Upload is hardly the first show to tackle the afterlife. In recent years, shows like The Good Place and Black Mirror have used varying concepts of life after death, and what the showrunner, Greg Daniels (co-creator of The Office and Parks and Recreation) does differently with Upload is that it brings more of the mundane into the magical realm of the afterlife.
This afterlife, formed in a VR environment that mimics Victorian hotels in the US and Canada, is full of freemium content, where you have to pay to unlock certain types of food and attire, and there’s also a ton of ads. Throughout the show, Daniels brings attention to class inequality, whether that’s a billionaire living inside a vast estate or cash-strapped uploads living in data-limited in ‘2gigs’ accommodations.
Nathan Brown (Robbie Amell) has a good life, but he doesn’t spend much time appreciating it. He is a coder who’s trying to get money for his startup, and has a very attractive girlfriend in Ingrid (Allegra Edwards), but he’s mostly partying through his life, until he ends up in a car accident (despite having a self-driving car) and his girlfriend urges him to upload to Lakeview, a posh version of a digital afterlife ran by Horizen (possibly a play on Verizon). There, he soon forms a bond with his customer service representative (or angel) Nora (Andy Allo). Both Nathan and Nora soon discover that there’s more to his death than they had initially thought.
There’s a good effort put into fleshing out Lakeview, including bellboy AIs, a restricted ‘grey zone’ and companies pushing digital content onto the uploads every chance they get. There are therapy pets, which literally talk to their patients like real therapists do, and then there’s the running joke of random mergers between existing companies such as Panera Facebook and AT&T&T.
The 2033 the show imagines is, perhaps, a bit too futuristic: it’s doubtful that 3D printing and AI-driven smaller cars will become as common as they are shown here, nor will superstores be able to scan shoppers and recommend products based on those scans. Then there’s the spookily invasive camera device that people attach to their chests to show they both consent to intercourse. The class divide has become so pronounced that there’s a new class in air travel called economy minus, where people hang from the ceilings and seats recline both ways, often causing the person caught within to get squeezed in the middle.
There’s a feeling that, although there is a bit of the everyman in Nathan’s character, he’s too privileged to face much adversity, except the fact that he was probably murdered. He’s good natured, but also shallow, and aside from an initial freakout where he tries to commit digital suicide. His girlfriend, Ingrid, is also fittingly shallow, barely mentioning Nathan during his own funeral. Nora is a lot more caring, though at times, you are left wondering what she sees in Nathan other than his hotness.
Is this show as good as The Good Place? It doesn’t really get the space to make the most of its characters, and the ideas explored here are more material than philosophical.
Often, the show feels bland, but it’s also comfortable, and there’s no egregious error that frustrates the viewer.
The show isn’t as developed as it could be, but if given a few more seasons, it could find its voice and do more interesting things with its characters. There’s probably a space in today’s TV landscape for a show like Upload, especially with The Good Place ending earlier this year. However, if it doesn’t distinguish itself soon it might get buried under the noise of more long-running series like Brooklyn Nine Nine.