PICK OF THE WEEK

Upload Amazon Prime Video, from Friday

What will the world be like in the year 2033? Greg Daniels’ vision of the nottoo-distant future seems ambitious, even for the pre-Covid world, but his new comedy/sci-fi/mystery series

Upload (Amazon Prime Video) is an undeniably fun place to visit.

This is something Daniels does better than almost anyone — building TV worlds that offer endless comfort and escapism, like the US adaptation of The

Office or Parks and Recreation. While those deepy beloved TV worlds were firmly rooted in reality, the twist here is that the world Daniels has created is, well, more of an afterworld. By 2033, this show predicts, we’ll be zipping about in self-driving cars and uploading our consciousnesses to virtual resort heavens, where we’ll be able to live forever in virtual luxury.

This is where confident, handsome (looks like Nick Lachey, remember him) but still likeable young app developer

Nathan (Robbie Amell) ends up after a mysterious self-driving car accident leaves him fighting for his life in hospital. Some suspiciously quick thinking from his socialite girlfriend gets him added to her family’s subscription to afterlife resort Lakeview, where he is weirdly able to maintain a connection to the living world — if you want to attend your own funeral via Zoom, that’s an option.

Virtual assistants — living in the real world, with their own real world problems — are on hand 24/7 at

Lakeview. One of the strongest plot points here is the relationship between Nathan and his VA Nora (Andy Allo). It’s sort of reminiscent of the 2013 sci-fi romance Her, the one where a sad-sack Joaquin Phoenix fell in love with his AI assistant, voiced by Scarlett Johansson.

Triangulate that point of reference with the lighter episodes of Black Mirror (anything vaguely set in the near-future gets compared to Black Mirror) and The

Good Place — somewhere in the middle lies the appeal of Upload.