Cupertino might be made for your mom, but it’s a good take on tech

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Cupertino brings the tech backlash to the CBS procedural — an initially awkward combination, but with rewarding results. The show starts off just slightly unsure, but quickly figures out what to do with these strange times, creating fictionalized dupes of the Zizians, Polymarket, Jeff Bezos’ looksmaxxing obsession, OpenAI stealing Scarlett Johansson’s voice, and the fight for AI guardrails, among other familiar tales, and using them to speak to the feeling of helplessness in the face of rapid change that extends well beyond the greater San Francisco area. It turns out the seemingly outdated to

Please don’t think Cupertino is some kind of Blue Bloods Bay Area or CSI: The Computer. (Sorry, I mean CSI: Cyber, a real show that lasted two seasons and starred Ted Danson, obviously.) Yes, the show is network TV, in the old-fashioned, 20-episodes-in-a-season sense, and it’s airing on CBS in the highly suspicious age of Ellison. But it has certain pedigree coming from creators Robert and Michelle King, the married couple behind the wonderful Elsbeth, Evil, The Good Wife, and The Good Fight. The Kings are often credited as uniquely sophisticated for network TV. But that still leaves some big

Also, yes, it is (mostly) a case-of-the-week show about an upstart Silicon Valley law firm taking on Big Tech one suit at a time. Price Siffre (pronounced “cipher”) is made up of lawyers Michael Price (Mike Colter, aka Luke Cage) and Olivia Siffre (Rachel Keller, Legion), along with their assistant Christy Palladino (Ella Stiller), all of whom left the same evil AI company under not-great circumstances in the pilot. (My recommendation is to skip that first episode — just know they sue tech companies — or at least don’t hold it against the show.) Cipher maybe isn’t the wrong word for this main

Maybe that’s not quite selling you — two out of five members of a fake girl group from a criminally underwatched sitcom and a bunch of ripped-from-the-headlines tech trials, made by people in their 60s for people in their 60s. But the Kings have their bona fides when it comes to the subject matter — The Good Wife was called “the most tech-savvy show on TV” by Wired in 2013, the same year that BuzzFeed said “everyone in tech needs to be watching” it. That show tackled Bitcoin, viral videos, NSA spying, and the goofy-ass names of 2010s tech startups without being hacky or hammy. Granted, being “

One of the creators’ greatest strengths is worldbuilding, and as their vision of Silicon Valley expands it starts to cohere. This is a landscape packed with data brokers, rationalists, underpaid AI trainers, software developers who put ASCII dicks in their code as a gag, gerontocratic judges, petty billionaires, and the frustrated contractors who build their offices and bunkers. That’s where a perceived weakness becomes a strength: The longer network season allows for tangents, explorations, multi-episode arcs, successful fake-outs, and surprise recurrences. These figures can, do, and likely w

This isn’t just good TV, it creates a sense of truth and claustrophobia that the show benefits from; these well-drawn people (mostly) all feel caught together in a highly specific and completely deranging reality. So it follows that the prevailing mood is sort of a peppy paranoia — the dark twist of actual reality, though, is that we’re post-paranoid. Suspicion about the reaches and aims of Big Tech has been shown to be grounded and, frankly, reasonable. The firm’s work suing “the big seven” fictionalized companies comes at a time when every device could be listening and deepfakes mean nothing

Somehow still, though, the show approaches its central preoccupation — AI — with a healthy fear but surprising lack of judgment. This can be frustrating if you’re sensitive about bots being anthropomorphized (oh, that’s happening, all right), and there were moments early on when I feared the “wrong” lessons were being imparted. But the lack of clean or easy answers makes this a subtler take on what we should be scared of today.