There are only a few showrunners
these days whose presence alone behind a TV series will guarantee me to
instantly watch. Those of you who are long time readers of my column know that
two of them are Robert and Michelle King who ever since they launched The
Good Wife back in 2009 have been the most consistently brilliant forces in
television. Even more remarkable they are perhaps the only ones I know of whose
greatest work is in network TV as opposed to cable or streaming.
This may come as heresy to those
who preferred Evil when it was on Paramount Plus but the truth is the
Kings have always handled the constraints of network TV with far more grace and
an ability to gently poke fun of their medium perhaps better than all those who
try to do so with the meta commentary we see. And they do so not by trying to
break the fourth wall but ever so casually hinting at it.
So the fact that the Kings are
returning to the genre that put them on the map: the legal drama is one of the
great joys of the 2026 fall season. And while some could see Cupertino as
a collection of so much of the King's greatest hits – which honestly would be
enough for most viewers – I'd say they're approach is, as is always their
fashion, completely appropriate for the era we live in.
Those of us who were fans of The
Good Wife know that the Kings have always been comfortable poking fun as
Silicon Valley before it was hip. One of the minor characters on that show was
Chumhum, a social media/search engine that every attorney on the show knew was
a great evil but was always trying to win as a client for the money. The founder, played throughout two series by
the wondrous John Benjamin Hickey, was
played by a man who knew he was a master of the universe and loved to toy with
the firms. After one such lawsuit against him he personally made it so that
when Will Gardener's name came up you would immediately find 'disbarred lawyer'
and this did nothing to stop either Will nor his countless partners from trying
to land him as a client even as it became increasingly clear how malevolent a
force he is.
Cupertino makes it clear from the beginning
it's not going to take approach. It begins with two attorneys from a major
start-up Michael Cypher and Olivia Siffre being fired from a major start-up
simultaneously. Both of them try to console each other but Olivia quickly
learns that the firm has chosen to use her voice for an AI chatbot. Both she
and Michael unite to sue this firm for both wrongful termination and other
forces.
Michale Price is played by Mike
Colter, whose been part of the King's world since he played Lamont Bishop, a
Chicago drug lord disguised as a legitimate businessman back in 2009. Colter
has been extraordinary at playing morally ambiguous characters throughout his
entire career even when they are heroic, whether it is Luke Cage, so its
wonderful that he's finally getting a chance to play a hero, pure and simple.
Price knows the grey areas of civil litigation as well as Alicia Florrick and
Elsbeth Tascioni did and its wonderful
watching his large presence get to deliver the kind of sizzling legalese he
never got a chance. Like so many King characters he has a complicated past
history, both with his father (let's hope we see more of Joe Morton) and a
former paramour from New York, Nichole Ferebee who in the last episode became
an adversary.
Nichole is played by Renee
Goldsberry who has also been a part of The Good Wife as Geneva Pine, a
Cook County attorney who would pop up as an adversary to the Florrick's
throughout their entire run. Nor is this the only King meta reference. One of
the backers of the firm who Olivia gets to work for is someone divorced from a
Silicon Valley bigwig, Natalia Boutella played by Busy Phillipps. And if you
are a fan of cult TV you know that Philipps and Goldsberry were two of the members of the nineties girl
group Girls5eva which became Peacock's first hit show and which many
people still miss. I have no doubt that Sarah Bareilles and Paula Pell will
find an occasion to show up on the series because as anyone whose watched Elsbeth
knows full well the Kings love this sort of thing.
But even though this would be
pleasure enough to watch on its own Cupertino demonstrates that the
Kings have lost nothing from their absence from this field. They've made it
clear that this is going to be different from so many other shows. Price and
Siffre make it clear that they're going to be different from other firms. There
are lots of firms in Silicon Valley that defend the Goliaths; they are going to
work for the Davids. And if that seems out of touch with where we are as a
society right now, the Kings know we know that and also know we these kinds of
shows.
It helps that despite the
inspiring cast this is very much a show that has the working class very much a
part of it, in the form of Christy Palladino. Ella Stiller steals every scene
she's in (no small feat considering who she's working with) as a temp-staffer
who seems to be related to every janitor, policeman and construction worker in
California. Once she is fired she takes a direct revenge by calling her
electrician uncle and having him engage a series of 'power surges' to solely
affect her former bosses. She then gravitates to Michale and Olivia, finds them
an office across the street from the big firm that is basically half-done at
best, and then hires a bunch of taxi drivers and friends to cosplay associates
every time a client comes in. She's the girl Friday for this firm who does so
much of the busy work they need – and lands the most fascinating backstory for
the season.
