THE SKED 2013 UPFRONTS: FOX Trailer – “Almost Human”

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In FOX’s new line-up, ALMOST HUMAN will take over the Monday 8PM slot from Bones post-baseball, then serve as lead-in to first Sleepy Hollow and then The Following.  It hails from Bad Robot, JJ Abrams’s mecca of genre TV and movies, and the Fringe connection is even stronger, because it’s written by J.H. Wyman, who was showrunner of Fringe for several seasons.  Here’s the trailer.

Maybe FOX’s promo department is just really skilled at cutting together trailers, but this looks like it could be a hit.  The mismatched buddy-cop genre is so familiar that it’s already been used for pairings where one cop isn’t human (Alien Nation, with Mandy Patinkin as the unearthly cop, and of course RoboCop), but this version seems fairly crisp and accomplished.  Karl Urban is the real-person cop, and Michael Ealy (who, ironically enough, just got off a terrible buddy cop show of his own where both the partners were biological, USA’s Common Law) is the cyborg–but for reasons that will no doubt be duly explained, unlike the other robots, he’s been programmed with emotions.  The production values look extraordinarily strong (although of course pilots have much larger budgets than regular episodes), and the supporting cast includes Lili Taylor, of all people, as the pair”s boss.  The key, though, will be the bantering/bonding relationship between Urban and Ealy, and that seems promising enough to keep the Bones audience around when that show moves to Fridays.