A nun makes a deal with an all-powerful algorithm: find the Holy Grail, and the machine turns itself off.
That’s the pitch for Mrs. Davis, and it’s the kind of thing that either wins you over in a single sentence or sends you running. Three years on, most people never found out which.
The 2023 sci-fi class was stacked, and this one got buried
Think about what came out that year. Apple TV gave us Silo. The Star Wars franchise branched out again with Ahsoka. The Last of Us arrived with its first season and turned a video game adaptation into appointment television. Foundation and Loki both returned for second seasons.
Science fiction keeps dominating the entertainment industry, and 2023 was no exception. A lot of those projects are still going. Most are still being talked about.
Mrs. Davis isn’t, and that’s the part that stings.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth about the way we remember TV: a show can post excellent viewership, rack up high critic and audience scores, and still slip out of the conversation within a couple of years. You might remember it. I remember it. That doesn’t mean anyone’s bringing it up.
What you actually signed up for
The series premiered April 20, 2023 on Peacock. Eight episodes, created by Tara Hernandez and Damon Lindelof, starring Betty Gilpin, Jake McDorman and Andy McQueen.
Gilpin plays Sister Simone, a floundering nun. Not the traditional sci-fi protagonist, and the show knows it, which is why it spends no time apologizing for the choice and gets straight to justifying it.
Simone’s world starts coming apart as humanity grows dependent on an artificial intelligence called Mrs. Davis. The algorithm takes a specific interest in her, routing messages through various users to make contact. Eventually a reluctant deal gets struck. She hunts down the Holy Grail. Mrs. Davis shuts herself down.
Dystopian sci-fi comedy is a narrow lane. This one drives down the middle of it at speed.
The numbers say people who watched it agreed
Shows this strange usually split the room. Critics love them and audiences bail, or the reverse. Mrs. Davis somehow avoided both fates, holding a 92% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes with the audience score close behind at 80%.
That gap is small. Suspiciously small, for a comedy that puts a devoted nun with a complicated past against a world-dominating artificial intelligence and expects you to take the emotional stakes seriously.
Eight episodes. That's the whole thing. A weekend, if you’re motivated.
Somewhere in there, a woman in a habit is negotiating with software for the fate of humanity, and she means every word of it.
