Genre: TV Comedy/Sci-Fi
Premise: In a future where your consciousness is uploaded into a hard drive that substitutes for heaven, a young programmer finds himself a new resident of the afterlife after a car accident.
About: One of the most frustrating results of superheroes taking over cinema is the death of the high-concept. I love a great high-concept idea. Hollywood used to be a high-concept battleground. Whoever came up with the best high concept that week won a million dollars. However, the high concept isn’t dead and gone forever. It’s moved over to television, which is why I decided today to review Amazon’s new show, Upload.
Writer: Greg Daniels
Details: First couple of episodes are 1 hour. Rest of episodes are 30 min.
Greg Daniels has been on a roll lately.
He brought back his beloved TV show, Parks and Rec, for a onetime coronavirus benefit episode. He debuted his new big budget comedy, Upload, on Amazon. And he’s got a highly anticipated comedy with Steve Carrell called “Space Force,” on the horizon.
As streaming continues to dig its claws into the theater business, tearing away market share piece by valuable piece, we’ve seen high concepts, which used to be relegated to spec scripts and summer movies, become a prominent force in the streaming space.
15 years ago, Upload would’ve been a movie. Now, when someone comes up with an idea like this, their first thought is ‘TV.’ And I’m still not sure if that’s a good or a bad thing.
Ideas like this always seemed too big for two hours. But they certainly aren’t big enough for 30 hours. That’s the thing that continues to bother me about television. When someone comes up with an idea, they usually have the first season mapped out. And, from there it becomes, “We’ll figure it out.”
Sometimes they do (Breaking Bad). But usually they don’t.
Complicating matters is that Upload isn’t sure what it wants to be. It presents itself as a comedy. But it occasionally delves into serious subject matter, such as how the moral implications of a known afterlife would work. Some of the questions it presents are thought-provoking, but it can be jarring when it moves so fluidly from “What’s the meaning of life?” to Bud the Talking Dog.
Upload is set 50+ years in the future where mankind has set up digital afterlifes you can be uploaded into. Which afterlife you join is dependent on how much money you have. If you have a ton of money, you go to the richest and snazziest afterlife. If you don’t, well, you get the picture.
Nathan Brown is a coder with a beautiful materialistic girlfriend. One night while heading home, his self-driving smart-car crashes and kills him. It’s unheard of for a smart car to crash so we’re suspicious from the start. Due to his rich girlfriend, Nathan gets uploaded into the top afterlife, which looks a lot like colonial Canada.
Seeing as the afterlife is one giant hard drive, you can still communicate via voice or video with the real world, which allows Nathan to stay in touch with his girlfriend. Meanwhile, Nathan is being shown the ropes by his “angel,” which is what they call your tech support helper in the afterlife. Real name Nora, Nathan’s angel develops a quick crush on her latest client.
Back in the real world, Nora is struggling with the fact that her cancer-ridden father still believes in good old God, which means he’s choosing not to be uploaded when he dies. For him, upload is Real Heaven. Nora keeps trying to convince him to sign up for Upload since, if he doesn’t, she’ll lose him forever.
Almost half of the people who get uploaded to the afterlife don’t “take.” They freak out. It’s all too weird for them and they end up committing digital suicide. Nathan is too weirded out by the place and decides to end it all. But Angel/Nora comes racing after him and pleads with him not to end it in a monologue that’s clearly just as much about her father as it is Nathan. It’s enough to get Nathan to stop, for now. But how much longer can he survive in this Groundhog Day hell? Odds are not long.
What I liked most about Upload is that Daniels did a TON of work constructing the mythology. He’s really thought hard about what this world would look like. For example, the third episode focuses on the first “Download,” where someone from the afterlife will be downloaded back into a clone of themselves (a fun cameo from Creed of “Office” fame), paving the way for the afterlife to be joined back with the real world.
Or then there’s the fact that there’s only ever 5000 people around. When Nathan asks about this, Nora informs him that, actually, there’s hundreds of millions of people around but the place would be too crowded if it showed all of them at once so it separates the reality into a series of planes, each of which limits the amount of people visible.
One of my pet peeves is when a writer comes up with a big idea but doesn’t put any effort into actually exploring that idea. Greg Daniels is on the opposite end of that. If anything, he became too obsessed with what this world would look like. That’s how you get ideas like talking dogs.
I also liked the injection of a murder mystery into the plot. One of the best ways to keep people watching, not just for a second episode, but all the way through the season, is an overarching mystery arc. In this case, Nathan was murdered. He doesn’t even know it at first. Someone else has to suggest it to him. But now we’re on the hunt trying to figure out who did this to him. He’s got this supposedly perfect girlfriend who’s a little too cutthroat at times. Could she be involved?
Despite the incredibly rich mythology, something is missing here.
I’m not sure what it is but I think it’s the lack of familiarity in a lot of the situations.
Comedy works best when you put characters in a situation that people can relate to and then you play around with that situation. For example, one of the staples of The Office was those boring conference room meetings that are always a complete waste of time. Anyone who’s worked in an office environment can relate to the absurdity and stupidity of those situations.
And then there’s “Upload,” where a featured scene is Nathan attending his own funeral via a virtual conference app. It’s a clever idea in theory. But the situation is so unfamiliar to us that it’s hard to find any laughs in it. The scene plays out with Nathan feeling weird about the whole thing and yelling at everyone, which leaves you wondering what the point of the whole thing was.
It’s frustrating on a writing front because this is actually what I tell you guys to do. Find situations we haven’t seen before. That way you can give us something original. And yet sometimes I’m reminded that there’s a reason certain things haven’t been explored before. It’s because they don’t work.
I don’t want to totally discount this show. It has its moments. The things it gets right – like the chemistry between Nathan and Nora – it gets really right. But the premise ends up being so weird and complex that there isn’t enough familiarity for us to relate to what’s going on. It’s almost like Daniels went one generation too far with his concept. If it was set a little closer to today, maybe in the beginning stages of integrating this technology into life, there would be more we could relate to. But because it’s so far ahead, it’s a future we don’t understand enough to laugh at.
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the stream
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Comedy tends to run into trouble – not always, but usually – when it either a) goes big-budget or b) attempts to push too much drama into the fold. Upload tackles both of these head on and, unfortunately, loses on both fronts.
