Cupertino brings the tech backlash to the CBS procedural — an initially awkward combination, but with rewarding results. The show starts off just slightly unsure, but quickly figures out what to do with these strange times, creating fictionalized dupes of the Zizians, Polymarket, Jeff Bezos’ looksmaxxing obsession, OpenAI stealing Scarlett Johansson’s voice, and the fight for AI guardrails, among other familiar tales, and using them to speak to the feeling of helplessness in the face of rapid change that extends well beyond the greater San Francisco area. It turns out the seemingly outdated tools of broadcast TV are a fantastic way to tackle our uncertain future. 

Please don’t think Cupertino is some kind of Blue Bloods Bay Area or CSI: The Computer. (Sorry, I mean CSI: Cyber, a real show that lasted two seasons and starred Ted Danson, obviously.) Yes, the show is network TV, in the old-fashioned, 20-episodes-in-a-season sense, and it’s airing on CBS in the highly suspicious age of Ellison. But it has certain pedigree coming from creators Robert and Michelle King, the married couple behind the wonderful Elsbeth, Evil, The Good Wife, and The Good Fight. The Kings are often credited as uniquely sophisticated for network TV. But that still leaves some big questions about what this show is and who it’s for.

Also, yes, it is (mostly) a case-of-the-week show about an upstart Silicon Valley law firm taking on Big Tech one suit at a time. Price Siffre (pronounced “cipher”) is made up of lawyers Michael Price (Mike Colter, aka Luke Cage) and Olivia Siffre (Rachel Keller, Legion), along with their assistant Christy Palladino (Ella Stiller), all of whom left the same evil AI company under not-great circumstances in the pilot. (My recommendation is to skip that first episode — just know they sue tech companies — or at least don’t hold it against the show.) Cipher maybe isn’t the wrong word for this main group: Michael is handsome and guarded, Christy is a King-classic spunky investigator type, and Olivia is religious and loves musicals, so she’s introduced listening to Godspell — it took me probably four whole episodes to forgive the show for that too-cute detail. The ensemble really starts to come together, though, when it’s revealed to be a secret Girls5eva reunion, with the additions of Renée Elise Goldsberry as Michael’s ex/rival and Busy Philipps as MacKenzie Scott (formerly Bezos) if she was very fun and a little drunk.

Maybe that’s not quite selling you — two out of five members of a fake girl group from a criminally underwatched sitcom and a bunch of ripped-from-the-headlines tech trials, made by people in their 60s for people in their 60s. But the Kings have their bona fides when it comes to the subject matter — The Good Wife was called “the most tech-savvy show on TV” by Wired in 2013, the same year that BuzzFeed said “everyone in tech needs to be watching” it. That show tackled Bitcoin, viral videos, NSA spying, and the goofy-ass names of 2010s tech startups without being hacky or hammy. Granted, being “good at tech” on an Obama-era show about lawyers in Chicago is different from being “good at tech” on a 2026 show called Cupertino.

One of the creators’ greatest strengths is worldbuilding, and as their vision of Silicon Valley expands it starts to cohere. This is a landscape packed with data brokers, rationalists, underpaid AI trainers, software developers who put ASCII dicks in their code as a gag, gerontocratic judges, petty billionaires, and the frustrated contractors who build their offices and bunkers. That’s where a perceived weakness becomes a strength: The longer network season allows for tangents, explorations, multi-episode arcs, successful fake-outs, and surprise recurrences. These figures can, do, and likely will return, and the show has the time and space to let them unfold and disappear until their resurfacing is a delight. It’s a trick rarely so surprising or fun in clockwork six-to-13-episode streaming seasons, when a detail in episode 3 pretty much has to pay off in episode 7.

This isn’t just good TV, it creates a sense of truth and claustrophobia that the show benefits from; these well-drawn people (mostly) all feel caught together in a highly specific and completely deranging reality. So it follows that the prevailing mood is sort of a peppy paranoia — the dark twist of actual reality, though, is that we’re post-paranoid. Suspicion about the reaches and aims of Big Tech has been shown to be grounded and, frankly, reasonable. The firm’s work suing “the big seven” fictionalized companies comes at a time when every device could be listening and deepfakes mean nothing’s guaranteed to be what it seems. Who wouldn’t be looking over their shoulder, under their desk, and into the source code?

