From Devs to Star Trek: Picard to Westworld: Why is science fiction TV so awful?

Entertainment Weekly

"What intrigues me is the common plot thread between all these divergent series: godlike technology run amok," says Darren Franich. "Westworld and Picard back into identical sagas about vengeful synthetic life. The former's noirish reboot in season 3 relegates great characters like Thandie Newton's Maeve behind bland tycoons controlled by a nefarious orb. That supercomputer sees everything — just like the device in Devs, which peers across time and space. Brave New World adds its own omniscient artificial intelligence to the 1932 source material. And Picard's finale climaxes with genocidal time-traveling megamachines. Actually, that's the second straight neo-Trek season to end with bad robots. Last year, Discovery stared down an all-powerful security system: Skynet for Starfleet, basically. Meanwhile, ambient techno-paranoia informs the new Twilight Zone's mood. In the season 2 episode 'You May Also Like,' iPhone-ish device anticipation becomes a spiritual fixation in a colorless world. I get it: We are all scared of phones, and bots, and the Algorithm. Yet by demonizing technology, these projects oddly exonerate the people behind that technology. CEOs with tragic origin stories in Westworld or Devs are puppets for machines they can't control. Higher-tech powers in Brave New World and 'You May Also Like' control whole civilizations comprised of unaware humans."