference is that in Devs, the technology feels uncomfortably plausible.

Devs is the perfect show for the age of generative AI

It offers no easy answers

We’re living in an age of what feels like technical marvels. Just a few years ago, it would have been unthinkable for most people to write a paper or create a webpage by entering a prompt into ChatGPT or Claude and then letting the program take care of it. Today, it’s becoming commonplace. Pundits predict the end of work as we know it, and even AI researchers warn that the technology has a decent chance of wiping out humanity within the next several years.

With generative AI seemingly on the brink of recursive self-improvement, it’s hard to know exactly what it might be capable of down the line. Could it get so good that it could model the universe in such detail that human beings are forced to confront the fact that our choices aren’t our own? That, as Forest says, “The sense that you are participating in life was only ever an illusion”? What might that do to our own sense of ourselves?

Alex Garland has been ahead of the game for years

Devs produces an uneasy feeling about the advancement of technology and then doesn’t tell us what to do with it, which I think reflects how a lot of people are feeling about generative AI these days. We don’t know what to do yet, but shows like Devs can help us sort through how we feel about it.

Devs’ creator, Alex Garland, has been making content on this level for years now. He also made Ex Machina, a terrific movie that directly addresses the advent of AI. Next up, he’s going to trade in sci-fi for fantasy by writing and directing a movie based on the tremendously popular video game Elden Ring. Rest assured, he’ll be blowing our minds for years to come.