Sense8, which is about eight people from all over the world who become linked telepathically.
The people behind the show are the Wachowskis and J.Michael Straczynski, and it really shows, the Wachowskis are really good at all things visual and J. Michel Straczynski is the king of plotting, and really cares about the details, not to mention that he knows how to write very well-rounded characters that truly feel like real people. In other words, visually it's probably the most beautiful series I've
ever watched, and the most thought out one since... well, since I discovered Babylon 5
I think I heard somewhere that they have planned five seasons in detail, just like Straczynski did with the latter.
It takes place in 9 different cities in total, and everything is shot on location, I don't think they've used a studio at all. There's also no CGI, or at least so little that it's totally invisible, but I'm going to go with none since I don't know where they could even have fit it in, instead the visuals rely on careful editing and finding just the right locations, light and camera angles. So even though it's the Wachowskis we're talking about, it has a very real feel to it.
It really gets time to grow too, it's definitely not about instant gratification, which didn't surprise me since Babylon 5 took the entire first season for the plot to really take off. Sense8 is much better paced though, which I guess is due to the season having 12 episodes instead of 22, so there's much less filler and pretty much everything that happens on screen is significant in one way or another
Well, except for one or two dialogues which felt they could have been lifted from any of the Matrix films, but they're few and far between.
The characters are great and very diverse, both the eight who are linked and the people around them, sure some things about them may look a bit stereotypical at first, but it's compensated by far by everything else, and it's really easy to connect to them on an emotional level. Its also a series where the gay and trans are simply characters who happen to be gay and trans, and it doesn't shy away from giving them sex scenes either. Sure, they do face some problems that straight and cis people don't, especially since the gay man is a Mexican telenovela actor who plays womanisers on screen, but some of the things in his storyline are definitely problems that a lot of gay men in show business have. And there's no pressure on the trans woman whose mother doesn't accept her for who she is and still calls her by her birth name to reconcile with her, which is very unusual for an American series.
There aren't very many fake nationalities used either, and only among the main cast from what I can tell; a Spaniard plays the Mexican character (the character's dad is from Spain though), and the American woman's equally American girlfriend is played by an English actress (fellow Whovians will recognise her, it's Freema Agyeman), but at least they have the same native language as their characters. There are two characters whose actors don't though, the Icelandic woman is played by an English actress and the Kenyan man by an English actor of Caribbean background. But hey, Naveen Andrews actually plays a guy born in India and who grew up in England, not an Arab, and that is definitely not something you see every day