Watched all of Upload last week. Putting aside the truly amazing coincidence that someone who worked closely with the creator of The Good Place for 10 years decided simultaneously to create a 30-minute comedy series about what happens after you die, and is making a point of saying in interviews that he’s never actually watched The Good Place…
It feels like a huge missed opportunity. The core premise is intriguing, if not entirely original. There are some really good moments, and some fun ideas (I loved the dark web analogue of the literal black market selling puberty patches etc, even if it doesn’t hold up to even a cursory amount of scrutiny). BUT
They’ve cast a blandly handsome charisma vortex as the lead and as a result it’s impossible to get invested in his situation. His arc is meant to be “handsome douche who’s coasted through life on his looks develops into someone who cares about others” but actually he’s just a douche the whole way through, but they occasionally show him doing some nice things. Also, he’s clearly a genius-level coder so the idea that he’d be a barista while trying to get his startup off the ground seems unfeasible and something put in there just for the sake of a mediocre joke during his funeral.
This is massively worsened by the fact that the female lead, Andy Allo, is fucking brilliant (side note: she played guitar for Prince. How fucking cool is that?!). As well as being a much better actress, she just emanates star quality and as a result the idea she’d fall in love with him just seems completely nonsensical. I found myself wishing they’d kill off the lead and just focus on her.
The lead meets a similarly personality-free ex-soldier who becomes his “best friend” in the digital afterlife, except they barely spend any time together, don’t ever seem to bond, and the friend has been written as kind of an annoying twat. So there are moments between them which were written as emotional but which land with zero heft because you just don’t care about either of them.
His girlfriend in the real world has been written as a stereotypical controlling, high-maintenance, spoiled rich girl and is so over-acted that when the “twist” (which is obvious from the very first episode) comes in the penultimate episode, it’s impossible to tell whether everything that came previously was meant to be a misdirection. What happens in the final episode suggests it wasn’t. Terrible casting (Allo aside) and some really, really bad writing too.
Of course, it dropped during Lockdown and is being heavily promoted by Prime so it’ll do really well (I mean, we watched the whole thing in 3 days) and get a second season. Which it needs, because the story was apparently written as a 2-season arc, and of course I’ll watch the whole thing.
Between this and Man In The High Castle (and, depending on who you ask, Mr. Robot) Amazon Prime really has carved a niche out for itself with big-budget programmes that people watch all the way through and still can’t figure out whether they enjoyed them.
