< Back to posts
By Coren Feldman
Upload was created by Greg Daniels, who, along with Mike Schur, co-created Parks And Rec.
While Schur went on to make The Good Place, a critically successful and masterful TV show about the afterlife, morality and change, Daniels gave us Upload - also a show about death, only without any of the elements that made The Good Place actually work.
I'll rewind. Upload is based in the near future, where technology has allowed humans to upload their consciousness onto computer servers, effectively creating a manmade afterlife. Nathan is a gap-model looking guy with no discernible character traits or flaws who dies in a freak (read: obviously orchestrated) car accident when his self-driving car squishes him into the back of a truck.
But actually, he doesn't die right away. Instead, he's rushed to the hospital, looking completely, 100% okay, save for a few superficial cuts, where his rich and snobbish girlfriend convinces him to get uploaded on her dime so they can be together forever, a thought he clearly doesn't love.
So now Mr. No-Personality is in the matrix, and it's the most boring version of one imaginable. It's basically a big hotel with activities available to its tenants, like sports, breakfast that disappears at a certain hour for no reason, the ability to pee into a urinal from any distance (this scene was WAY too long) and a virtual helper that can only be read as a much, much worse version of Janet from The Good Place.
The second half of the show comes in the form of the still living customer service rep Nora, whose dad is dying but doesn't want to be uploaded so he can be with her dead mom, even though she gets an employee discount. This plot point is so forced and stilted that it's hard to take her character seriously. Anyway, so she strikes up a friendship with Nathan in the process of customer servicing and they start falling in love. But uh oh! He's still in a relationship. Don't worry though, his girlfriend is a monster who threatens to deactivate his membership (kill him) when she doesn't get what she wants, so there's no nuance in this boring love triangle.
The relationship between Nathan and Nora is clearly what's supposed to be the main drive of the show, but both of their characters are so bland and stiff that it's near impossible to care.
But wait! There's more! Remember the car accident? So it turns out Nathan was building an open source afterlife and someone had him killed for it and wiped his memory files so he wouldn't remember this super important mission. This mystery is simultaneously slow moving, obvious and utterly boring.
Upload at it's core is a not-so-subtle commentary on class, between the people who can afford to be uploaded, the cringeworthy in-app purchases that are being pushed on the residents, the name of the company being Horizon (Verizon, hello?) and Nathan's rich neighbor David Choak - a thinly veiled version of the Koch brothers.
The biggest problem this show has? It's not funny. Like, at all. I did not once laugh in the 6-7 episodes I watched. Not even exhale-through-the-nose-sort-of-funny laugh. The jokes are immature, obvious and tedious.
This show is a goddam mess that doesn't work on any level and that's why I've been going absolutely fucking insane reading glowing reviews and hearing from a lot of friends that they liked it. I mean, am I crazy? I feel like I'm going crazy.