Exclusive Interview: Humans’ Sam Vincent & Jonathan Brackley

PREMIUM: Writers Sam Vincent and Jonathan Brackley discuss how the relationship between the Synths and humans is a jumping-off point for exploring the impact of technology on society in Humans. 

TV DRAMA: When did you first become involved in the project, and what appealed to you about the topic?
BRACKLEY: We first came to the project three or four years ago. We had done a lot of work for Kudos, the production company that makes the show here in the U.K. We wrote the last two series of Spooks, their show for the BBC. And we also wrote the Spooks movie for them. Jane Featherstone, the chief of Kudos at the time, came to us and said they had acquired the rights to remake the Swedish show Äkta människor, which was about robots in a contemporary world. She asked if we were interested. We said, absolutely! When we watched the original show, it was so full of fascinating ideas. The central conceit of the show was this clever idea that creator Lars Lundström came up with, which was to set it in a world that is identical to ours; we call it a parallel present. The show was set [in today’s] world, and the humanoids, the robots, had been invented ten or so years ago. That created a really smart way into the show for the audience. We’ve gone for a broader audience because of that, possibly an audience that wouldn’t have come to a sci-fi show, in addition to sci-fi fans.

TV DRAMA: How much did you remain faithful to the Swedish version, and what changes did you feel you had to make for your audience?
VINCENT: If you watched the first episode of ours and the first episode of the original, you’d see a lot of similarities. Most of the characters have their counterparts, and it’s quite clear who they are. The story begins and moves in the same direction. We loved the original and saw areas we thought we could do more with, and we weren’t so interested in other areas. And the natural effect of that is that as seasons one goes on, it diverges more and more from the original material as it takes on its own identity. For example, for the character of Niska, who works as a sex worker in a Synth brothel, there was a character like her in the original, but she didn’t have the same story. We were interested in actually seeing what it would be like for a conscious Synth to be trapped in that situation. [Our show] branches off [in a new direction], so the second season is almost entirely different in every way from the Swedish original, it just became its own thing.

TV DRAMA: What are some of the themes you wanted to explore? I would imagine one is our dependence on and our ambivalence toward technology. We love it and fear it.
VINCENT: You are completely on track. It’s really interesting how we are increasingly reliant on technology for every aspect of our lives, and [how there is a lack of distance between us and our devices]. Perhaps the reason we as a culture are so fascinated by that barrier now is that our emotional lives are increasingly entwined with or carried out on our technology, be it social media, public profiles or dating sites. All these things are becoming increasingly intimate, so it makes a lot of sense to do a story about how intimate we have become with our technology as it becomes ever more humanlike and ever more able to understand us, even as we, conversely, become less able to understand it.

TV DRAMA: We’ve come a long way from Rosie in The Jetsons, haven’t we? That’s the first thing that came to mind when I watched the first episode of Humans.
VINCENT: Yes, we’re a little ways away from that now! But the principles are the same. It is just is one of those topics that is endlessly fascinating and never left alone for long by popular culture and popular fiction; particularly at this moment, it is really engaging people. Luckily for us, we’ve come along at the right time.

TV DRAMA: How do you share the writing process?
BRACKLEY: Sam and I worked together on the outline and the arc for the whole season. Then we developed that with our production team here and with our fellow executive producers, and then we brought in other writers. On both seasons we’ve had other writers. Sam and I write the majority of the episodes together. We have had other writers, and they contribute to the character arcs and story lines and then they will go away and write the episodes. Sam and I will always story line our episodes together. Then we will divide up the episode into different parts, go away and write those parts, and then swap and edit each other’s work. We continue that way until the episode is done.

TV DRAMA: And you’ve been writing together for a long time, haven’t you?
BRACKLEY: We have. We first wrote something together in 2006, 2007. We worked in comedy when we first started writing. We wrote a lot of comedy sketches for late-night TV shows in the U.K. that no one ever watched! And eventually we wrote a comedy feature film together, which didn’t get made, but still it opened a few doors for us. We got our first prime-time writing credit on a show called Hotel Babylon. We moved on to Spooks after that and carried on from there.

TV DRAMA: The Synths have very specific body and eye movements. Did the actors playing Synths need a bit of training to learn those?
BRACKLEY: They did. We knew from the very beginning that we’d have to work out a physical grammar for the way the Synths moved, to distinguish them from humans. So we contacted a dance company here in the U.K. called Frantic Assembly, and one of their choreographers, Dan O’Neill, developed with the actors a way to work out exactly how these machines would move. It’s all largely based on efficiency, because if these Synths did exist, they would use an enormous amount of battery energy and wouldn’t want to waste any of that. So their movements would be very precise, very graceful and they’d always be taking the shortest route to any action. All our actors were sent to “Synth school” with Dan to learn how to move. They are all experts in that now, and they have all done it again in the second season.

TV DRAMA: Do you think the world depicted in Humans is not too far away from the one we are living in now?
BRACKLEY: What we’ve found, with new stories appearing in the press daily, is that this world is a lot closer than we think. When we were writing the first season, we did a fair amount of research on the topic. For the second season, we were lucky enough to be able to talk to a guy named Demis Hassabis, who is the CEO and founder of a Google company called DeepMind. The people at DeepMind are the world’s leading artificial intelligence experts and are at the forefront of this technology. I don’t know if you read about their work with the Japanese board game Go at the beginning of the year. It’s a notoriously hard board game for humans to play, and no artificial intelligence program had ever been able to beat a human at it, largely because there are so many potential moves in the game that you can’t use brute-force programming to work out every possibility. There is a lot of intuition involved, and it was always a holy grail for artificial intelligence scientists to build something that could beat a human. Finally, at the beginning of the year, Demis’s colleagues at DeepMind did that and beat the world champion several times. It’s fascinating to see what’s possible.

TV DRAMA: Where does season two of Humans pick up, and what did you seek to explore in it?
BRACKLEY: At the end of the first season, we see our Synth family heading off into the wide world. They are splintered slightly because Niska heads off to do her own thing, and then Vera, Max and Leo go off to find their own way in the world, leaving the Hawkins family back in London. We pick up the show three months after the events of the first season, and the world has moved on a bit. We see that Synths are being integrated deeper into society and penetrating further into our lives. And we pick up with our Synth family—I don’t want to give away too much because there are lots of potential spoilers here! They are out there still fighting, still clandestine, trying to find their place in the world. We will also pick up with the Hawkins family, who are trying to start their lives afresh having been involved in this exciting story with the Synth family. They are finding that it’s hard to move on, bereft as they are without their Synth friends.

TV DRAMA: So the humans appreciate the Synths more, and the Synths are developing feelings.
VINCENT: That is very much a part of the show—exploring what it means for the Synths to feel, if they can feel. And more than anything, we’re exploring what it means for us—how we as humans react to seeing Synths develop the ability to think and feel just like we do.