Peacock has released the first full trailer for Damon Lindelof (The leftovers) and that of Tara Hernandez (Young Sheldon) upcoming sci-fi thriller series Mrs. Davis on Tuesday and all we can say is hell yes; that’s more like it. After the first, boring teaser released earlier this month, this new trailer offers a much closer look at the bizarre and eerie world of a luddie nun who simultaneously wages war against and on behalf of a ubiquitous artificial intelligence. This trailer finally does justice to the premise of the series.
As this new trailer covers, and as we wrote about the first teaser last week, Mrs. Davis Betty Gilpin (The hunt) as Sister Simone of Reno, a nun increasingly disillusioned with a world mediated by an all-too-familiar artificial intelligence that, like Richard Brautigan’s 1967 poem, rules all of humanity like a machine of loving grace.
When Simone is repeatedly approached by messengers from Ms. Davis to accept a “Quest” to find the “Holy Grail” – presumably the AI’s servers – she embarks on a journey that crosses paths with Wiley (Jake McDorman) . Wiley, her ex-boyfriend, now fights against the algorithm as a resistance leader.
As Simone explores the world in search of the “Grail,” she’s faced with the kind of big questions you’d expect from a show produced by the man behind Lost And The leftovers. Namely, which side is she on? Real fighting for? What is Ms. Davis’ ultimate intention? And would the world as a whole really be better off if Mrs. Davis stopped pulling the strings?
It’s a fascinating set-up for a sci-fi thriller series, one that falls somewhere equidistant between the high-concept storytelling of West world, Made for loveAnd Suspect and the irreverent’20 minutes in the futureLindelof’s context Guardians and that of Patrick Somerville Maniac. Owen Harris, who directed the critically acclaimed Black Mirror episode ‘San Junipero’ and the first two episodes of Peacock’s TV adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s Brave new worldwill serve as an executive director on the series and direct the first episode.
Given all the recent talk about the proliferation of AI art generators and “Deep Fake” technology — which has only become more ubiquitous, ethically alarming, and legally fraught over the past year — Lindelof and Hernandez’s series couldn’t have landed at a better time. .
Still, the biggest question remains: Can Mrs. Davis secure the landing, like that guy on that motorbike jumping through that giant donut? We’ll just have to wait. The first four episodes of Mrs. Davis premieres April 20 on Peacock.
