Better than us shows a world where robots do the most basic human tasks, to the point that the government is considering lowering the retirement age to forty. That future, close enough to touch, starts demanding more: bots that are more empathetic, more capable, more free. And if defending that freedom means taking a human life, what then?
From the first minute the series makes its position clear: special effects are not the point. The atmosphere is. What matters here is not the big scene but the small detail, the everyday life of a society where humans and bots live together in every corner.
This is exactly where the Swedish Real humans was strong, in that social reading of the future, and the two stories start in a very similar place. Where the Swedish series was thin, the Russian one is precise. Russians do not speculate halfway; they go to the end. Real humans was a social democracy of an almost immediate future with empty sets behind it. Better than us is closer to the cyberpunk we already live in: everything is coherent, everything has a soul, especially the ugly objects.
If you like science fiction that talks about people without saying the word, watch it. And if you want another angle on the same idea, start with Real humans.
Keep reading: Real humans, 3% and what cyberpunk actually means.
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