Upload: Series 1: Amazon Prime Video Review

Upload: Series 1: Amazon Prime Video Review

Released May 1 on Amazon Prime Video

Greg Daniels' latest foray into the TV world seeks to build on success from The Office and Parks and Rec - but it never quite finds a tone it wants and settles on it.

The 10 episode first series deals with Robbie Amell's Nathan Brown, a coder whose untimely death at the hands of a self-driving car leads his frankly awful girlfriend to get him uploaded to the afterlife.

Digitally aware but technically kind of dead, Nathan begins to suspect that he's been murdered. So he gradually starts to investigate what exactly happened with the help of the voice in his ear and the digital Jeeves to his Wooster, his "Angel" Nora (Andy Allo), a glorified customer service assistant at the afterlife company.

And that's kind of it - meshing more drama than comedy, and not enough to end up in the "dramedy" genre, Upload at its digital heart is more interested in showing how shallow Nathan ends up realising the world he left behind was the one he misses the most - even though he didn't realise it at the time.

Equally, Nora discovers that she's falling in love with the upload rather than living for her daily reality.

There are little to no major discoveries in Upload, and the comedy is generally wanting - it's certainly not a show that delivers consistent laughs in its 25 minute episode chunks. If anything, the marketing will oversell this element of the series and damage it - certainly a trailer implies that there's a lot more hokey goings on in the Good Place stylings and pretensions of the show.

But mostly, Upload plays as a soft, gentle drama, that has sporadic laughs that feel more like glitches in the story's narratives than deliberately set down codes.

Amell and Allo work nicely together, and there's a building rapport between the two that feels genuine as the show builds through its 10 episode stint. But tonally the show doesn't seem to decide what it wants to be - is it murder mystery, is it love story - it's never quite sure.

Certainly, it's no biting satire on capitalism, or fantasy takedown (even if there are a nice splattering of sight gags throughout) - it itself seems stuck in an afterlife of uncertainty - and by episode 6, the narrative feels compelled to suddenly change lanes, as if to cope with the initial premise.

Perhaps it's the binge drop of the show which harms it, with each episode feeling like pieces of a jigsaw rather than a composite whole. There are Black Mirror elements here, but run through a prism of softness rather than satirical edges, and consequently Upload feels like a show that's not really sure what its actual MO is.

As a romance and a meditation on life after it's kind of okay, and watchable enough fare delivered in pristine bitesize episodes - but Upload never quite fires in the way it could or should, and with a central pairing that has your support and a premise that's rich in potential, that's a crying shame.

Upload premieres on Amazon Prime Video in its entirety on May 1. All ten episodes of the series were streamed for the purposes of this review.