‘Upload’ offers up a familiar digital future

But the details make it disturbingly funny

Greg Daniels, who developed the American version of “The Office” and co-created “Parks and Recreation” — which translates as “never has to work again and can rest on his laurels” — has instead created a new series, “Upload,” streaming now on Amazon Prime. (For good measure, he has another, “Space Force,” reuniting him with Steve Carell, at the end of the month.)

Apart from being a comedy, and good, “Upload” is nothing like those earlier shows. But it is like a lot of other things: an afterlife comedy (of an unusually secular sort); a futurist satire; a murder mystery; and, most of all, a romantic comedy built along classical lines, replete with wacky friends, mid-arc alienation and less serious significant others to complicate the progress of the soul-mated, different-world lovers.

It’s the year 2033, and it is possible to digitize and upload an individual consciousness into a program that the deceased inhabits more or less like life. Communication between the two realms is accomplished by the future iteration of a smartphone or virtual reality.

Nora (Andy Allo) works as a customer service representative, or “angel,” for Horizen — you are supposed to think “Verizon” — which maintains one of many available heavens, an environment called Lakeview, “the only digital afterlife modeled on the grand Victorian hotels of the United States and Canada.” She introduces new clients into the system and helps them integrate. One of these is Nathan (Robbie Amell), whom we have met alive, and who, with his best friend, Jamie (Jordan Johnson-Hinds), is about to finish work on a free digital afterlife — or would, if Nathan would code more and party less.

If “Upload” breaks no ground other than in digging up its influences, it has put the pieces together in a smart and satisfying way; if it leaves a host of philosophical questions on the table and picks up the practical ones, it has more straightforward things on its mind: love and suspense.