Greg Daniels on how Upload ties into The Office and Parks And Rec

Pop quiz: What is the most-watched half-hour original show on Prime Video? If you’re surprised to find out that it’s Upload, we wouldn’t blame you. The absurdist comedy launched in 2020 by writer-director-producer Greg Daniels, best known for adapting the U.S. version of The Office and co-creating Parks And Recreation, kicks off its third season this week. Upload stars Robbie Amell as Nathan Brown, a computer programmer who dies prematurely and is digitally reconstituted in a luxury afterlife called Lakeview. Although his continued existence is entirely paid for by his girlfriend Ingrid (Allegra Edwards), he finds himself drawn to his customer service support “angel” Nora (Andy Allo).

At the end of season two Nathan managed to download himself back into his human body, creating a new set of problems and more opportunities to explore the real world, a near-future dystopia where unchecked capitalism and corporate greed has made life barely habitable for all but a wealthy and elite few. The A.V. Club spoke with Daniels about the new season, how he and his writers created the future as envisioned in the show, and the philosophical questions of identity it continues to address.

Greg Daniels: Sure, I mean, the central premise of it is this notion that using technology, we’re able to create a digital afterlife for people. So it does have that persistence of your mind, but what it doesn’t necessarily have is any justice that you are used to thinking of when you think about heaven. And, you know, it’s run by these tech companies and it’s run for profit. And so once you are in that world where some people get to go to heaven if they have enough money, and some people can’t, then I think you’re going to be saying a lot about unfairness and income inequality and just how capitalism works for the benefit of the people who own the big-tech companies, a lot more so than your average consumer or worker. So I think it’s part of the implications of the central sci-fi premise—that there’s a lot of unfairness involved in a for-profit heaven.

AVC: It’s amazing how much you get away with considering this is coming out on Prime Video. You have an entire episode in which Prime Day has become a big national holiday where everyone prints their food on 3D food printers.

GD: Yeah, I mean, it’s like as good as Thanksgiving for them. There’s an episode all about that. We call it Cyber Discount Day, and it’s like the most important family holiday for the people in the future.

AVC: Do you ever get any notes from Amazon about things like that? Do they ever get nervous when something hits a little too close to home?

GD: We have this character of the Free Shipping Ferret that is on a lot of the boxes, and I think the people are pretty tickled by it. And we wanted to use it on the billboards. And I think they were like, “Oh, let’s leave it at that and not put that on the billboards.” But Amazon’s really been quite good. They give a lot of good notes, just sort of like independent film-style notes.

AVC: You’re doing a lot with AI this season, and we’re now in this moment where AI is getting a big push from tech companies and pushback from other sectors with legitimate concerns about its use. It came up as an issue in the writers’ strike, and the actors are still negotiating over it as we speak. How does it feel having the show dealing with issues like this that have become so timely?

GD: Well, I think that we’re addressing it in a lot of different ways. So the central premise is there’s digital people now; they’re digital dead people. And one of the big questions this season is are they going to be allowed to take jobs from real people? We’re using that storyline. But also we have an AI character, and he started off very incompetent and he’s getting more and more sort of human. And this season the idea was that he outgrew his line-by-line programming and he has to learn from other humans now. And Aleesha is in charge of training him. And so he’s got this sort of adolescent feel to him, and she’s trying to give him a moral sense the way you would with any adolescent, really, or any kid. She’s the teacher. And I do think that that’s one of the big challenges of AI: to not just give it giant datasets of Twitter posts filled with misinformation and, you know, lies for them to generalize off of. You need to give them some kind of morality and make them good. You have to give the same attention to an AI to make them a good person as you would to just some teenager.

AVC: Right, you have this AI character who has been there from the beginning, played by Owen Daniels, who also happens to be your son. And he basically does all the jobs in this digital afterlife, but he also plays the original human in the real world who was scanned by the company.

GD: It’s funny, we have this history of doing jokes that then become kind of real. So the backstory on that character was that he was an actor named Boris Netherlands, who was paid $1,200 to have his entire face and likeness scanned. And so the big-tech company that owns his likeness based this digital Alexa-style assistant on this poor actor’s scan. And he never got any more money for it. And I guess it’s one of the big issues in the SAG strike right now. You know, it’s amazing.

AVC: One of the things you’re doing more this season is going out into the real world, so we get to see more of what it’s like for humans living in the future.

