On its face, the CBS drama “Cupertino” is a reversion to type for creators Robert and Michelle King. After dipping a toe into the supernatural with “Evil,” a kind of “X-Files” riff set inside the Catholic Church, the married couple behind “The Good Wife” and “The Good Fight” are back on factual terra firma with another legal procedural staffed by New York theater actors. It’s nice to see Jackie Hoffman back in judges’ robes!
But in just a couple of episodes, it’s clear that star Mike Colter isn’t the only carryover from the “Evil” set. In shifting the proceedings from Chicago to Silicon Valley amid the artificial intelligence boom, “Cupertino” runs headfirst into questions that are straight-up spiritual. Can a machine have a soul, or even free will?
Should an algorithm rule us impartially, like a god? Who is culpable for the sins of a computer? That’s about when I started looking for Andrea Martin’s steely nun to walk onscreen while waving a crucifix.
Of course, the Kings have long had a keen eye for distilling and (just barely) heightening the absurdities of modern life. A full decade ago, the too-ahead-of-its-time “BrainDead” spent its single season spinning our devolving political discourse as a covert zombie apocalypse; “The Good Fight” was the only satire of the (first) Trump era to make truth and fiction equally strange. The Kings have some deep, probing questions about what a few highly capitalized innovators are unleashing on the rest of the world.
They’re not questions science and logic proofs alone can answer. Their chosen protagonists are up to the task. Colter’s Michael Price, an attorney we meet while being unfairly defenestrated from the AI startup where he was co-founder and in-house counsel, brings the legal experience — and a motivating chip on his shoulder courtesy of a successful, controlling dad he’s still trying to outrun.
But Olivia Siffre (Rachel Keller of “Fargo” and “Tokyo Vice”), the entry-level associate fired at the same time as Michael in retaliation for sexual harassment, is an observant Christian whose religion sticks out like a sore thumb in the largely secular South Bay Area. (“Consciousness is a divine endowment given by God’s breath,” she says, whatever the most up-to-date LLM would have you believe.) When Michael and Olivia team up to launch a fledgling firm, both of their backgrounds inform its approach. But he sees the uphill battle of suing major corporations differently — not as altruism, but as opportunity. In a flood, he notes, “You don’t sell water.
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