Sam Vincent and his writing partner Jonathan Brackley make room for difficult science fiction in ordinary family life. Humans is worth following for that discomfort, though its familiar thriller plot is less interesting than the people caught in it.
Fi1m perspective
In Humans (2015), artificial people are useful around the house, and the people they serve would prefer not to think too hard about them. Sam Vincent and Jonathan Brackley put the question of personhood among the routines of family life, where admitting that a servant deserves sympathy might mean having to change your habits. We were unsettled by the humans’ willingness to carry on being served rather than consider what they owed those serving them. That discomfort is the series’ strongest reason to watch.
Vincent’s long collaboration with Brackley began in television comedy sketches in the mid-2000s. They moved into drama with episodes of Spooks from 2009, becoming head writers for its ninth and tenth series. They wrote the feature Spooks: The Greater Good (2015), while Humans brought their storytelling into family homes that same year; the crime thriller Better followed in 2023. In Humans, we can see the usefulness and the limits of that interest in suspense: a running mystery keeps the story moving, but the household is where the harder questions arise.
Adapted from the Swedish series Real Humans, Humans gives its ensemble time through serialised rather than self-contained stories. That is a sensible choice for writing concerned with how people come to depend on technology: we need room to notice what they have begun to take for granted. The performances make the questions about work and personhood worth following, even when the thriller becomes familiar. Machines being denied the sympathy afforded to their makers is not a new subject. The sharper writing concerns the people who find that arrangement convenient.
Brackley and Vincent divide and edit their work to maintain a consistent voice, so assigning particular strengths to either writer would be guesswork. What we value in their work together is the attention to ordinary people who have something uncomfortable to acknowledge. We would happily spend longer with those families and less time attending to the mysteries. Start with Humans if a familiar thriller will not spoil an evening of thoughtful science fiction.
Biography
Sam Vincent is a British television writer and producer. He frequently collaborates with Jonathan Brackley; the pair met at school in London in the 1990s and began writing comedy sketches before moving into drama.
They contributed episodes to Spooks (2002) and served as head writers on its final two series. In 2015 they wrote the feature film Spooks: The Greater Good. Vincent and Brackley created the science-fiction series Humans (2015–2018), an adaptation of the Swedish drama Real Humans, which aired on Channel 4 and AMC. They later created the crime drama Better (2023) for BBC One.
Vincent has also received writing credits on series including Hotel Babylon (2009) and has worked as an executive producer on Humans and Better.
