Cupertino draws on Robert and Michelle King’s group of New York theater legends to skewer America’s current heart of darkness.
Photo: Elizabeth Fisher/CBS
In the peaceful times of the Obama era, The good wifeWhen Lockhart & Gardner lawyers took on a case that intersected with the booming tech industry, the series’ creators, Robert and Michelle King, often refracted a real-life story about Google, Facebook or Amazon through the prism of a fictional conglomerate known as ChumHum. Created by a Zuckerberg-like guy named Neil Gross (John Benjamin Hickey), ChumHum became embroiled in struggles over the secrecy of its search engine algorithm, the price-fixing of its employees’ salaries, Gross’s marital woes, the theft of a prototype tablet very similar to an iPad, and, later, the algorithmic discrimination propagated by “ChummyMaps.” During the era of the Trump administration, as tech companies aligned themselves with oppressive regimes, the Kings dedicated an episode of a follow-up series The good fight to ChumHum’s editing of its search results to appease Chinese censors, including a meta-bit in which they posted a warning that CBS itself had censored an animated short they had planned to include.
All this to say that if you have ever enjoyed a Good wife Or Struggle episode on ChumHum, or even if you just scoff at the concept of a tech company named ChumHum, you’ll love the Kings’ new drama, Cupertinoa legal procedure which rediscovers the zany and distressing pleasure of The good wife And Struggle and more than a little of the existential fear of Wrong in America’s current heart of darkness, Northern California. The story kicks off with a team-up between two big tech rejects: a race lawyer named Michael Price, played by Mike Colter (a Kings drama regular), who was kicked out of a start-up he co-founded, and a fresh-out-of-school but sharp Christian lawyer named Olivia Siffre (Rachel Keller), kicked out of the same firm after rebuffing the sexual advances of the other co-founder. To take revenge, the two men team up to found their own company and stick it to the Goliaths of technology.
Michael and Olivia are standard models of the Kings universe: serious repositories for exposition that aren’t particularly engaging but become interesting when paired with more idiosyncratic characters. Their new company, operating out of Potemkin’s offices that have more fake walls than real employees, hires a receptionist who becomes their investigator, a sardonic, party-loving variation of The good wifeMarissa Gold from , played by Ella Stiller (from The return and being Ben’s daughter). Soon there’s an infusion of money and chaos from a major benefactor: Busy Philipps, playing a character named Natalia Boutella, who is the ex of a tech baron (a brooding Fisher Stevens) and answers the question: “What if MacKenzie Scott was blonde and had a law degree and an ax to grind?”
The strangeness of Cupertino follows an exponential growth curve. Early episodes feature material that could have been broadcast The good wifeincluding a few crates from the week which are worn but quite amusing; in one, Michael and Olivia play a coder played by Nik Dodani, who quickly becomes their resident expert at explaining technobabble. Soon, however, the Kings’ penchant for probing the strangest possible intersections of legal practice leads them to Cupertino in strange and hilarious directions. One episode takes place with the characters all calling into a Zoom while stuck in traffic debating an AI algorithm’s decision to award an organ to one donor over another. (In a classic network drama twist, mid-episode, evidence emerges that forces the legal teams to change their argument while getting stuck in traffic.)
Cupertino also continues the Kings’ tradition of hiring major New York theater actors to play guest roles, often as rival lawyers and judges. When Michael and Olivia embark on a music service duplicating artists’ work to get more streams, the voice presiding from the bench is nine-time Tony winner Danny Burstein, who turns out to be a Parrothead disappointed that dirt has infiltrated his playlist of Jimmy Buffett favorites. And, in what turns out to be an essential acidic ingredient in the Cupertino recipe, Price and Siffre often find themselves facing a lawyer from a specialized firm representing the mutual interests of the big guys. Played by an incredibly tight and sly Renée Elise Goldsberry, Nichole E. Ferebee channels elements of Girls5evaIt’s Wickie Roy and Lola, the devil’s sidekick, on Damn Yankees and has a sparkling chemistry with Price, often tempting him back to corporate life. If these companies have become so all-powerful, why not give up the fight and join them?
Given the accelerated nature of the sector Cupertino covers – both in terms of how quickly these companies can innovate and how quickly they can bludgeon the regulations around their work into whatever form they want – a show broadcast about Silicon Valley sometimes seems removed from reality. A recurring character in the first set of episodes is a mysterious whistleblower named Bo (played by an unsettling chipper Rob McClure), who refuses to identify much about himself, to the perplexity of everyone involved. (He pays them in bitcoin.) They learn, however, that he’s connected to the latest advances in AI technology, leading to storylines that, depending on the latest headlines you’ve read about Anthropic and OpenAI potentially leading us to the end of the world, are perhaps too cuddly and human. But if there is an unavoidable imprecision in the details of Cupertino‘s plots, sprawling, peak-out nature of television allows it to conduct a broad study of the texture and culture of the world it covers that is mostly accurate (at least based on the ten episodes of the first season’s massive 20-episode order that were shared with critics).
Silicon Valley has developed its own weird niches and cultures, which gives the Kings and their writers plenty of material to work with: legal experts calling at naked parties at Burning Man, AI cults that almost seem like fringe corners of effective altruism, weird antisocial billionaires obsessed with building bunkers. There, television, which has become something of an underdog in the streaming era, takes its revenge against the titan that devoured it. Look at these weirdos running the world now, Cupertino argues. Don’t they make great television? They may have subsumed much of our lives into their ever-expanding monopolies, but that can’t stop us from making fun of them every week.
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