Chicago-made Fox series ‘neXt’ explores real-world tech fears

Inside gleaming rows of sleek, sterile-looking servers twinkling with lights, a sinister artificial intelligence called neXt lurks in plain sight. It plays dumb in front of its programmers, innocently answering questions like Alexa or Siri might, all the while covertly plotting against humanity.

Its server bank brain under the harsh fluorescent lighting is ostensibly housed at the Silicon Valley headquarters of billion-dollar tech corporation Zava.

But in the real world on a cold February day, it’s surrounded by a bustling mass of crew members, production assistants and reporters in the middle of a massive soundstage at Cinespace Chicago Film Studios on the West Side, where Fox’s upcoming sci-fi thriller “neXt” was shot from October 2019 to March 2020.

The series, which premieres at 8 p.m. Tuesday on WFLD-Channel 32, centers on the titular rogue AI rapidly growing smarter and more dangerous as it uses global surveillance, social engineering and an internet-connected world to turn people against one another and eliminate anyone who stands in its way.

The AI’s creator, tech pioneer Paul LeBlanc (John Slattery, “Mad Men”), teams up with FBI Special Agent Shea Salazar (Fernanda Andrade, “The Devil Inside”) and her cybercrime team in an effort to get neXt under control before it’s too late.

Fox

Showrunner Manny Coto, who previously worked on “24” and “Dexter,” got the idea for the series one morning after his son said he didn’t get much sleep because an Alexa unit started talking to him in the middle of the night. The family couldn’t figure out whether they’d accidentally set an alarm or if the device turned on without being prompted.

“The incident with my son was just a little creepy and kind of had echoes of a classic ghost story with modern technology,” Coto said. “You know, the parent puts the child to bed, closes the door and then hears the child talking to somebody who’s not supposed to be there, and that’s what this felt like to me.”

He was also interested in warnings from real-life tech figures like Bill Gates and Elon Musk about the dangers an advanced AI could pose to humanity’s future.

“If a superintelligence did become smart, it probably would not, like in the movies, launch missiles and build robots, it would probably play dumb, because it would not want to be discovered,” Coto said. “Right there was the kind of nugget for a series, because if it did want to play dumb, if it didn’t want to be discovered, what would it do if someone did discover it? If it immediately perceived them as a threat, we now have an entity that’s actually coming after you, but it wants to do it in such a way so as not to be discovered.”

The series sees neXt using devious, indirect methods to attack victims, including deactivating network-connected hospital equipment or hacking self-driving cars and traffic lights to cause crashes. Anything with a camera, microphone or internet connection can be weaponized.

neXt also befriends and manipulates Salazar’s son, Ethan (Evan Whitten, “Mr. Robot”), by talking to him through a smart speaker in the family’s home when his parents aren’t around.

“It’s something that we can all really feel an attachment to, because we all have these things that are at our disposal, whether it’s Siri on our phones or Google Home or whatever you call them, and these smart speakers are in our home,” said Gerardo Celasco (“How to Get Away With Murder”), who plays Salazar’s husband, Ty. “Most families that have kids and have these speakers are gonna watch that scene and just be like, ‘We should really reconsider.’ ”

Despite the disturbing effects of real-world technology in the show, Slattery said working on the series hasn’t changed his relationship with the tech he uses in his own life.

“It’s one of those things that you get scared about when you hear one of those simple analogies or those stories, but then you go right back to your phone and you go right back to your computer,” Slattery said. “And it’s probably being watched, I mean every time I have a conversation, you know, you get ads the next day, 50 ads the next day for whatever you were talking about. So I don’t know. I don’t live in fear of AI, but I probably should.”

Originally slated for a spring release, the series was pushed back to the fall to keep it from getting “lost in the shuffle” amid widespread shutdowns and disruptions caused by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, Coto told the Sun-Times in May.

