Alex Garland's Devs Trailer Reveals Nick Offerman Like You've Never Seen Him

Prepare to enter the void -- er, the vacuum. FX has revealed the first trailer for Devs, an ambitious science-fiction series from Ex Machina and Annihilation writer-director Alex Garland, and it's every bit as mind-blowing as fans of his films might expect from the celebrated auteur.

The eight-episode drama follows a software developer named Lily Chan (Sonoya Mizuno) as she investigates the secretive organization at her company, headed by a shadowy figure named Forest (Nick Offerman), which she believes is responsible for the death of her boyfriend, Sergei (Karl Glusman). The plot is not quite so simple, however, as the show dives deep into high philosophical concepts -- particularly determinism and its relationship to technology. It's a subject that Garland studied for 10 to 15 years before he felt "comfortable" enough to develop this series.

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"I think when I came across the idea of determinism some time ago ... initially I thought, well that's an interesting idea that we don't have free will, and that, in a sense, if you had a powerful enough prediction machine, you could predict what you are about to do," he explained during Thursday's FX TCA winter press tour, adding that he didn't want to "reduce [the concepts] to sound bites."

Garland went on to say that by approaching Devs from a television format -- his first experience with the medium -- he gained the "freedom" to address such heavy material without having to cram it into the confines of a narrower theatrical run time. As the trailer's vibrant new footage proves, turning the story into a TV show also gives Garland's fans much more of his signature exquisite imagery to savor along the way.

Devs premieres exclusively on FX on Hulu on Thursday, March 5.

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