It’s a blend of Altered Carbon and Defending Your Life except it doesn’t look anything like that at all. In Amazon Prime’s new series Upload, the afterlife is hell, or close to it, because it’s gone digital. And if you want to have a good afterlife you better be rich, because otherwise you risk weeks a month without service. Like Altered Carbon, your memory becomes uploaded after your body dies and like Defending Your Life you get some help, not via heaven’s legal counsel as revealed in that film, but by customer service agents standing by to help via virtual reality. But it’s the chemistry of the story’s two lead characters that is touted as the reason viewers will come back after the first episode.
Like the social media upvoting and downvoting gone amuck found in first season episode of The Orville, “Majority Rule,” social media is parodied here similarly along with technology and modern culture. The male lead will be familiar to many borg readers: Robbie Amell of Marvel’s Legends of Tomorrow, and most recently Code 8. Amell plays Nathan, a computer coder who gets in a car wreck early on in the season. He is uploaded to avoid death, but that doesn’t get in the way of squabbles with his very alive girlfriend, played by Allegra Edwards (Briarpatch). But the focus is on Nathan and his helper in this strange new world, Nora, played by Andy Allo (Black Lightning).
Other regulars include genre favorite and The X-Files smoking man himself, William B. Davis and Jessica Tuck (Super 8, Grimm).
The series is directed by Jeffrey Blitz of The Office (U.S. version) fame, and created by The Office co-creator Greg Daniels. So you have an idea of what kind of humor is in store.
Here is a preview for Upload:
A bit sci-fi, a bit comedy, and a bit fantasy, look for all ten episodes of Upload, streaming exclusively on Amazon Prime, today, May 1.
C.J. Bunce
Editor
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