Season two of Upload is on Prime Video March 11. The show comes from Greg Daniels and is about a time in the future when humans can choose to be “uploaded” into a virtual afterlife.
Upload is a comedy, with a few other genres sprinkled in. Daniels said he originally pitched it as “a romantic comedy-sci fi-mystery-satire, with philosophical undertones–sort of like a joke that I was gonna try and shove that many genres together.”
Season one came out in April 2020. Daniels, whose credits include The Office and King of the Hill, said it was “a little nerve-wracking” to release this kind of show at the start of the pandemic.
“I think a lot of the themes in the show were only made more relevant by what everybody was going through,” he said. “We were all going through a strange, futuristic, partially virtual experience.”
Robbie Amell plays Nathan, Andy Allo is Nora, Kevin Bigley is Luke and Allegra Edwards plays Ingrid.
Season two sees Nathan at a crossroads. Ex-girlfriend Ingrid has arrived at Lakeview hoping to strengthen their relationship, but Nathan yearns for customer service “angel” Nora. Nora, for her part, is off the grid and involved with an anti-tech rebel group.
“The two characters that are in a romantic relationship that you care about are going in opposite directions,” Daniels told B+C. “Are they going to continue in opposite directions, or are we gonna find a way to bend them back toward each other?”
Prime Video adds, “Season two is packed with new near-future concepts, including Lakeview’s newest in-app digital baby program called, ‘prototykes,’ and other satirical glimpses of the technological advances and headaches to come.”
Daniels executive produces Upload with Howard Klein. He said Upload dates back to his writer’s notebook when he was at Saturday Night Live, which was way back in the late ‘80s. He tried it as a novel, then it was in the works at HBO, before Upload ended up on Prime Video.
Loads of research goes into Upload, he said, including studying the technology “waiting in the wings, and exaggerating it slightly.”
Daniels has guessed right on a few things. Facebook named its VR portal Horizon Worlds, and Horizen runs the after-life world Nathan is living. Nora’s father 3D prints food.
“That’s actually happening,” said Daniels. “People are printing steaks now from 3D printers…Stuff we maybe imagined as a joke is actually happening.”
Daniels made his name in broadcast TV before coming to streaming, though he noted that a broadcast show he developed, The Office, has done pretty well on the digital platforms. “It’s hard to say the broadcast model doesn’t work on streaming,” he said.
He liked having a seven-episode season on streaming, and making the cinematography sparkle. “There’s time in the edit room to polish everything perfectly,” Daniels said.
Besides comedy and sci fi and the rest of the genres it represents, Daniels said there’s even “a few horror moments” in the Upload mix. “It keeps you on your toes and you never know what’s coming next,” he said. ■
