Amazon Prime Video has an original series called ‘Upload’. Here’s the premise: It’s the future. The rich can have their consciousness uploaded when they die. They can spend their digital afterlife in a VR country club/resort forever (or until they run out of money, whichever comes first). In this world, the main character is working on an open source version of the digital afterlife so he can give it away to those less fortunate who can’t afford this paradise. But before he’s able to release it to the public, he’s murdered. So his rich girlfriend pays to have his consciousness uploaded. Now he’s in this VR country club with a bunch of billionaires, trying to solve his own murder.
With that premise alone, I’m interested. Sounds totally cyberpunk. The rich/poor divide, uploaded consciousness, murder mystery, all hints of Altered Carbon. And yet… it’s a romantic comedy.
That entire premise I described above is just the sub-plot, the B story. What the show is actually about is the love triangle between the main character, his rich girlfriend (who’s paying for his digital afterlife but treats him as an accessory), and the tech support rep assigned to his case (who’s a genuinely nice person). He’s falling in love with the tech support rep but if he breaks up with his psycho girlfriend she’ll stop paying his afterlife bills and he’ll die. Cue wacky sit-com antics.
If the focus was reversed and the character was spending all his time investigating his murder while gradually falling in love with this tech support rep, I’d probably really enjoy it. But instead, the focus is on the love triangle and his murder investigation is mostly just something to talk about while taking long walks with his tech support rep.
Now, obviously, the show simply isn’t for me. It never claimed to be a gritty cyberpunk murder mystery; it was always marketed as a fun-loving rom-com. So it’s my own expectations that are flawed. But the world-building is so close to a solid cyberpunk tv show that I can feel the wasted potential. I guess I’d say it’s the most cyberpunk rom-com I’ve ever seen, but that’s a really odd category to have.
Trailer, in case anyone is interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZfZj2bn_xg
Is it a legitimately bad show? It’s hard for me to judge because I don’t like rom-coms in the first place. So while I wasn’t a fan of the light-hearted tone, I just assumed everything they were doing was accurately hitting what their target demographic wanted to see.
I will admit though, I stuck with it and watched the whole series. I liked the technology they would use, like having the phone built into their hand. So a video phone would appear between finger and thumb and they could hang up by just making a fist.
Also, there was an episode where they went to a black market to buy illegal software. There were so many instances of clever ideas that I wished they would expand on, rather than the love triangle.
I don’t think it’s a particularly bad show. And although I empathize with wanting a different balance in the storytelling, and for me… moreso a different lens into this world… I don’t feel like the love trial was entirely superfluous romcom nonsense. The love triangle was the vehicle to explore:
- Real world financial inequality between tech support girlfriend and rich girlfriend.
- Digital inequality between both women and upload.
- independence and obligation in a world of inescapable monetization through upload and his pathological dependence on rich girlfriend’s funding and support girlfriend’s favors.
- Status, belonging, and self-worth through rich girlfriend’s flailing attempts to attain her ever shifting conception of success first by ignoring upload, then buy leveraging his dependence, then by attempting to entangle their digital lives even at the expense of real world status she used to value as she disappears into the virtual suit and sacrifices her skin health, fitness, and real world social status.
I don’t want to give it TOO much credit. These were all pretty shallow explorations of their topic, but my point is that the love triangle… for better or worse… is lens through which we experience the sci-fi implications of this world. And although I’d rather have more lenses and different lenses, I don’t feel like they just dumped a romcom love triangle in there for no reason and then did nothing with it. They picked 3 perspectives in this world, and then linked them together in the most accessible… and overused way possible.
I largely agree with this. It’s a shame that S2 ended on a cliffhanger where they were finally getting into the sci-fi questions.
Light Spoilers, though they may make the show more interesting if you’re on the fence:
spoiler
The main character discovers he was murdered when someone hacked the self-driving cab he was riding in and forced it to crash. When he was uploaded into the corporate-controlled post-death community, he had memories removed: prior to his death, he was working on a free alternative afterlife system, so it seems likely he was murdered to keep him from competing with the big players in the industry.
Additionally, while there are laws about the uploaded/deceased no longer being allowed to work or otherwise be involved in business with the living, they find proof not only that the founder (?) of the current afterlife megacompany is still running things despite being dead, but that they’re working on technology to grow clone bodies and upload the deceased back into them, all for insane prices, of course. It’s illegal tech that could further shift the balance of power between the rich and the poor.
That’s all from memory, so I may have mucked up a detail or two, but by the end I was really interested to see where it was all going. The show could be really smart when it wanted to, which is why it’s a shame that it mostly wants to meander through a slow-paced will-they-won’t-they for two seasons instead of getting into the meat of things. Maybe they felt they had to make it more “accessible” and sneak the cyberpunk in?
I dunno.
It was greenlit for a third season, and recent news reports indicate it was still coming (all prior to the current strikes), so maybe we’ll get a conclusion? I’ll certainly watch it when it drops.
