TV REVIEW: 'Upload' is a familiar but rewarding vision of the future
Robbie Amell and Andy Allo star in Upload, created by Greg Daniels.
If you spend too much time on Twitter, you might start to feel like the world’s falling apart in real time. Seeing tweets from millions of users during an ongoing global pandemic and during protests over racial inequality casts one nation in particular in a very gloomy light. The United States doesn’t feel like the optimistic, unified place it once was. Political divisions, corporate greed, income inequality, and environmental decay are all more acute than they’ve ever been, to the point that you might forgive someone for wanting to retreat entirely into the digital world.
That worldview is steadily making its way into new content on streaming services, like the Amazon Original series Upload, from Greg Daniels (The Office, Parks and Recreation). The premise is simple enough: mix the futuristic tech from the Black Mirror season 3 episode “San Junipero”, the afterlife setting of The Good Place, and Daniels’ signature office-comedy stylings, and you have a taste of this 10-episode first season.
Robbie Amell stars as Nathan, a skilled computer programmer living in 2033. The world 13 years from now is depicted as an exaggerated version of our own: self-driving cars are ubiquitous, water is scarce, and most people can only afford to 3D-print their food. But the headline societal “improvement” is digital afterlife: just before you die, you can have your consciousness stored in a vacation-resort computer realm of your choice. There, you can enjoy all the luxuries that were impossible in real life, and be guaranteed that you’ll spend eternity with your loved ones - provided you all have the funds to stay in the same version of Heaven.
Allegra Edwards as Nathan’s girlfriend Ingrid, who bankrolls his afterlife.
That’s right: the service isn’t free, and even Paradise has pop-up ads and customer service screw-ups. But as far as Nathan is concerned, the afterlife was a long way off for him; he has a radical business idea he’s developing, a beautiful girlfriend from a wealthy family, and good looks that he’s not afraid of bragging about. But one night his self-driving car has a rare collision, forcing his girlfriend Ingrid (Allegra Edwards) to upload him to her family’s posh afterlife resort.
When Nathan wakes up, he meets his assigned customer service rep Nora (Andy Allo), known as an Angel. Mysteriously, he’s the only client with missing memory files, and as he attempts to unravel how his car crashed, he becomes ever closer with Nora. Between mind-scrambling interactions with his fellow residents, Nathan has to come to terms with how his choices in life may have led to his premature upload.
Like any sci-fi show, there’s a hefty amount of worldbuilding to do in the opening episodes, but the writers’ room on Upload wisely tries to balance the talky exposition with plenty of sight gags. We get jokes about ridiculous future corporate mergers, like “Panera Facebook” and a future dating app called Nitely, like a blend of Tinder and Uber. In the afterlife, Nora can use her Angel privileges to change Nathan’s appearance and abilities with a swipe of her touch pen. In one scene, Nora’s colleague Aleesha (Zainab Johnson) resorts to erasing her client Luke’s various body parts to keep him from stealing promotional gorditas. It’s here that the influence of The Good Place is the most obvious: that show can’t be topped in how it weighs its heady philosophical discussions against the comedic power of its characters to conjure things out of nowhere.
Unfortunately, Upload borrows from The Good Place a little too heavily on the character front. When Nathan and Nora begin to develop feelings for each other (against company policy), the idea that Nathan may have his memory wiped feels like it was wholly lifted from Eleanor and Chidi’s relationship in seasons 2 and 3 of the NBC show. Upload also doesn’t build out its characters as deeply as you would hope. Nathan arrives in Heaven a nice (if slightly vain) guy, and a delayed attempt to reveal some misdeeds when he was alive feels contrived. His character’s arc remains mostly static, even if Amell sells it with his kind-natured, straight-man performance.
As an Angel, Nora has total control of her afterlife clients.
Nora fares a bit better. She’s the heart of the show, as someone who both loves and hates the idea of digital afterlife; she believes in the ideals that the tech is based on, but hates how corporate culture has infected it with predatory policies. Nora is someone who struggles to connect with people in the real world, and when she finally finds someone she truly cares about, he’s tragically both already dead and a professional client. For an actor in her first starring role, following an impressive music career and some recent TV and film work, Allo proves she’s a talent to watch in the coming years.
In general, Upload doesn’t dip into existential horror as deeply as Black Mirror or The Good Place. There’s a prevailing sense that the darker implications of Upload’s concept are spread more lightly throughout the show. Upload is packed with quick references to ideas like “puberty hacks”, pay-as-you-go afterlife plans, and terrifying beauty trends that might have become whole episodes on other series. But as fast paced as these moments are, it proves that the writers on the show have no end of directions to take the second season that Amazon ordered not long after Upload’s launch.
Maybe the more light-hearted tone of Upload will work well for people too spooked by the eerie plausibility of Black Mirror, or who are looking to fill the hole left by the ending of The Good Place. For me, the constant riffing on future technology and a solid cast is enough to keep me watching, even while I hope for harder-hitting, fresher character arcs. Here’s hoping we don’t need to make any in-app purchases to get there.
Season one of Upload is available on Amazon Prime Video.