(courtesy IMP Awards)
You kind of have to feel sorry for Upload.
Created by Greg Daniels (Parks and Recreation), Upload has the misfortune to release right in the middle of the first year of the COVID pandemic, and while that was a boon for many shows, and likely helped some viewership, it meant that a lot of the usual promotional momentum that would’ve swung behind a new show simply wasn’t there.
Compounding that, is the fact that while there’s a popular perception that everyone was baking sourdough and streaming their locked-down hearts out, the reality is that many of us were holding down jobs remotely and dealing with the stress of normal life being taken from us, leaving not as much bandwidth as normal to go exploring.
It’s a pity in many ways because while Upload is not the greatest show to ever grace a streaming platform, it was still up there with the science fiction comedy drama, about people being uploaded to the afterlife for a big, fat, easily monetised fee, serving up smart social commentary, romcom feels and comedy with a health serving of the goofily absurd.
Set in the real world and a digital “heaven” known as Lakeview, a palatial estate where the very wealthy could buy the afterlife of their dreams, all for a simply upload of their consciousness, Upload took place in the near-future of 2033 where mobile phones are card-sized screens that appear between your thumb and forefinger, sentient gerbils drive cars (self-drive cars didn’t quite pan out) and grave inequality fills U.S. cities with the Haves and Have-nots stressing across a huge, pretty much unbridgeable divide.
While technology looks to offer all kinds of benefits to those people with the money to take advantage of it, it comes at a price, and what looks like an amazing offer, to offer have the afterlife of your choosing in digital luxury, suddenly comes with all kinds of conspiracy-laden strings attached with capitalism finally finding a way to monetise death to an invasively dark degree.
So, yes, Upload did come with its fair share of archly observed and sometimes comedically delivered social commentary where AI could be goofy or life-ending, where the afterlife could be fantastic or a nightmare and where your ability to influence anything about your life could be easily blunted, no matter your net worth, if those in charge in the real world could do whatever they wanted.
Not that the very much alive Have-nots were exactly doing brilliantly either, either uploading to cheap, nasty versions of Lakeview, with none of the benefits and all kinds of onerous impositions, and a life preceding full of deprivation and loss.
Upload was very real, for all its comedic leanings, and made the most of its depiction of a future dystopian nightmare, cloaked in the shiny garments of advances technology and future promise.
OOOO