Better than Us

UNDER CONSTRUCTION

Better than Us (Russian: Лучше, чем люди, romanized: Luchshe, chem lyudi, literally Better than Humans). Alexander Kessel, creator (IMDb); Kessel plus Andrey Junkovsky and Aleksandr Dagan, creators (Wikipedia).[1] Andrey Dzhunkovskiy, director. Alexander Dagan and Alexander Kessel, script (supplemented by Asia Guseva and Koshkina Marina, credited with one episode [each?], 2018). Television series 2018-19, 16 episodes in two seasons. See IMDb for full credits[2] and very brief episode synopses.[3]

IMDb log-line: "A family on the brink of splitting up become the owners of a cutting-edge robot being sought by a corporation, homicide investigators and terrorists."

From the Wikipedia article:

The story takes place in 2029 where androids serve humans in various positions, even replacing them in many menial jobs. China's one-child policy has led to a critical shortage of marriageable women, so an engineer designs an advanced robot named Arisa. She is programmed to be a wife to a man and mother to adopted children, and she does not abide by the Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics. She is designed to protect her family, which includes herself. However, her creator dies and Arisa is sold to the Russian robotics firm CRONOS.[6] Arisa accidentally kills a man at CRONOS who tried to use her as a sex robot, and she then flees. She encounters little Sonia (Vita Kornienko) and automatically bonds with her and makes herself the child's guardian.[4]

From Facebook, 7Mar20, 2230 PST, from the SF scholar Istvan Csicsery-Ronay (shortened and lightly edited):

We just finished the Netflix series Better Than Us, a Russian "domestic robot" series. It has some affinities with the great Swedish series, Real Humans, but it's uniquely Russian [... and] very good [...]. Most fascinating to me is simply to see a Russian take on robots. I can't imagine many cultures less inclined to incorporate robots into their world. Unlike the Japanese, whose laws at the moment allow robots even to be heads of households, Russians tend to be over-the-top humanists. Anyway, it's very well written (although the directing isn't great) and engaging. [...]

Better than Us is in a substantial line of SF fiction and drama, among which cf. and contrast R. U. R., the play giving us the word "robot" (probably); METROPOLIS, "Helen O'Loy," Isaac Asimov's I, Robot tales and their successors, and perhaps "The Offspring", for Mr. Data as a father.[5]

RDE, Initial Compiler, 8Mar20