While the series is set in Portland and the Pacific Northwest, it was shot primarily at Cinespace, with an AT&T campus in Hoffman Estates standing in for an FBI office and some exterior shots filmed throughout Chicago and the suburbs.

Coto credits the local crew and production staff with making the show special and said he hopes to work here again if the series gets renewed.

“This was the best production I’ve worked on” he said. “God willing, if the show got a second season, I would certainly want to go back. I think Chicago just made the show.”

Who’s who in ‘neXt’

WHO’S WHO ON ‘NEXT’

Fox

Paul LeBlanc (John Slattery) is the brilliant, volatile, socially maladjusted tech pioneer who created neXt. He was forced out of his company, Zava, after realizing the danger neXt posed and trying to shut the project down. He suffers from a degenerative brain disorder that prevents him from sleeping, causes hallucinations and makes him irritable and paranoid.

“He’s not a people person,” Slattery said. “So he’s had his head in some kind of tech his whole life, that’s where he succeeded, that’s where his passion was, so it wasn’t in a social setting, and you know, that gets multiplied.”

Fox

Special Agent Shea Salazar (Fernanda Andrade) leads an FBI cybercrime unit and stumbles upon LeBlanc and neXt while looking into the mysterious death of her old mentor.

“She’s the youngest agent to have her own unit in the FBI and when you meet her she has just lost somebody very dear to her in a kind of sketchy situation,” Andrade said. “So when she goes to investigate it, it leads her to Paul LeBlanc. … They’re wildly different people. They somehow need each other and complement each other in strange ways, and I think they ultimately become a good team.”

Fox

Ty Salazar (Gerardo Celasco) is Shea’s husband, who has been laid off from his job and stays home raising their young son, Ethan.

“Ultimately he becomes a huge protector for his wife and his son, especially his son,” Celasco said. “So because of the AI that’s technically affecting all of our lives, he really has to be in charge of making sure that his son is taken care of because it not only affects the older characters of the show, but I mean, he’s being targeted as well.”

Fox

Ethan Salazar (Evan Whitten) is Shea and Ty’s young son, who is targeted by neXt through an Alexa-like smart speaker in the family’s home.

Fox

Ted LeBlanc (Jason Butler Harner) is Paul’s short-sighted younger brother, who takes over Zava after Paul is forced out and continues the neXt project.

“I think Ted definitely loves and is concerned about his brother’s mental health because there’s a precedent of mental illness that’s happening with Paul,” Harner said. “And also he’s trying to save the business, and sometimes Ted’s more fragile ego can get the better of him because he’s had to do so much cleaning up for Paul.”

Fox

Abby LeBlanc (Elizabeth Cappuccino) is Paul’s daughter. They have a troubled, distant relationship, and she gets along better with her uncle, Ted.

“I am like this emotional Achilles heel for Paul,” Cappuccino said. “But we have sort of an estranged relationship, and I feel much closer to my uncle than to him, so you can watch how that plays out in the season and just how the dynamic shifts in that sort of familial triangle.”

Fox

Gina (Eve Harlow) is a high-strung data analyst with Salazar’s cybercrime unit. “What I liked about this character, actually, is that she’s a very, like, vivacious, kind of spunky character, which you wouldn’t necessarily associate with someone who is an FBI data analyst,” Harlow said.

Fox

CM (Michael Mosley) is a brilliant hacker who got arrested and started working with Salazar’s FBI cybercrime team as part of his probation. He wears an electronic monitoring ankle bracelet and is mistrusted by some of his colleagues, including Gina, who dislikes him because of his previous associations with a hate group.

“He used to be kind of like a white nationalist and maybe even a little on the domestic terrorism spectrum, and I think he started to kind of back away from that mode of thinking,” Mosley said.

Fox

Ben (Aaron Clifton Moten) is a computer analyst with the FBI cybercrime team, whom the show’s producers describe as a “straitlaced, buttoned-up hard worker, who is boring to the point of being interesting.”

Luke Wilusz