‘Upload’ Keeps Getting Better, Weirder, and Even More Meta

There's a lot to like about Prime Video’s Upload, the barely speculative AI-afterlife rom-com from creator Greg Daniels (The Office) that kicks off its third season Oct. 20. The ensemble’s virtual-versus-real world performances? Sharp. The digital-heaven production design? Cartoonish and absurd enough to read as camp. And the dialogue! For the series’ human and AI characters alike, Daniels and the Season 3 writing team have turned out some arrestingly natural lines.

Still, it’s impressive that Upload has become so likeable. It is, after all, a show whose central drama pivots around a corporate-owned, spam-filled neoliberal hellscape—one that hews so uncomfortably close to the trajectory of our real world that several throwaway jokes from the first two seasons have already, to some degree, come true.

In case you’re just catching up, here’s Upload’s basic deal: At the start of Season 1, Robbie Amell’s bro-coder Nathan died in a freak driverless car accident and had his consciousness unwillingly “uploaded” by his spoiled rich girlfriend, Ingrid (Allegra Edwards), to Lakeview, a very luxe, very WASP-y digital afterlife run by tech giant Horizen. Once there, Nathan discovered he had been uploaded sans some important memories— namely, that his driverless car accident wasn’t so accidental after all. Turns out that in order to prevent him and his business partner from releasing a no-cost digital afterlife alternative called Freeyond, a mystery big tech bigwig had Nathan (dun dun dunnnn) murdered.

Read more at The Daily Beast.