CBS's Cupertino Turns Tech Backlash Into Weekly Network TV Cases

The firm is named Price Siffre, pronounced "cipher," and consists of lawyers Michael Price, played by Mike Colter, and Olivia Siffre, played by Rachel Keller, along with assistant Christy Palladino, played by Ella Stiller. In the pilot, all three leave the same malign artificial intelligence company under strained circumstances. The Verge's reviewer recommends skipping that first episode, or at least not holding it against the rest of the series.

The ensemble begins to cohere, the review says, when the show adds Renee Elise Goldsberry as Michael's ex and rival and Busy Philipps as MacKenzie Scott, formerly Bezos, portrayed as, in the reviewer's words, very fun and a little drunk. The cast also draws on the Kings' earlier work in ways the review describes as a reunion of performers from the sitcom Girls5eva.

The series lifts recognizable stories from recent technology news and builds fictional versions of them, including the Zizians, the prediction market Polymarket, Jeff Bezos' reported interest in looksmaxxing, OpenAI's disputed use of a voice resembling Scarlett Johansson's, and the fight over AI guardrails. The review says the show uses these to speak to a feeling of helplessness in the face of rapid change that extends well beyond the San Francisco Bay Area. The reviewer calls the prevailing mood a peppy paranoia, adding that suspicion about the reach and aims of large technology companies has been shown to be grounded and reasonable, at a time when every device could be listening and deepfakes mean nothing is guaranteed to be what it seems.

The Kings have some standing on the subject. The review notes that Wired called The Good Wife the most tech-savvy show on television in 2013, the same year BuzzFeed said everyone in tech needed to be watching it, and that show dealt with Bitcoin, viral videos, and National Security Agency spying. The review adds that being good at technology on an Obama-era legal drama set in Chicago is a different task from being good at it on a 2026 show called Cupertino.

Where the network format once looked like a weakness, the review argues, it becomes a strength. A longer season allows for tangents, multi-episode arcs, misdirection, and the return of characters who can disappear and resurface later, a trick the reviewer says is rarely as surprising in tightly clocked streaming seasons of six to 13 episodes, when a detail planted in episode three all but has to pay off in episode seven. The review describes a landscape packed with data brokers, rationalists, underpaid AI trainers, software developers who hide crude jokes in their code, elderly judges, petty billionaires, and the frustrated contractors who build their offices and bunkers.

The reviewer's conclusion is that the seemingly outdated tools of broadcast television turn out to be a good way to address an uncertain future. Cupertino may be made for an older audience, the review says, and it may be a case-of-the-week show, but the Kings' vision of Silicon Valley coheres as it expands, and the series creates a sense of truth and claustrophobia that serves it.