Better Than Us

Silicon Hearts, Moscow Shadows

When I think about Better Than Us, I don’t think first of the murder mystery, though that’s the engine that gets the thing moving. I think of hands. latestnetflix.com's read is that a robot’s carefully calibrated hand hovering a little too long before a touch.

A human hand pulling back from a machine as if from a bad memory. In a series about artificial people living among us, the real drama is in those tiny distances — the half-inch of hesitation that says more than a monologue ever could.

Andrey Dzhunkovskiy’s 2018 series arrived in a familiar science-fiction moment, one we’ve been living in for years now: the age of polite robots, useful robots, threatening robots, emotionally convenient robots. But this one doesn’t come from Silicon Valley futurism or the chrome optimism of Western techno-thrillers. It’s rooted in Moscow, and that matters.

The city isn’t a sleek laboratory for innovation; it’s a cold administrative maze, full of concrete, surveillance, exhaustion, and the kind of bureaucratic air that makes every advance feel like it’s already been filed, stamped, and compromised. The show was produced as a Russian original for Netflix, which gave it a broader international life than many viewers may realize. That global distribution also changed the conversation around it: people came to see whether Russia could stage a high-end prestige sci-fi series without simply copying American templates.

My answer is mostly yes — and sometimes better, because the series understands that futurity doesn’t erase old social habits. It just gives them new bodies.

What’s striking is how little the series trusts clean progress. The robots here are efficient, attractive, and unnervingly calm, but they’re also introduced into a society that already knows how to rank people by utility. That’s the show’s sharpest idea, and maybe its most uncomfortable one.

The central question isn’t whether machines can pass for humans. It’s whether humans, already trained to treat each other as functions, are even sure they want to know the difference. I’m not entirely sure the series always pushes that thought as far as it could — the plotting can be a bit dutiful, and by midseason it occasionally falls back on the familiar gears of chases, secrets, and procedural revelations — but the premise keeps reasserting itself in visual form.

Robots are everywhere, yet the feeling of alienation belongs, stubbornly, to the humans.

Kirill Käro, as Georgy, gives the show its most persuasive center of gravity. He’s an actor who often seems to be thinking two seconds ahead of the line he’s saying, and that quality works beautifully here. Georgy is a forensic specialist, which means he lives in the company of evidence, fragments, and dead time — the sort of person who knows that truth usually arrives in damaged pieces.