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\n Cupertino airs Thursdays at 10 p.m. on CBS.\n <\/p>\n
\n Cupertino taps Robert and Michelle King\u2019s deep bench of New York theater legends to skewer America\u2019s current heart of darkness.
\n Photo: Elizabeth Fisher\/CBS\n <\/p>\n
Back in the halcyon Obama-era days of The Good Wife<\/a>, when the lawyers at Lockhart & Gardner took on a case that intersected with the burgeoning tech industry, the show\u2019s creators Robert and Michelle King often refracted a real story about Google, Facebook, or Amazon through the prism of a fictional conglomerate known as ChumHum. Created by a Zuckerberg-ish guy named Neil Gross (John Benjamin Hickey), ChumHum got itself entangled in fights over the secrecy of its search-engine algorithm, price-fixing its employees\u2019 salaries, Gross\u2019s marital woes, the theft of a prototype tablet very much like an iPad, and, later on, the algorithmic discrimination propagated by \u201cChummyMaps.\u201d<\/a> By the time of the Trump administration, as tech companies got in bed with oppressive regimes, the Kings devoted an episode of follow-up series The Good Fight<\/a> to ChumHum\u2019s modifying its search results to appease Chinese censors, including a meta bit in which they posted a disclaimer<\/a> that CBS itself had censored an animated short they\u2019d planned to include.<\/p>\n All of this is to say that if you\u2019ve ever appreciated a Good Wife or Fight episode about ChumHum, or are even just now laughing about the concept of a tech company named ChumHum, you will love the Kings\u2019 new drama, Cupertino, a legal procedural that rehomes the zany, angsty fun of The Good Wife and Fight and more than a little of the existential dread of Evil<\/a> to America\u2019s current heart of darkness in Northern California. The story kicks off with a team-up between two castoffs of big tech: a pedigreed lawyer named Michael Price, played by Mike Colter (a regular of the Kings\u2019 dramas), who has been kicked out of a start-up he co-founded, and a fresh-out-of-school but sharp Christian lawyer named Olivia Siffre (Rachel Keller), cut from the same company after rebuffing sexual advances from the other co-founder. To get their revenge, the two team up to found their own firm and stick it to the Goliaths of tech.<\/p>\n Michael and Olivia are factory-standard templates of the Kings\u2019 universe: earnest repositories for exposition who aren\u2019t especially engaging themselves but get interesting when paired with more idiosyncratic characters. Their upstart firm, which operates out of Potemkin offices that have more fake walls than actual employees, takes on a receptionist who becomes their investigator, a sardonic, harder-partying variant of The Good Wife\u2019s Marissa Gold played by Ella Stiller (of The Comeback<\/a> and being Ben\u2019s daughter). Soon, there\u2019s an infusion of cash and chaos from a big benefactor: Busy Philipps, playing a character named Natalia Boutella, who\u2019s the ex of a tech kingpin (a peevish Fisher Stevens) and answers the question, \u201cWhat if MacKenzie Scott were blonde and had a law degree and an ax to grind with it?\u201d<\/p>\n The weirdness of Cupertino follows a curve of exponential growth. The first few episodes present material that could\u2019ve been on The Good Wife, including a few cases of the week that are shopworn but fun enough; in one, Michael and Olivia represent a put-upon coder played by Nik Dodani, who quickly becomes their resident expert on explaining technobabble. Soon, however, the Kings\u2019 fondness for probing the strangest possible intersections of legal practice pushes Cupertino in odd and hilarious directions. One episode takes place with the characters all calling into a Zoom while stuck in traffic to debate an AI algorithm\u2019s decision to assign an organ to one donor over the other. (In a classic network-drama twist, midway through the episode, evidence emerges that forces the legal teams to switch arguments while still stuck in traffic.)<\/p>\n Cupertino also continues the Kings\u2019 tradition of hiring great New York theater actors to play guest roles, often as rival lawyers and judges. When Michael and Olivia take on a music service duplicating artists\u2019 work to get more streams, the presiding voice from the bench is nine-time Tony winner Danny Burstein, who turns out to be a Parrothead bummed that slop has infiltrated his playlist of Jimmy Buffett favorites. And, in what turns out to be an essential acid ingredient in the Cupertino recipe, Price and Siffre often find themselves going up against a lawyer for a boutique firm representing the mutual interests of the big guys. Played by a fantastically slinky and devious Ren\u00e9e Elise Goldsberry, Nichole E. Ferebee channels elements of Girls5eva\u2019s Wickie Roy and the devil\u2019s associate Lola on Damn Yankees and has sparkling chemistry with Price, often tempting him to return to corporate life. If these companies have become so all-powerful, why not give up the fight and join them?<\/p>\n Given the accelerating nature of the industry Cupertino covers \u2014 both in terms of how quickly these companies can innovate and how quickly they can bludgeon regulation around their work into the shape they want \u2014 a broadcast show about Silicon Valley occasionally feels a step off from reality. A recurring figure in the first set of episodes is a mysterious whistleblower named Bo (played by an unsettlingly chipper Rob McClure), who refuses to identify much about himself, to the bafflement of all involved. (He pays them in bitcoin.) They do learn he\u2019s connected to the latest advancements in AI technology, however, which leads to some storylines that, depending on the latest headlines you\u2019ve read about Anthropic and OpenAI potentially leading us to doomsday<\/a>, are maybe too cuddly and humane. But if there\u2019s inevitable imprecision in the specifics of Cupertino\u2019s plotlines, the sprawling, maximal nature of broadcast television allows it to take a vast survey of the texture and culture of the world it covers that\u2019s mostly accurate (at least based on the ten episodes of season one\u2019s whopping 20-episode order that were shared with critics).<\/p>\n Silicon Valley has developed its own strange niches and cultures, which gives the Kings and their writers a lot of material to work with: There are legal experts calling in from nude parties at Burning Man, AI cults that all but resemble fringe corners of effective altruism, weirdo antisocial billionaires obsessed with building bunkers. There, broadcast television, which has become its own kind of underdog in the streaming age, gets its revenge against the titan that consumed it. Look at these weirdos who rule the world now, Cupertino argues. Don\u2019t they make for great television? They may have subsumed much of our lives into their ever-growing monopolies, but that can\u2019t stop us from laughing at them every week.<\/p>\n Sign up for the Vulture Daily<\/p>\n An entertainment newsletter for the pop-culture obsessed.<\/p>\n Vox Media, LLC Terms and Privacy Notice<\/p>\n