快猫短视频

Osmosis
Netflix

WOULD you trust a tech company to find your soulmate? Say that all you had to do was swallow a pill full of nanorobots that would scan your brain and implant a talking AI in your head, which would then show you the face of your one true love when you close your eyes. Would you do it? I wouldn鈥檛.

That means I wouldn鈥檛 be a great beta tester for Osmosis, the start-up at the centre of the , which is produced by Netflix. But the fictional company has no trouble finding people to sign up. There is Ana, who is unlucky in love, Lucas, who is in a committed relationship but can鈥檛 stop wondering if his ex-boyfriend was the one, and Niels, a 17-year-old boy struggling with sex addiction and hoping true love will fix his problems.

In the near-future Paris in which the show is set, people are more disconnected than ever. The streets are mostly empty, and we learn that many people spend huge amounts of time in a virtual reality where they can hang out, date and have sex with avatars they will never meet in real life. The most dystopian part of the show is that, with little resistance, people have largely ceded their minds and bodies to technology.

The beta testers take a chance on Osmosis, full of hope that won鈥檛 last the show鈥檚 eight episodes. Of course, this kind of technology goes wrong. How many times have CEOs of tech companies promised a new app or medicine to solve all our problems, vowing to remove the inconvenience of everything from shopping to traffic to ageing? And how many times has that actually worked out?

鈥淏oil love down to a black box computation and you miss out on its unruly nature, and its attraction鈥�

The CEOs here are Paul and Esther, siblings who stumbled upon the soulmate tech when Esther was developing ways of waking Paul from a coma. He awoke to the face of a woman he didn鈥檛 know floating behind his eyes, who he then found and married. Thus, Osmosis was born.

Like Netflix鈥檚 recent hit Maniac and episodes of Black Mirror, Osmosis explores the folly of trying to use an algorithm to find something as alchemical as love.

The scenes that resonate the most are those of Ana, Lucas and Niels falling in love. We see the tender and nervous moments of a first love, the reckless joy of young love, the relief of requited love 鈥� but these instants are fleeting.

If I had one request for the series, it would be to spend more time with these characters. All of their stories reveal the truth that the company is missing: love is messy. If you sand the edges off and boil love down to some black box computation that spits out an answer, you miss out on its unruly nature, and its attraction.

Osmosis suffers from trying to pack too many thrills into too few episodes 鈥� there鈥檚 a kidnapping, an activist mole trying to infiltrate the company, police using the implants to track the beta testers, and behaviour that strains believability.

When Paul and Esther鈥檚 mother also slips into a coma, there is a lot about Esther鈥檚 attempts to wake her up, including taking steps without the knowledge or consent of the beta testers that cross the boundaries of their privacy and autonomy. Here, Paul and Esther are both so cartoonishly selfish that it is hard to care about them.

The show is refreshing in one key way: it doesn鈥檛 lay the blame for the problems on the shoulders of tech. It is the disastrously amoral megalomaniacs running the company who are at fault.

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Chelsea Whyte is a reporter for 快猫短视频, based in Boston, Massachusetts.
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