TV’s Best Show About the Threat of Big Tech Is Made by Two Boomers

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.

It’s hard to imagine a TV show more of its moment than a legal procedural about the threats posed by Big Tech. But Cupertino also feels like the show Robert and Michelle King have been working toward for years. Although they both had substantial previous careers—Robert was the screenwriter of, among other movies, the pirate adventure Cutthroat Island and the kickboxing actioner Bloodfist—the couple vaulted into the top ranks of TV creators with the 2009 premiere of CBS’s The Good Wife, which starred Julianna Margulies as an attorney who returns to the law after her husband is embroiled in a political sex scandal. At a time when Hollywood’s creative energy was shifting toward premium cable and streaming, the Kings proved it was still possible to tell smart and wildly entertaining stories 23 times a season. The show’s cases involved the standard mixture of legal oddities and ethical dilemmas, but by the end of the second season, the Kings started taking on an unusual target, with an episode in which a tortured dissident sues a Google-like company for disclosing his identity to the Chinese government. It’s not the kind of plotline that globally connected media conglomerates love to tell—as Robert, whose 1997 thriller Red Corner got MGM in hot water with China, already knew—but like the Silicon Valley disrupters of Cupertino, the Kings don’t always ask for permission.

Whether they were following lefty lawyers on The Good Fight or a team of paranormal investigators employed by the Catholic Church on Evil, the Kings have consistently explored the new wrinkles evolving technologies add to age-old dilemmas. (In one episode of Evil, the possibility of a child predator using chat apps to take in young victims is enhanced by having the predator be a literal demon.) But Cupertino is the first time they’ve faced the subject head-on. The show, which premiered last week, stars Kings veteran Mike Colter as Silicon Valley attorney Michael Price, who takes his shady firing by a prosperous startup as the impetus to start a scrappy firm specializing in defending the little guy from Big Tech. He and fellow firee Olivia Siffre (Rachel Keller) take on clients like an Elon-esque billionaire’s ex-spouse (Busy Philipps) and a programmer (Nik Dodani) whose employer is trying to make him the scapegoat for a fatal drone malfunction—all within the boundaries of a tried-and-true network law show. But at the end of Cupertino’s second episode, they make contact with a whistleblower named Bo who wants to sue his employer for removing the guardrails from its sentient A.I., which he believes could become dangerous enough to threaten the entire world. And in a classically offbeat Kings twist, the A.I. he’s trying to rein in turns out to be Bo himself.

I watched the episode in question only days before Anthropic’s Dario Amodei called for an immediate slowdown in the pace of A.I. development, and every few days since, we’ve had some headline that made the Kings’ version seem newly relevant. As Robert admitted on a joint Zoom last week, I’m not the only one unnerved by watching real life catch up to their loopy speculation. “It was scary,” he said. “We’re shooting the 18^th episode now, and it touches on things you read in the newspaper the next day. Even the actors are like, ‘OK, how did we know this was coming down?’ ”

A.I. of one form or another figures in most of Cupertino’s episodes, or at least the 10 I’ve seen thus far. And though most of the fictional and nonfictional accounts focus on the young moguls who are pushing this tech on the world, the Kings, both boomers, are well aware their cohort comprise some of A.I.’s most enthusiastic users. “I think with a generation like ours, there’s always some point where you’ve passed, I guess, your productive years, and they feel a kind of transcendence in this science fiction–like development. Whereas the youngest people are like, ‘What the hell is it doing to our job market? What is it doing to our minds?’ ” Robert says. The Kings themselves don’t indulge, and Michelle, at least, has little truck with those who do. “Whenever anyone even begins a sentence that says they’re using it, I so immediately start making fun of them that they shut down,” she says.

Cupertino isn’t anti-tech, but the Kings are laser-focused on how tech companies—especially the Magnificent Seven that are currently responsible for a major portion of the U.S.’s economic growth—are redefining, undermining, and straight-up flouting established law and supposedly cherished American values with little oversight or pushback. One of Cupertino’s running gags is that the few judges who aren’t ethically conflicted out of hearing the firm’s challenges to tech giants because of their intertwined interests are so in thrall to the region’s governing ideology that a mere mention of Ayn Rand is enough to get them ruling in the oligarchs’ favor. Robert points, among other things, to the credulous interpretation of personhood that allows large language models to “learn” from human artists’ works, as if they were simply using The Brothers Karamazov to brainstorm and not absorbing and assimilating its every word. “Just looking at the criminal courts in San Jose and the Bay Area, there seems to be a gold-rush mentality,” Robert says. “No one wants to disturb the goose that’s laying the golden eggs.”

Of course, with David Ellison’s Skydance swallowing both Paramount and Warner Bros., the Kings now work for the son of one of those oligarchs. When we spoke, the WB merger had just officially gone through, and Ellison had spent the morning on CNBC touting the efficiencies that A.I. would bring to the newly tech-savvy Warner Bros. The Good Fight, which began with the shell-shocked reaction of longtime Hillary supporter Diane Lockhart (Christine Baranski) to Donald Trump’s first election, was better than any other show at capturing the constant destabilization of life in Trump’s America. Cupertino, at least thus far, hasn’t paid much attention to the East Coast, at least beyond a passing mention of a would-be mogul running into trouble getting his betting market app off the ground because their biggest competitor is friendly with the president’s son. But though it’s the Skydance logo that pops up while I’m waiting for our Zoom to start, the Kings say they have yet to feel any pressure from above. “All I can tell you is we’ve done 20 episodes of this show now, and we have not gotten one single bit of pushback, not one note,” Michelle says. “I think there’s a lot of trust with CBS, Paramount,” Robert adds, “now Warner Brothers, Skydance. I think we feel protected.”

The Kings, who made their disdain for fashionably gritty cable drama plain with The Good Wife’s parodic show-within-a-show Darkness at Noon, have never gone all-in on serialized storytelling. (Their biggest recent hit is the Good Wife spinoff Elsbeth, a Columbo-esque case-of-the-week show.) But the Bo plotline seems likely to stick around for most of Cupertino’s first season— although whether the character, played with a disarming goofiness by Rob McClure, is really a self-aware chatbot or just a person playing games remains an open question, one that will only seem more relevant as the Altmans and Musks of the world make their outlandish claims about the possibilities of A.I. “Our only worry was that A.I. was heating up so much, especially in the newspaper and online, that it felt like we might be left in the dust a bit, but not yet,” Robert says. “The good news,” Michelle adds, “is that we don’t seem to be running out of stories.”