‘Upload’ Is No ‘The Good Place’

Warning: Contains spoilers about The Good Place and the first three seasons of Upload.

Maybe it’s the purgatorial nature of the average email job, but working on The Office seems to inspire its writers not only to contemplate eternity, but to conceptualize it in administrative terms. Michael Schur, a producer on the American version of The Office, created NBC’s The Good Place, set in a supposed heaven that turns out to be the exact opposite. The architects who construct the spaces where the dead spend their afterlife are routinely shown in offices and grappling with middle managers. Greg Daniels, the executive producer who adapted The Office for NBC, created Prime Video’s Upload, which proposes a tech solution to life after death; its still-living facilitators work in a bullpen as crowded and stifling as Dunder Mifflin’s. And with its abbreviated final season dropping today, I can definitively say that Greg Daniels’s vision of the afterlife ends up being darker than The Good Place’s actual Hell.

Set in 2033, Upload imagines a process by which living humans can upload their consciousness to a digital avatar in a virtual world. Typically, this occurs when death is imminent, though that may or may not be the case for Nathan (Robbie Amell), whose pushy girlfriend Ingrid (Allegra Edwards) urges him to do it after his self-driving car smashes into the back of a truck. Once he’s signed the papers, it no longer matters how close his death was, since the machine that uploads his consciousness also causes his decapitation.

Nathan’s consciousness then wakes up in Lakeview, a high-end afterlife community. He’s guided through his orientation by his “angel,” Nora (Andy Allo); she’s still alive and working for Lakeview’s parent company, Horizen, but she can also appear at Lakeview in human avatar form. It’s through these interactions that Nathan and Nora grow closer and, eventually, fall in love, despite the fact that Ingrid is paying his Lakeview bills, making her technically the owner of his consciousness. He can also still talk to Ingrid, his mother, his niece, and his old business partner: Uploads still have cell phones and can call the living, and the living can use avatars to visit on special occasions.

Things get more complicated when Nathan downloads to a clone Ingrid’s had grown for him in the real world. His inexperienced new angel, alarmed that she can’t find him in Lakeview, breaks the law by restoring Nathan from a months-old backup, so most of the third season proceeds with two Nathans figuring things out: one in the real world, pursuing justice for people who’ve been cheated by a crooked consortium into uploading (and killing their organic bodies) to lose their votes and thus swing elections; the other in Lakeview, deciding what kind of life he wants with Ingrid.  

Upload premiered its first season in May 2020 — a time when mortality was on our minds, but also just four months after the series finale of The Good Place, which may be why you read or heard about Upload and immediately decided you were all set on afterlife comedies. It’s also very possible that, because Prime Video rarely markets any of its own productions if Bosch isn’t involved, you’re learning about Upload for the first time right now. But if the mention of the Office creator made you want to pop in for the final season just to see how things end? Sorry, you really can’t. This show rests on a Lost-worthy pile of lore, which also may be why there was probably no way to wrap things up in a satisfying way this far in. I would have preferred it if they’d worked a little harder to try.

To be clear, this isn’t a failure on the level of Space Force, another show Greg Daniels created that came out in May 2020. Here, unlike there, some bright spots do exist. Amell is an actor I’ve never thought much about, but he is very good as Nathan, someone who starts as a cocky tech pretty-boy but melts into a kind, charitable, generous person — partly thanks to his love for Nora, but partly from the ways his time in Lakeview is rewiring his understanding of existence and what’s actually important to him. In the back half of the series, Amell has to make both Nathans distinct; the show wouldn’t work at all if he couldn’t, but he nails it/them, veering from joy to terror multiple times in a single episode. Amell honestly has no business being this likable, cute and good at comedy. I hope he can step from this into a project someone actually cares to promote.

Another standout is Kevin Bigley. Already a scene-stealer from the sadly short-lived USA sitcom Sirens and a recurring role in Animal Control, Bigley plays Luke, an army veteran who lost both legs fighting in the Middle East but has had them restored on his Lakeview avatar. Luke develops a friendship with Nathan that’s hero-worshipful verging on homoerotic. If that sounds like something you’ve already seen many times, it is, but Bigley finds unexpected angles on his lines and physical comedy to make it feel fresh. Also: shows his butt a lot.

Special mention must be made for William B. Davis as David Choak. A billionaire in life — yes, like the late David Koch, a dopey name that sparks unwelcome memories of Space Force’s General Grabaston and Admiral Biffoont — Choak is Nathan’s Lakeview neighbor. When Davis, formerly The X-Files’ Cigarette Smoking Man, turns out to be embroiled in an evil conspiracy, it’s not exactly a surprise, but Davis seems to be having fun as Choak skeet-shoots his angel and dines on peacock with the tail still attached.

Frustratingly, though, the show gestures toward political points it never quite makes. In the real world, 2033 is full of normalized indignities, from printed “food” to ratings on dating apps. It’s not much better in Lakeview, where residents are segregated according to what they can pay for, and a whole class of “2 Gigs” can just freeze for weeks until their data refreshes at the start of the next month or be forced to walk around nude and smooth if they can’t afford clothes and/or genitals. Even the well-off residents have to pay extra for upgrades like virtual babies or, eventually, the ability to finish a conversation. It’s basically a mash-up of half a dozen existing episodes of Black Mirror, except much longer and a lot less clever.

Most disturbing for a show that has straddled the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes is that I’m not sure what position it takes on A.I. In Lakeview, all service functions — bartender, landscaper, hairdresser, shoeshine — are performed by duplicates of the same A.I. Guy; the fact that he’s played by Owen Daniels, Greg’s son, suggests to me that Greg doesn’t have as much contempt for A.I. as he should to make a show like this. (Eventually, we meet Boris Netherlands, the living actor who was scanned for Lakeview’s A.I. Guy and endlessly duplicated, for which he was only paid $1,200. This is quite literally one of the points the actors struck over, but the affection Lakeview residents have for his copies makes it unclear what the show’s writers think of Horizen having done it.) In the fourth season, an A.I. Guy in Lakeview generates a new kind of copy that expands his worldview and emotional range; one who’s downloaded into a clone and is living in New York City is given a crucial role to play in the climax of the series and much more power in the dénouement. 

“It is scary,” says one character who’s spent time in both worlds, “but there’s nothing we can do about it now” — and that’s the end of the discussion. Is this supposed to be funny? It’s not to me.

Ultimately, Upload’s biggest crime isn’t that its politics are murky, that many of its performances are stiff, that it frequently drops seemingly significant storylines and characters, or that its half-hour-plus episodes drag. It’s that its series finale doesn’t deliver the main thing a viewer typically wants out of a comedy: a happy ending. Twenty-nine episodes in this world is both too much (of a slog) and not enough (of a payoff). I trust Prime Video has no plans for resurrection and will let it quietly expire.