‘Cupertino’ Review: Robert and Michelle King Tackle Big Tech in Their Latest Broadcast Winner

The end of the world has come in many forms for Robert and Michelle King, television’s reigning masters of the feel-good/feel-bad apocalypse.

There were the alien insects of BrainDead, the zombifying COVID variant of The Bite, the Satanic panic of Evil and, of course, the Donald Trump of The Good Fight — all warnings from the Kings that the modern world is going to shit, no matter how funny that descent often is.

Cupertino

The Bottom Line Clever and light — too light? — on its feet.

Airdate: 10 p.m. Thursday, October 8 (CBS)
Cast: Mike Colter, Rachel Keller, Ella Stiller, Busy Philipps, Renée Elise Goldsberry and Nik Dodani
Creators: Robert and Michelle King

Whether their ostensible focus has been on the legal system, politics or organized religion, the Kings have always looked askance at the unchecked realm of technology, especially the seemingly benevolent time-savers threatening to rid us of time altogether.

With Cupertino, their latest CBS hour-long, the Kings offer their most extended and often scathing take on malignant artificial intelligence, marauding ghosts (more figurative in this case than on Evil) in various machines, and the sniveling, Ayn Rand-quoting billionaires fiddling while the internet burns.

It is not, through the 10 episodes sent to critics, the Kings’ most refined critique, swiftly becoming repetitious in its ripped-from-the-headlines targets. But most of the flaws in Cupertino are relative to its creators’ previous successes. On its own merits, this is a fast-moving, consistently entertaining treat — a reminder that nobody is currently more comfortable with the broadcast procedural format than the Kings, and nobody has built a more reliable and endearing ensemble of recurring actors over the years.

Evil star Mike Colter returns to the fold as Michael Price, an attorney fired from his Silicon Valley start-up for shady reasons.

Mike, whose father (Joe Morton’s Bayard) is a notorious celebrity lawyer, quickly joins forces with Olivia Siffre (Rachel Keller), a young legal associate fired from the same start-up for different sketchy reasons.

They realize that Silicon Valley is all about catering to the whims of the tech Goliaths, while the tech Davids are left without defenders. So they decide to launch a boutique firm protecting the victims of misapplied artificial intelligence, the encroachment of the surveillance state, and ethically challenged boy geniuses run amok.

At a rate of basically one newly added cast regular per episode, Mike and Olivia build a team that includes plucky assistant Christy (Ella Stiller), whose extended family gives her handy connections in every low and out-of-the-way corner of the region; coder and versatile tech handyman Vik (Nik Dodani); and easily bored investor Natalia (Busy Philipps), who’s willing to put her money toward any cause that hurts her slimy billionaire ex (Fisher Stevens).

In a format that will be familiar to any fan of previous shows from the Kings, the new firm takes on a weekly case — AI making a mess of transplant recipient lists, AI making a mess of fireworks displays, AI making a mess of security cameras — with a recurring group of legal adversaries. Those include Renée Elise Goldsberry as Michael’s former colleague and lover, contesting cases before a rogue’s gallery of quirky judges played by the likes of Jackie Earle Haley, Jackie Hoffman and Peter Riegert.

Uniting the case-of-the-week elements, which flow extremely smoothly from one episode to the next, is a bigger mystery involving Bo (Rob McClure), a whistleblowing client with a mind-blowing secret.

With so many of its procedural plots echoing and sometimes directly referencing real-world events, Cupertino is more substantive and less inherently silly than Elsbeth. But despite the existential threat represented by many of the season’s ideas, it lacks the darkness and occasional rage that sometimes fueled both The Good Wife and The Good Fight. That’s largely because the Bo storyline is so much less engaging, thus far, than the weekly plots. It’s also because, despite some effort to give the main characters a few token characteristics — Michael had daddy issues and a possible gambling problem, Olivia is religious, with a conservative Upper Midwest family — they’re likable moving chess pieces rather than fully realized humans.

It doesn’t help the grounding of the story that, while the show takes place in a very real city with a very real relationship to tech, Cupertino was proudly filmed in New Jersey and rarely looks or feels like Northern California (and if you know anything about the racial demographics of the region, you’ll notice that representation is bizarrely absent). Despite top-tier directors including Robert King, Ron Underwood and John Dahl, there’s a visual blandness throughout.

Cupertino is best known for its relationship with Apple, and Apple is one of many real behemoths that get name-checked and off-handedly criticized, when the actual villains are exclusively the fictionalized companies. It’s a show that’s cautious about big business, but very amenable to overt, occasionally clunky, product plugs.

Maybe Cupertino doesn’t go as deep, thus far, as the Kings’ best work, but as a broad tech-based legal dramedy, it’s sharply written and clever, exuding the confidence of talented people working in a collective sweet spot.

Nobody is more confident working with the Kings than Colter, whose swagger and comfort with bursts of goofiness are well-deployed, albeit with less emotional range in the early-going.

If Keller, here a warm and open contrast to her two superb seasons on HBO’s Tokyo Vice, seems a hair less sure of herself, it’s only because the writers themselves aren’t always sure how youthful and how zealous to make Olivia. I’m a fan of characters on TV shows having religious backgrounds, like people do in real life. Olivia’s faith is important and respected, but it isn’t consistent, nor is it always specific.

Neither is the show sure who it wants to set up as a potential love interest for Michael, so it goes with “everybody.” I’d suggest that Colter and Keller have great chemistry, but in the mentor/mentee vein, compared to the real sizzle that Colter and Goldsberry generate.

(Note that Cupertino always seems right on the verge of going full Evil and integrating actual supernatural elements, rather than just aspects of modern technology that would have felt supernatural a decade ago. The possibility that Olivia Siffre might have an ill-intentioned uncle named Lou Siffre piques my Angel Heart-loving curiosity.)

Both Stiller, livelier and more comedically assertive than she was in the final season of The Comeback, and Philipps, alternating between zany and vulnerable, are perfectly integrated into the story, first as scene-stealers and then as more regular presences.

The same is true of the various actors who pop up as guest stars, but will surely recur going forward, including the hilariously folksy Haley, a flamboyant and threatening Morton and more. It takes a lot for a parade of guest stars this esteemed not to feel like a stunt, but when the Kings bring in a Steven Pasquale or Evan Handler or Clifford “Method Man” Smith Jr., it’s just like inviting another old friend to a well-attended potluck.

Ten episodes represent a bigger sample than critics normally get for broadcast shows, and it’s enough to allow us to see that Cupertino starts promisingly and doesn’t fall off — but also that it doesn’t quickly find that next qualitative gear that Evil and The Good Wife located by this point in their first seasons. Still, this is the rare broadcast drama that has instantly taken a place on my must-watch list.