Upload: Enjoyably quirky series set inside a digital afterlife, where your credit rating still matters
By Jim Slotek
Rating: B-plus
At last, a series that answers the question, if corporations could sell things to dead people, would they? Sorry. Stupid question. Of COURSE they would.
The 10-episode Upload on Amazon Prime is a murder-story and love-story set in 2033 from The Office’s busy Greg Daniels (who has yet another series debuting this month, the Trump-inspired Space Force with Steve Carell on Netflix).
Newly dead Nathan gets advice from a talking “support animal” in Upload
Considering that it’s about death, dire behavior, corporate malfeasance and even the human soul, there’s a gentle quirkiness to Upload that is its real charm. Credit much of that to Robbie Amell (cousin of Arrow’s Stephen Amell), whose handsome-guy appeal tends to dial down the seriousness of any situation.
Amell plays Nathan, a struggling but hard-selling software developer who, with his partner Jamie (Jordan Johnson-Hinds), is on the verge of a billion-dollar breakthrough when things go horribly wrong. After a night with his even shallower rich girlfriend Ingrid (Allegra Edwards), he’s headed home in his self-driving car (even bicycles are self-driving in 2033) when it goes out of control and crashes, leaving him mortally wounded.
In the emergency ward, the decision is made. Ingrid will pay for his consciousness to be digitized by the mega-corp Horizen, and sent to the virtual “Heaven” of his choice, from which he can still communicate and interact with the real world and even have sex with living people via virtual reality and attend his own funeral.
The catch is that Heaven is like a cruise ship or a resort, where you can eat, drink and enjoy yourself in every conceivable way (prompted by digital ads and come-ons), but it all has a price tag, and somebody alive must pay your tab.
And the deskworker in the office where your avatar was assembled (from old photos and videos) is your “angel,” who attends to your technical support issues when you call (make sure you give them a five-star rating, so they can qualify for a company discount on an upload for themselves when the time comes).
Upload is full of suppositions of the near future, which are mostly more sly than hilarious. Sex partners who hook up on an app give each other star ratings as well, and officially announce their consent before they get started. Horizen “angels” who get the uploaded guests to buy the latest Taco Bell item and such get their ratings boosted also. (In Nathan’s case, a “support animal” is literally that, a talking dog avatar who offers soothing advice).
But Nathan’s angel Nora (Andy Allo) has a special interest, having become infatuated with him in the process of designing him (she also notices irregularities in his programming).
The characters on the digital other side of this mortal coil – the putatively dead people – are more interesting overall, and lead us to bigger ideas. There’s a callous billionaire (William B. Davis) who discovered he can take it with him, and celebrates by chowing down on nearly extinct animals. There’s 12-year-old Dylan (Rhys Slack) who died in a fall and has stayed 12, leaving his friends to grow older and discover girls while he stays trapped in a pubescent body. And there’s Nathan’s new best friend Luke (Kevin Bigley) a former amputee military veteran who’s become adept at enjoying Heaven while scamming ways to not pay.
As for the world of the conventionally living, it sometimes seems a letdown by comparison, with the show’s writers parsimoniously dishing the truth behind Nathan’s death. There’s a cousin of Nathan’s, a middle school teacher named Fran (Elizabeth Bowen) who decides to play detective and root out the bad guys. And Nora’s father (Chris Williams) is terminally ill with, ahem, “vape lung,” but resists all her attempts to convince him to upload, because he continues to believe in a real Heaven, and doesn’t believe the uploaded have souls.
Upload is a hodgepodge of cool ideas, mostly seamless in the way it extrapolates some of the most troublesome aspects of our modern, corporate, and increasingly less human society. Somewhere in there is a story. And with the recent green light of a second season, I assume we’ll be getting more of that too.
Upload. Created by Greg Daniels. Starring Robbie Amell, Andy Allo and Allegra Edwards. Now available on Amazon Prime.