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NBC’s new VR thriller Reverie is a schmaltzy take on techno-dystopia

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In the first few minutes of Reverie, a new episodic science fiction thriller premiering Wednesday, May 30th on NBC, the protagonist starts ranting about smartphones. Mara Kint (Person of Interest’s Sarah Shahi) is a former hostage negotiator turned college professor, and she complains that her students are living with their nose to their screens. “They get the whole world in their pocket. Is that such a bad thing?” asks her former boss, who’s recruiting her for a mysterious job at a tech company. “It is if they’re not developing the most important tool of all: empathy,” Kint says sagely. “We learn empathy by observing, and we’ve stopped doing that.”

The speech could be lifted from an episode of the tech-wary TV series Black Mirror, and...

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