'Almost Human' meshes man and machine

Brian Truitt | USA TODAY

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%27Almost Human%27 premieres Sunday at 8 p.m. ET/PT on Fox

Michael Ealy and Karl Urban star in the futuristic police series

It%27s produced by J.J. Abrams

Two cops busting each other's chops in a TV police drama is nothing new.

What is, though, is setting it in the year 2048 and partnering a grizzled human cop with an android who knows just how to press his buttons — and is not afraid to tell him when his blood pressure's rising.

That's one of the fresh aspects of the new Fox series Almost Human for star Michael Ealy, who plays the "synthetic" partner Dorian to Karl Urban's human John Kennex.

"We've all seen the great buddy cop combos, and I would be lying if I said we were not stealing," Ealy says with a laugh. "It's just more interesting when you can have that banter between a machine and human."

Premiering Sunday (8 p.m. ET/PT) and settling into its regular slot Monday (8 p.m. ET/PT), the latest show from creator J.H. Wyman (Fringe) and executive producer J.J. Abrams showcases a futuristic world in which, for safety reasons, police officers are paired with robots.

Emerging from a 17-month coma following a deadly attack by a mysterious criminal organization, Kennex is now a little bit synthetic himself (he's equipped with a bionic leg) but wants nothing to do with his robot partner.

Enter Dorian, an older model of police-bot who's deemed "too human" but proves the key to Kennex's reconnecting with his own humanity.

"There's a yin/yang dynamic between these two," Abrams says. "These are characters who are both -- one metaphorically and one literally -- coming off the scrap heap. Without the other, they wouldn't be doing this job."

Urban starred as Dr. "Bones" McCoy in Abrams' two Star Trek films, and Ealy won the gig after a planned 15-minute meeting with Wyman turned into three hours.

"When you're working the hard slog in television and filming brutal hours, it helps to have a partner as great as he is," Urban says of Ealy.

Urban is particularly fond of Kennex's blaster weapon, but while it was bigger than his Star Trek phaser, the New Zealand-born actor says he wasn't totally pleased with the heft of the one he used in the pilot. "I told the props department, 'I need a more substantial beast than that.' "

Most enjoyable for Ealy, though, is capturing the personality of a robot who wants to be human, though finding the right balance between man and machine isn't always easy.

"If I don't deliver, then it could come off a little cheesy," he says. "Every day I work I try to play along that line, and it's harder than anything I've ever done."

Ealy says that when filming the premiere, he had to find times where Dorian could be more robotic "because my thing was, I went so human with it." Now, after filming five episodes in Vancouver, "my thing is to play him human and then pull back from there."

The friendly dynamic between the two characters is the key to Almost Human's success, Wyman says.

"You don't want to have the Bickersons — for an audience that's boring," he says. "The show itself really hangs on these two guys and how much fun they have."