Cupertino brings the technological backlash to the CBS procedure – an initially tricky combination, but with rewarding results. The series begins with a bit of uncertainty, but quickly figures out what to do with these strange times, creating fictional dupes of Ziziens, Polymarket, Jeff Bezos’ lookmaxxing obsession, OpenAI stealing Scarlett Johansson’s voice, and the fight for AI guardrails, among other familiar stories, and using them to talk about the feeling of helplessness in the face of rapid change that extends far beyond the greater San Francisco area. It turns out that the seemingly obsolete tools of broadcast television are a fantastic way to approach our uncertain future.
Please don’t think Cupertino is a kind of Blue Bloods Bay Area Or CSI: The computer. (Sorry, I mean CSI: Cybera real show that ran for two seasons and starred Ted Danson, obviously.) Yes, the series is network television, in the old-fashioned sense of 20 episodes per season, and it aired on CBS in the highly suspect Ellison era. But it does have some pedigree coming from creators Robert and Michelle King, the married couple behind the marvelous Elsbeth, Wrong, The good wifeAnd The good fight. The Kings are often considered particularly sophisticated for network television. But that still leaves big questions about what this series is and who it’s for.
Plus, yes, it’s (mostly) a case-of-the-week show about a new Silicon Valley law firm taking on Big Tech one lawsuit at a time. Price Siffre (pronounced “cipher”) is comprised of attorneys Michael Price (Mike Colter, aka Luke Cage) and Olivia Siffre (Rachel Keller, Legion), as well as their assistant Christy Palladino (Ella Stiller), all of whom left the same evil AI company under not-so-great circumstances in the pilot. (My recommendation is to skip this first episode – just be aware that they’re going after tech companies – or at least not hold a grudge against the show.) Cipher may not be the wrong word for this main group: Michael is handsome and cautious, Christy is a classic King type of plucky investigator, and Olivia is religious and loves musicals, so she was introduced to listening to Divine spell – it probably took me four whole episodes to forgive the series for this cute detail. The whole thing really starts to come together when it’s revealed to be a secret. Girls5eva reunion, with the additions of Renée Elise Goldsberry as Michael’s ex/rival and Busy Philipps as MacKenzie Scott (formerly Bezos) if she was a lot of fun and a little drunk.
Maybe that doesn’t really sell you: two out of five members of a fake girl group from a criminally under-watched sitcom and a series of headline-grabbing tech trials done by people in their 60s for people in their 70s. But the Kings have their good faith when it comes to the subject – The good wife was called “the most technological show on television” by Wired in 2013, the same year as BuzzFeed said “everyone in tech needs to watch it.” This show covered Bitcoin, viral videos, NSA spying, and the wacky names of 2010s tech startups without being hacky or hammy. Certainly, being “good at tech” on an Obama-era show about Chicago lawyers is different from being “good at tech” on a 2026 show called Cupertino.
One of the creators’ greatest strengths is world-building, and as their vision of Silicon Valley expands, it begins to come together. It’s a landscape filled with data brokers, rationalists, underpaid AI trainers, software developers who put asshole ASCII in their code as a gag, gerontocratic judges, small billionaires and frustrated entrepreneurs who build their offices and bunkers. This is where a perceived weakness becomes a strength: the longer network season allows for tangents, explorations, multi-episode arcs, successful knockoffs and surprise recurrences. These characters can, do, and probably will come back, and the show has the time and space to let them fan out and fade away until their reappearance is a delight. It’s a trick rarely as surprising or amusing in six- to 13-episode streaming seasons, when a detail from Episode 3 should pay off in Episode 7.
It’s not only good television, it creates a sense of truth and claustrophobia that the series benefits from; these (for the most part) well-drawn characters all feel caught together in a very particular and completely disturbed reality. So it follows that the prevailing mood is a kind of high-spirited paranoia – the dark side of reality, however, is that we are post-paranoid. Suspicions about the reach and goals of big tech have proven to be well-founded and, frankly, reasonable. The company’s work to pursue the “big seven” shell companies comes at a time when every device can be listening and deepfakes mean nothing is guaranteed to be what it appears to be. Who wouldn’t look over their shoulder, under their desk and into the source code?
Somehow, though, the series approaches its central concern – AI – with healthy fear but a surprising lack of judgment. This can be frustrating if you’re sensitive to the anthropomorphization of robots (oh, it happens, okay), and there were times early on when I worried the “wrong” lessons were being taught. But the lack of clear or easy answers makes this a more subtle view of what we should be afraid of today.
Cupertino comes at a time when the technological reaction is manifesting itself on screens in a very important way – in cinemas with The social report, You can see everything, ArtificialAnd Muskand on TV too with The altruistsa Netflix show on FTX coming in November, and that of AMC The audacity hit Netflix last summer. But while The audacity I felt like I was preaching (and sometimes shouting) to the choir, CupertinoThe key is that it’s about to be introduced to an audience who may not follow the intricacies of the Hugging Face hack and riff on these real-life themes, stories, and archetypes with intelligence, nuance, and a little leftover joy.
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