May 6, 2020 8:00 AM

Upload Is a Clunky Parable About Class in a Digital Afterlife

The Amazon comedy has a smart premise, but it's light on ambition.

an injured man reaching out from his chair

In 2033, the Gordita Crunch is sold virtually by fast food goliath Nokia Taco Bell. Mega-airline corporation Frontier Spirit United offers 30-minute flights from New York to Los Angeles with the option of Economy Minus. The most popular reality show is Baby Botox—which is exactly what it sounds like. Body cams have been repurposed for sexual encounters as a means of documenting consent. Toast is conveniently sold in cans and only the super rich can afford real meat. Gaze upon this imperfect tech-branded wilderness with anxious delight, our capitalist future on steroids is fast approaching.

On Upload, the new Amazon comedy from TV writer-producer Greg Daniels (King of The Hill, The Office, Parks & Recreation), the future is rendered with cartoonish strokes. In this hyper capitalist hereafter, people upload their consciousness into luxury cloud servers and “live” forever. It’s utopia, but with monthly lodging fees and the occasional in-app purchase. Money buys time and time is all people really crave. Just as class hierarchies bisect the real world, so do they in the afterlife.

At the top of this corporatized pyramid are five major tech companies that have control over these digital heavens, and the most lavish destination among them is Lakeview, famously “modeled on the grand Victorian hotels of the United States and Canada.” In Daniels’ clunky class parable and quasi-murder-whodunit, Nathan (Robbie Amell) is rebooted into Lakeview’s posh wonderland following a mysterious self-driving car crash. “Forever is just sooo long to think about,” he tells his girlfriend Ingrid (Allegra Edwards), who’s footing the bill and comes from a “Horizen family with unlimited data” (Horizen is the company that runs Lakeview).

Overseeing Lakeview residents are customer service reps, or “Angels” as they’re called, who work out of a converted loft in Dumbo, Brooklyn. Nora (an endearing Andy Allo) is tasked with Nathan’s caretaking. Before long, their check-ins ripen into mutual affection; they’ve got feelings for one another but it’s complicated—Nathan is confined to virtual living and Nora isn’t. During one conversation, she takes him to see the “2 gigs,” Lakeview’s “lowest class of upload.” The floor is a stark contrast to what Nathan is afforded on his level. With such little data, customers are limited in what they can eat and enjoy. Lean Cuisine uses the cafeteria to test menu items—“Fiesta Jalapeno Creamed Meat” anyone?—and extra amenities, like books, are provided as free sample versions. (All the Harry Potter books go blank after page 20.) Upset that Horizen refuses its residents basic fundamental conveniences, Nathan fumes. “It’s just code,” he says. Nora agrees, but it all comes down to business: “They want people to pay for upgrades.”

Virtual aftercare is a very big business—$600 billion in fact. It's the reason why Nathan is at Lakeview. Before the crash, he worked as a coder, developing a free version of a digital afterlife called Beyond, which posed a potential threat to the industry. Inside Daniels’ greedy sci-fi dystopia, the working class believe uploading is a human right, but not everyone sees it that way. Behind the absurdities of this commodified future is a story about dark control: the rich want more of it and the powerless have little say in how they’re exploited.

The meatier questions of Upload—What purpose should a digital afterlife serve, who should be allowed in, and what does this say about us as a society?—end up being minor keys. One question the show brushes aside almost entirely is, what happens to the people left behind, those left grieving? We never find out. We don't get the full benefit of seeing in both directions. Much of what floats the series to its surprising finish are Daniels’ characteristic tricks; look close and you’ll notice that Upload is a workplace comedy about oddballs of every age and status, only it’s the virtual planes of 2033 this time, not the halls of small-town Indiana government or the offices of Dunder Mifflin.

The sticky moral virtues apparent on the best after/alternative life shows of the Peak TV era—The Good Place, Forever, Russian Doll—were amplified by their obtuse curiosity. They were alluring propositions because of their boldness and care. You never felt stiffed by their urges, even as they occasionally detoured into nonsense. You always felt full from their pursuits. Daniels is stellar at outfitting his world with silly esoterica, and even as I found myself agreeing with the show’s thesis—digital utopias can’t be perfected!—Upload is light on ambition. You can’t help but want it to take a bigger swing.

One of the stranger consequences of this moment is how Covid-19 gives Upload a profound resonance that it would typically lack outside normal circumstances. 260,000 people are dead from the virus—the majority of which have not received proper burials, many of whom are disproportionately black. If uploading were a possibility today, how many of those individuals would have been denied entrance into a place like Lakeview, or one like it, because of strained financial situations, because the way the world works is the way it always has for them: fiercely unkind.

My mom once told me she wouldn’t mind living forever. The memory is a little spotty, but I do remember recoiling in a kind of comic disbelief upon hearing it. Forever!? How fantastically ridiculous and sweet, I thought. She wanted to navigate this stinker of a planet for all of eternity; she wanted to soak up everything it was willing to teach her, to live a little more radiantly if given the chance.

I don’t share her views. Not totally. I prefer my mortality narratives neat and tidy, adhering to time's linear flow. We sludge—some of us more miraculously than others—from point A to point B. And then we die. But if that day does eventually come for my mom, who am I to say no? She'd have every right.