Believe it or not, despite presenting a terrifying picture of the future, “Upload” is absolutely delightful. The first season introduces app developer Nathan Brown (Robbie Amell), who abruptly dies in a self-driving car incident and finds himself “uploaded” into a digital afterlife. Thanks to his wealthy girlfriend Ingrid (Allegra Edwards), he can live on in the luxurious virtual reality of Lakeview, a totally uncomplicated (read: inevitably disastrous) situation until he finds himself falling in love with his very alive customer service angel Nora (Andy Allo). Can love transcend death? That’s just one of many questions Nathan hopes to answer, along with unraveling the grand conspiracy of how he actually died. Love triangles, miscommunication, and all the things that can go wrong in a romance absolutely do — but “Upload” has that extra special twist of taking place in a dystopic future with advanced technology. Set up like a sitcom, the series features increasingly hilarious situations all while pondering life’s biggest questions of death, loss, and love against all odds.
“Upload” premiered back in 2020 and, because of the whole global pandemic situation, returned for a second season after a 22-month hiatus. Thankfully, the wait for season 3 should be considerably shorter because Greg Daniels and his writers got back to work ahead of the series renewal news. As Daniels said to Collider earlier in the year, COVID-19 wasn’t the only reason “Upload” took its time to return. Daniels explained, “so much visual effects work makes the post process very long. So they really want to get on it so season three can happen as quickly as we can make it happen.” It takes time to transform Robbie Amell into a Minecraft block man, but at least the visual gags make “Upload” worth the long wait.
The first two seasons of “Upload” are available to stream on Prime Video.
