I’m not saying “Cupertino” was created by a benevolent superintelligence from the future and sent back in time to warn us. But you almost have to wonder.
The timing is too perfect. You have backlash against data centers, warnings from artificial intelligence researchers that their products might permanently delete mankind and OpenAI’s Sam Altman saying that “The world should accept some bad things happening” in the course of building his trillion-dollar baby. And now here comes a clever topical drama, Thursday nights on CBS, about Silicon Valley’s mammoth, dubious power and about a tiny law firm trying to stand against it. (It also streams on Paramount+.)
The timing is less of a surprise, however, when you realize that “Cupertino” comes from Robert and Michelle King, whose past series — including “The Good Wife,” “The Good Fight” and “Evil” — were fascinated with tech, its power and its absurdities.
Before, that fixation was a sidelight to series about law, politics and religion. Now, tech is the main story. The delightfully feisty “Cupertino” argues, with a populist spirit, that tech has become so pervasive that it is actually the only story — and maybe, if we don’t watch out, our last one.
The series begins in the offices of the tech firm S-Talk (that’s right, “stalk”), where the high-powered lawyer Michael Price (Mike Colter) and the fresh law-school grad Olivia Siffre (Rachel Keller) have just been fired — he in an apparent effort to steal his equity, she after being sexually harassed. Together they start a shoestring legal practice to help the “Davids” underserved by the big law firms getting rich on the tech Goliaths’ payrolls.
“During the gold rush,” a peer cautions Michael, “don’t sue the gold mine.”
As in “Evil” (to which Colter lent his slow-burn charisma as a priest investigating the paranormal), “Cupertino” is built on an odd-couple pairing. Michael is legal royalty, estranged from a father (Joe Morton) who runs a storied law firm. Olivia is the sharp but sheltered daughter of Christian publishers from the Midwest. (The Kings are unusual among prestigious TV-makers in taking faith seriously, which may come in handy now that A.I. execs are lobbying the Vatican.)
But they’ve both been burned, and they’re ready to burn things down. Turns out they are not alone. While seeking a business partner for the firm, Olivia searches “people who hate Silicon Valley”; the list scrolls on and on.
They find a ragtag support staff, including Christy Palladino (Ella Stiller); a working-class receptionist also dumped by their former employer; and financial backing from Natalia Boutella (Busy Philipps), the vengeful ex of a tech overlord.
“Cupertino” falls into a semi-procedural rhythm, balancing a long-term thriller, involving a powerful A.I. model without guardrails, with cases of the week. The show’s philosophy is that every legal case is a tech case now, because tech has become embedded in so many jobs and so much decision-making, whether in policing, medicine, education or family law.
You could call the approach “ripped from the headlines,” but it’s more like the Kings are intuiting the headlines. They look at the state of tech, factor in human foibles and cupidity, and guesstimate what will happen from there.
The results are impressive. One story involves an A.I. that interacts with users through a photorealistic video chat, a device that seemed far-fetched to me. Or it did until, a few days after I watched the episode, I saw an announcement from a company that purported to have developed an A.I. chatbot that does precisely that.
The early episodes of the series have a bit of a spare, building-the-plane-while-flying-it feel to them. As Michael and Olivia open their Potemkin office, the supporting cast fills in gradually, including Reneé Elise Goldsberry (in a mini “Girls5Eva” reunion with Philipps) as a sharky rival attorney and Nik Dodani as a consultant and all-purpose tech explainer.
The good news is that the Kings will have 20-count-them-20 episodes to flesh out the story, an advantage of working on old-fashioned network TV. A disadvantage is that the series’ ambitions can feel narrow in comparison with the heavily serialized “The Good Fight,” which ran on streaming, and “Evil,” which finished its run there.
“The Good Fight” in particular was the boldest political drama of the past decade, a dark-comic fever dream of law in the Trump era that employed everything from wild conspiracies to drug hallucinations to cartoon music videos to sketch a constitutional order straining at its rivets.
Politics is comparatively absent in “Cupertino.” This rings a little odd, given how much government regulation, or the lack thereof, figures into today’s A.I. angst, and how much tech titans have cozied up to the current administration. (There is a reference to Natalia’s mogul ex-husband having attended the inauguration.) In “Cupertino,” the government may as well not exist except to keep the courts open, though I don’t know if that’s avoidance or simply a statement of where the real power lies in this world.
But however brilliant, “The Good Fight” had limited reach. “Cupertino” is bringing cybersurveillance, digital theft of artists’ work, online scams and the bunker mentality of tech tycoons to the audience of “Tracker” and “Sheriff Country.” The last time I would have said that the best new show of the fall was on broadcast TV, the year would probably have had two zeros in the middle of it. (In fact, it might have been “The Good Wife.”)
The Kings understand and respect the network-TV medium, and they execute like pros. The cases are tightly plotted, familiar in format but surprising in their turns, and the cast is stellar. Price and Keller have an endearing big-brother-little-sister dynamic, Goldsberry makes an enticing schemer and Philipps has the time of several lives as a crusading Real Ex-Housewife of Silicon Valley.
Like many great series, “Cupertino” knows what it’s about and why. Like many powerful software models, it is persistent and iterative. It starts briskly, levels up every few episodes and, by the end of the half season I watched for review, left me thirsty for the next update.
I’m not saying that “Cupertino” is potent and necessary. I’m not saying that it’s a smart, urgent entertainment that delivers good times while sounding a wake-up call about the A.I. end times. I don’t dare say it. After all, an A.I. might be reading this.
The post ‘Cupertino’ Review: The People v. A.I. appeared first on New York Times.
