Upload series premiere recap: Welcome to Upload

Amazon’s Upload Season 1 is a delight, thanks to the show’s clever writing, world-building, and a  hilariously charismatic performance by Robbie Amell.

With literally gazillions of new shows out there in a plethora of streaming services all around the world, finding a new show to watch is super hard, but without a doubt in my mind, I assure you that Upload Season 1 is worth every second of your time and is an enjoyable watch throughout its entirety of the first season.

So, Upload Season 1 is the newest addition to Amazon’s roaster and is a futuristic comedy set in 2033 (which actually sorts of seems possible in the near future) from The Office creator Greg Daniels.

When I was watching the first episode, the thought that first crossed my mind is that this is what will happen if The Good Place would meet with Altered Carbon, or if The Good Place was run by you know……. Facebook, there are also some Black Mirror-ish elements in this show which actually makes this show seem more realistic and relatable even though it’s set 13 years from now.

The series is set in the future where people can upload their consciousness to different types of digital afterlife depending on what people can afford and follows Nathan (Robbie Amell) who meets an untimely death in a car accident.

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He is then uploaded to this lavish beautiful digital afterlife called Lakeview, designed in the model of luxury hotels in the countryside of Canada thanks to his rich girlfriend Ingrid paying the bill, which is also the problem as this heaven just like most of the good apps or things online comes with tonnes of microtransactions.

And she’s out in the real world deciding what Nathan can buy or experience here in this afterlife. To sum it up, she literally owns the power to delete him out of existence.

In this first episode, we are introduced to Lakeview which is honestly a pretty sweet place to be heaven on the surface, I mean you get like all you can eat breakfast buffet, the view from Nathan’s room is pretty spectacular, you can pee from anywhere and it still hits the urinal, there’s this kid who is always in action mode with avatars, and there’s even a woman from 1960s whose picture was black and white, so her avatar is black and white.

But still, Nathan is pretty frustrated with the whole afterlife and just wants to go back to the real world. There’s this army veteran, Luke, who told him about the torrent, where people throw themselves to try to get back to the real world, but none ever make it though and disappear forever.

And just as Nathan is about to do that, his angel Nora (Andy Allo) aka one of the people from the support staff that are assigned to a particular person in this heaven shows up and tries to talk him out of it and gives an emotional speech about staying alive even after death and how she will be there for him and she would like to get to know him better.

Nathan figures out that she is a real person and sees a friend in her and calms down, and Nora ends up giving him her real name and address even though that’s against the company policy.

At the end of the episode, we see someone hacking into Nora’s computer and deleting some of Nathan’s memories which were damaged, so something spooky is definitely going on.

With just its first episode, Upload comes off as a real but hilariously charming dark comedy due to its solid world-building, genuinely funny moments, social commentary, and intrigue. But above all, what really carries the series is Robbie Amell and his delightfully charismatic performance and the main character appeal.

Did you watch Upload Season 1, Episode 1? What did you think of the show’s first episode? Comment below and let us know.