"Upload isn’t flawless as a television show, partly because it seems so fascinated by the dynamics of the world it has constructed that its attention to plot and character are secondary," says Sophie Gilbert. "But as a philosophical projection, buffeted by the jaunty humor and irreverently satirical eye of its creator, Greg Daniels (The Office, Parks and Recreation), it makes an argument that’s hard to counter. As technological and scientific advancements bring humans closer to the concept of the digital afterlife—where souls can be uploaded to live peacefully in a simulated universe and even continue communing with the living—the stakes of such an existence move beyond ethical concerns to existential ones: Do people have the capacity to conceive of an online utopia, given the frailty of human nature and the imperfectability of the real world? Any version of heaven created by people, Upload argues, would inevitably have the same rampant inequality and toxic consumerism of life on Earth, but without the parts that actually make it worth living. This kind of setup isn’t the most obvious canvas for a comedy. But it’s a subject that TV keeps returning to, in dystopian series such as Black Mirror and Altered Carbon, and thematically in comedies such as The Good Place (created by Daniels’s Parks and Recreation collaborator Michael Schur) and Forever. On Westworld, hosts can be rewarded for their brutish lives among humans in a kind of robot heaven named the Sublime. Try imagining a kind of heaven designed by and for humans, though, and the scenarios immediately get darker, as though we’re unable to conceptualize an afterlife that won’t eventually ruin us."
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TOPICS: Upload, Prime Video, Greg Daniels