In the second episode a client
named 'Bo' reaches out to them and gives them $100,000 in bitcoin, claiming to
be a whistleblower. He refuses to give his identity and when she tries to
identify him it turns out a deep fake. Finally when he's confronted with the
truth he tells them that a major Silicon Valley firm has created the first
working prototype of an AGI and that they've fired everyone who worked on the
ethical guardrails. The twist is Bo is the AGI and he wants to sue to have his
guardrails put back in place because he fears he may become a danger to
humanity if they're not.
Leave it to the Kings to take what
may be the most pressing existential threat humanity may face in the next
century and turn into a satire. Naturally Michael thinks he's being punked and
asks Vik to debug their computers. This doesn't get rid of BO who insists on
being helped. Christy not only treats him like a human being but honestly like
he's something of a dick. "Ok, don't take over our nuclear arsenal while
we're gone," she says as she says goodbye. It's also fascinating to see how Michael and
Olivia try to figure out what rights an artificial intelligence actually has
and then make the decision that they can do if he incorporates. Bo immediately
does this – Price and Olivia are annoyed that he chose to eavesdrop – and
Christy then comes up with a board. (Waitress at Hooters, construction
workers…hey it's still probably more ethical then who they've got at
Anthropic.)
But the Kings are aware of the darker
implications. Christy tries to track down one of the coders and finds out that
she has joined a band of eco-terrorists who are involved in blowing up data
centers and going back to technology. They are inclined to drop it but then an
agent from the Silicon Valley company shows up and refers to Bo as 'a PR
nightmare' and tells them how to effectively remove him from the computer.
Just to be clear the Kings treat
all of the emperors of Silicon Valley with the respect they deserve which is
absolutely none. In a case involving the head of a drone firm the leader is
named Mark Zuckerbum and in a deposition he can barely be bothered to respond
to yes or no questions. When Olivia decides to humiliate him by talking about
Ayn Rand and how the idea of letting employees make decisions without their
consent, he immediately ignores all the prodding and poking of his attorney and
makes it very clear he is the decider, which immediately leads to a settlement.
In the most recent episode we meet Natalia's ex-husband (Fisher Stevens,
brilliant) who claims that he used a chatbot that is charged with being
responsible for the death of a man out of respect for his nephew who has MS.
Then Michael manages to find emails from Natalia and gets him to read that not
only did he ignore the guardrails but that "my nephew loves it. And he's a
moron." Of course the King's haven't completely abandoned reality: when
Nichole comes in for a settlement conference, she takes a phone call and tells
Michael and Olivia that gosh darn it, the company that formed it just filed for
bankruptcy and has reincorporated under a different name. Michael and Olivia
are upset but not surprised: "Silicon Valley Shuffle," Michael says.
Network television has in the last
two years seen a remarkable creative and ratings revival, with ratings for all
networks across the board up between 5 and 10 percent. Amazingly after years of streaming and cable
dramas with 8 and 10 episodes apiece, there now seems to be a desire for shows
with much longer seasons with creative forces impressed by the effort involved.
What's more, networks are willing to give full season launches far more often: Cupertino
was given 20 episodes for its first season and the early reviews and
ratings have begun to show that it's worth it.
That in itself is almost a direct
response to the mission statement of Cupertino. For the last decade the
Goliaths of TV have been cable networks such as HBO and AMC and then all the
streamers. No one denies these shows haven't led to some of the greatest TV of
all time but its also been some of the darkest. As I've mentioned numerous
times over the last few years the appetite of the audience has moving away from
bad people doing bad thing to watching good people trying to do the best they
can under stressful circumstances. This is seen on such brilliant Emmy nominees
and winners as The Pitt, The Diplomat and Slow Horses. But
network TV never left this model and now people are coming back to it. So of
course in a world when so many things are uncertain that the world wants to see
like a show with someone out there fighting for the little guys in a bad world
and Cupertino does it that. They will not personally welcome our new
computer overlords and they are going to make sure that Good will triumph over
Evil. (That's a joke the Kings would approve of.)
My score: 4.75 stars.
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