Amazon Prime Video has an original series called ‘Upload’. Here’s the premise: It’s the future. The rich can have their consciousness uploaded when they die. They can spend their digital afterlife in a VR country club/resort forever (or until they run out of money, whichever comes first). In this world, the main character is working on an open source version of the digital afterlife so he can give it away to those less fortunate who can’t afford this paradise. But before he’s able to release it to the public, he’s murdered. So his rich girlfriend pays to have his consciousness uploaded. Now he’s in this VR country club with a bunch of billionaires, trying to solve his own murder.
With that premise alone, I’m interested. Sounds totally cyberpunk. The rich/poor divide, uploaded consciousness, murder mystery, all hints of Altered Carbon. And yet… it’s a romantic comedy.
That entire premise I described above is just the sub-plot, the B story. What the show is actually about is the love triangle between the main character, his rich girlfriend (who’s paying for his digital afterlife but treats him as an accessory), and the tech support rep assigned to his case (who’s a genuinely nice person). He’s falling in love with the tech support rep but if he breaks up with his psycho girlfriend she’ll stop paying his afterlife bills and he’ll die. Cue wacky sit-com antics.
If the focus was reversed and the character was spending all his time investigating his murder while gradually falling in love with this tech support rep, I’d probably really enjoy it. But instead, the focus is on the love triangle and his murder investigation is mostly just something to talk about while taking long walks with his tech support rep.
Now, obviously, the show simply isn’t for me. It never claimed to be a gritty cyberpunk murder mystery; it was always marketed as a fun-loving rom-com. So it’s my own expectations that are flawed. But the world-building is so close to a solid cyberpunk tv show that I can feel the wasted potential. I guess I’d say it’s the most cyberpunk rom-com I’ve ever seen, but that’s a really odd category to have.
Trailer, in case anyone is interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZfZj2bn_xg
I watched the first season and about half of the second when they came out, but going off of my half memory of the show I found it to be fine. It was a solid enough romcom with a sci fi flavor, the jokes all landed how they should. I recall that in the second season, the tech support rep joined this terrorist cell that was trying to take down the company running the digital afterlife, but I don’t recall where(if anywhere) they took that.
I think going in looking for anything but a cyberpunk backdrop to a mostly unrelated story is a mistake. It would be quite interesting seeing another story explore the concepts set up by Upgrade or Black Mirror’s “San Junipero”, but I couldn’t tell you where to find that.
The second season ends with them on a train to go do that. So, technically a cliffhanger, but since the driving storyline is the two characters getting together, they didn’t write it like a cliffhanger.
So you might’ve actually watched the whole series. 😅
Shows how much I actually remember haha, it must have been whatever the next season was where I dropped off. I recall her spending time in a commune and getting rehired at the company while secretly working for the terrorists, but I don’t remember anything after that. So either I stopped watching or the ending was so uninteresting that it got purged from my memory lmao