Amazon's Upload is the latest show in which the afterlife darkly mimics our earthly existence

The Atlantic

"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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• It's best to not approach Upload as a comedy: "It looks like, sounds like, and often acts like a comedy," says Kathryn VanArendonk. "It’s got jokes! It’s got a familiar brightly colored palette, a light emotional touch, and a run time that generally hovers around the half-hour mark. It’s also a show from Greg Daniels, who is most famous for The Office and exclusively as someone who makes TV comedies. Obviously it’s a comedy! But the best way to watch Upload is to mostly ignore the comedy-shaped things, or to treat them as window dressings that are secondary to its main goal. Upload, at its heart, is a more cuddly looking Black Mirror."
• Upload will make you think about your own digital afterlife: "As a sitcom with a tendency toward the most obvious sight gags, it is unlikely that Upload will be embraced as a kind of future probe in the way that Black Mirror, Altered Carbon, Westworld, or other series have been," says Alexander Halavais. "It is hard, though, to leave the show without wondering what will happen in your own digital afterlife in a world where more and more of our selves are wrapped up in what we create technologically—our social media pages, our Spotify playlists, our email correspondence, our Animal Crossing homes, our Pinterest boards, our financial transactions, video recordings of our work happy hours, biometrics from our workouts, our trips on Waze, or the traces of our daily routines in the records of the increasingly smart cities and organizations around us."