In What’s Next? The Future With Bill Gates, the former CEO of Microsoft takes a look at various aspects of humanity’s future and how currently emerging tech will affect those aspects, both for good and bad. He’s not just there in name only, or just provides some perfunctory narration. We see him meeting with the most influential people in tech, and he interviews many of the experts in each episode.

Opening Shot: Bill Gates approaches the camera, introduces himself and says, “This is a show about our future.”

The Gist: The first episode is entitled “What AI Can Do For Us/To Us,” and the duality of the title is indicative of just where we are with artificial intelligence in 2024. Gates, as well as the show’s producers (Morgan Neville and Caitrin Rogers are the show’s toplined EPs) speak to a number of people that are involved in the development of AI software, like OpenAI’s founder Greg Brockman. They also talk to experts who study the technology like Dr. Fei-Fei Li of Stanford University. Kevin Roose, a technology reporter for The New York Times, is interviewed about the story he wrote when Bing’s AI chatbot told him it wanted to be alive and that he should leave his wife.

Gates also speaks to James Cameron, who likens how we’re dealing with the warnings about AI to what happened to the Titanic. But he also co-wrote The Terminator, the uber-tale of AI out of control, way back in the early 1980s, so he is actually a good person to talk top about this. He admits to Gates that he takes the more dystopian view of the technology, which balances out Gates’ more optimistic view, which examines how it will help humanity if deployed correctly.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? This series reminds us of PBS’s A Brief History Of The Future or docuseries like Cosmos.

Our Take: As one might expect, Bill Gates is rather bullish on the potential of how technology can help humanity rather than hurt it, and he brings that point of view to What’s Next?. The first episode, about AI, is a good example of one that concentrates more on the technology’s potential than its pitfalls.

The other episodes in the series talk about the preponderance of conspiracy theories, the ability of technology to help us slow climate change, the potential of combating communicable diseases with technology, and the implications of the income gap. Given the fact that Gates is heavily involved in this series, there are plenty of famous faces interviewed amongst the experts, like Lady Gaga, Bono, Senators Bernie Sanders and Mitt Romney, Dr. Anthony Fauci and more.

We hope that there’s a bit more balance in these other episodes. The one on AI touched on the very real negative affects that we’re already seeing with regards to the technology, like job loss, potential human isolation and situations where the technology is abused for personal gain. But it felt like those downfalls were mentioned briefly but not deeply examined.

Listen, we get it: Even something like AI, that has the potential to be everything that we fear it can be, can also have very positive effects on humanity. We just wish the negative and the positive were given equal weight.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: Under AI-generated scenes, Gates discusses what humanity’s purpose will be if AI eventually does all the work we used to do on a daily basis. That’s yet another issue we wish was explored more.

Sleeper Star: We thought it was funny when Roose asked for an AI-generated overlay of a more handsome version of himself, and the producers obliged, with a graphic that said “Hot Kevin Roose”.

Most Pilot-y Line: We get the feeling that if James Cameron didn’t get enough black beans on his Chipotle burrito, he’d equate it to some aspect of the Titanic.

Our Call: STREAM IT. What’s Next? The Future With Bill Gates is informative, and Gates and the producers speak to an impressive array of experts and A-listers. But we wish it had a bit more of a wary eye about its subjects.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.