GD: That’s one of the fun themes of this season, because at the very end of last season, Nathan, who’s been the digital version since the pilot, gets downloaded back into his body. They’ve grown a new head for him. So he’s actually in the real world with Nora, and it’s very joyous that they’re together. But they’re also kind of learning stuff about each other that you learn when you actually live with someone. And so those two main characters are both in the real world and we see them go across the country and go to L.A. and San Francisco and different places in the future. So that’s a big part of the show. And then, of course, when they realize that Nathan’s no longer in the system, some of the lower-level people at the tech company are worried about getting in trouble. And they back him up from a copy from a couple of months ago. So there’s a second Nathan, who has the same memory set as the first one—up until a point.

AVC: It’s played for laughs, of course, but there’s also the whole philosophical question: Which is the real Nathan? Technically, neither of them are the original Nathan. So what makes one more legitimate than the other?

GD: I mean, this is a very philosophical point, because once their head is burned off, and the information is captured, and they’re reconstituted in a digital sense, are they really still around? Is that really them or did they die when their head burned off? Because they have their memories and they think they’re who they are because of the way the technology works. And then to push them back into a meat body; from his awareness he’s continuous from the one that was born. And that’s also the awareness of the copy. It just doesn’t go quite as deep as the other one, but he does start at the same place. So he thinks he’s the original.

AVC: I want to tie this into the other work you’ve done that’s been a little bit more grounded. Parks And Recreation is underrated, I think, as a thoughtful political satire. And then, of course, The Office is essentially a critique of corporate culture. Are these things that you’re thinking of when you’re coming up with ideas, or are they just the background setting for jokes and situations meant to make people laugh?

GD: No, no. I think that especially when you’re building a show in the beginning, you are trying to build in themes and interesting things that you know will pay off three or four years from now in terms of being able to write an episode that you don’t see coming. But it has conflict and it’s about something. And so there’s a lot of effort put into going, Ah, what is this about? Why is Parks And Rec different from The Office? What are the themes? Why is [Leslie Knope] so positive and optimistic about government? And yet she works for Ron, who doesn’t even believe in government at all. Like, why are they opposites? Right? It’s so that there’s going to be tension and different points of view on things going deep into the show. If they’re set up properly there’s a lot to play off of in the future. You don’t have to constantly be talking about it because it’s kind of baked into their character interactions. So you can just be fun on the dialogue level. I think that the world is the world, and if you approach it with a comedic eye you’re going to notice certain things, certain inconsistencies, certain hypocrisies. And you’re going to be writing about them, maybe over and over [laughs].

AVC: Upload, Parks And Recreation, and The Office all have sweet romances at the heart of each show. In Upload it’s Nathan and Nora, which gets a little complicated this season. Now that there’s two versions of Nathan, and one is with Ingrid, you have a sort of love quadrangle with him on two sides.

GD: Yeah, it’s what’s so fun about this show. I was trying to come up with a tagline for the season, and I thought maybe, “Nathan and Nora: the ultimate love triangle” was kind of funny. It was an unusual situation, and you can be very surface about it. I think you could just say, “Wow, how sci-fi? What a crazy thing, that there’s two versions of the same person.” But once you treat it really seriously, like this is another person and he just has a lot of the same memories but he’s a little bit insecure because he doesn’t have all the memories, you start to actually care about both of them, I think.

AVC: Is there anything else you want to say about what we can expect in season three?

GD: Yeah, well, we’re doing something a little different. The show has a very big audience; it’s the number one half-hour show on Prime Video. It doesn’t have the profile in the entertainment industry of some other shows, but in terms of the audience it’s quite large and very international. And I think a lot of it is that we’ve been dropped on one day and then everybody binges it and it’s just not in the conversation that long. So we’re trying something where we’re dropping two episodes a week for four weeks and we’ll see how that goes. I really wish that the SAG thing was figured out, because I love our cast and they’re good ambassadors for the show. So my hope is, before the end of our run, that’ll get worked out and they’ll get a chance to get some of the attention that they deserve, because I think they do such good work.

AVC: Are you hopeful that you’ll get a fourth season?

GD: Well, I think it would be fair to fans to give them a fourth season. Yes. I mean, I’m negotiating with some of the writers right now and we’re anticipating it, for sure.

Upload season three kicks off on Prime Video on October 20, with the first two episodes, followed by two new episodes each week until the finale on November 10.