Devs (2020)

Devs

Devs is Alex Garland's eight-episode FX on Hulu miniseries from 2020, written and directed entirely by Garland. Sonoya Mizuno plays Lily Chan, a software engineer investigating the secretive Devs division of the quantum-computing company Amaya - run by Nick Offerman's Forest - after her boyfriend Sergei vanishes on his first day inside. (IMDb)

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Casio F91WM-9A

Worn by Nick Offerman as Forest. Forest, a billionaire who has stopped performing wealth, wears a gold-toned Casio digital on a black resin strap through the series; the spotting record names it as the F91WM-9A, the gold-cased variant of the F-91W that Casio has kept in production since 1989. The identification is likely rather than confirmed - the gold case and black strap are visible on screen, but no frame resolves the module text that would separate the F91WM-9A from Casio's other gold-toned digitals. (WatchReel) The choice itself is deliberate in a series where Garland composes every frame: a $30 watch on the man who owns the machine that claims to compute the universe, the same instinct that has made the F-91W a quiet favourite of technologists who have thought hard about what a watch is for. (Zac Brown)

© FX Productions

Seiko SKX007

Worn by Karl Glusman as Sergei. In the opening episode Garland's camera holds on Sergei's Seiko SKX007 long enough that it stops being incidental: the black dial, day-date at 3, dive bezel and vented rubber strap fill the frame in golden light. Sergei is the Amaya engineer whose first day inside Devs is also his last; the watch outlasts him by roughly a scene. The identification is confirmed across independent spotting records. (Oracle of Time, Watch Dandy, WatchReel) An unpretentious ISO-rated automatic diver on a working engineer reads as tool-watch shorthand for exactly the kind of person Devs consumes.

© FX Productions