Somehow still, though, the show approaches its central preoccupation — AI — with a healthy fear but surprising lack of judgment. This can be frustrating if you’re sensitive about bots being anthropomorphized (oh, that’s happening, all right), and there were moments early on when I feared the “wrong” lessons were being imparted. But the lack of clean or easy answers makes this a subtler take on what we should be scared of today. 

Cupertino arrives at a time when tech backlash is coming to screens in a big, big way — in cinemas with The Social Reckoning, You Can See Everything, Artificial, and Musk, and on TV too with The Altruists, a Netflix show about FTX coming in November, and AMC’s The Audacity hitting Netflix this past summer. But while The Audacity felt like it was preaching to (and occasionally screaming at) the choir, Cupertino’s key is that it’s about to be fed to an audience that might not be following the finer points of the Hugging Face hack, and riffing on these themes, stories, and real-life archetypes with intelligence, nuance, and some small remainder of joy.

Cupertino premieres on CBS on October 8th.

From the omnipresent One Night Only trailer, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the movie glosses over its terrifying and absurd premise — in otherwise normal modern New York, single people can only have sex one night a year — to deliver an entirely traditional romantic comedy. 

I’m here to report that it does not do that. 

No, the film is very much about life under Sex Purge Law, but where you might expect questions of politics or religion or fear or humanity, there are instead questions of boning. Questions like “Who should I do sex to and why?” are explored in an episodic format that sees two special hot people (Monica Barbaro and Callum Turner) run into each other over and over but not immediately get busy. That obviously raises more questions! (“WHY NOT?”) Questions are really the joy of this movie, if you find joy in it, as I did. It tries to answer some, but it creates so, so many more. 

The one you’re probably asking: How is this law possibly enforced?

Editor’s note: This post contains One Night Only spoilers.

When “the mandate” was passed, three years prior to the events of the movie, all adults of legal age were issued subcutaneous tracking chips with attendant, color-changing tattoos. When you’re unmarried, the tattoos — a little lighthouse for our heroine, the Batman symbol for our hero — are red. You know, for “stop” (having sex). When you wed, they go green. But on “The One Night,” as people and brands alike shorthand Sex Purge Day, reds turn green and pent-up singles barely stop themselves from boinking in the street. Largely they do stop themselves, though, because somehow despite its R rating, this movie isn’t like that. 

In fact, the movie is somewhat desexed, even though sex is the explicit topic. It is surprisingly amusing, though, if you can quiet your disbelief to only one to two cries of “Really?? This??” per minute. The movie has sort of misfired David Wain energy, with some truly unexpected gags and pleasantly silly set pieces. It helps immensely that Barbaro and Turner are extremely appealing, both individually and as a pair. They have the all-important chemistry that makes romcom heads forgive wild, bizarre sins of plot and conception. 

One of these sins is arguably the way the chips monitor sexual activity, which is basically “science???” Dopamine and other erotic neurochemicals are measured, and if they’re discovered to be spiking in two people close in proximity, that’s a violation. You can be arrested — although it’s unclear how many violations this takes, as we only see repeat offenders — and banned from sex even on The One Night. While I can tell you there are no special sex cops, only an exhausted-seeming regular NYPD, this law enforcement technology does engender many more questions. As Verge senior copy editor Kallie Plagge asks, what if you both see a puppy at the same time? What if you do drugs together, asks senior social media editor Tristan Cooper — or if you self-pleasure in the presence of another, how far apart do you have to be? What if you have roommates? I don’t know!! 

It’s purposefully hand-wavy and a little vague, but maybe not as completely out there as we’d like. Wearables have been proposed that could monitor your sexual fidelity via heart rate, skin temperature, and movement-detecting sensors. 

Information about how exactly this became a political reality is not the particular interest of screenwriter Travis Braun or director Will Gluck, but it is allowed to dribble out in the background as Barbaro and Turner separately scheme to get some.

(Sorry, let’s pause here. Actual question No. 1: Why do these two absurdly attractive, totally charming people even have to try, especially on a night such as this? We learn early on that Turner’s handsome pizzamaker had a mishap with his intended, but Barbaro’s character was apparently too busy with her career singing lyrically tweaked pop ballads for pharmaceutical commercials to meet a decent guy in the previous 364 days. That might be even more outlandish than the government decree they’re living under, but the movie makes it clear she’s a romantic — in classic romcom logic that’s a practically insurmountable flaw, until you find the perfect person to mount.) 

We learn that Congress passed the measure at the urging of a Christian-coded technomegacorp that makes the chips and also employs Nicholas Braun. We do not learn where the Durex and EPT lobbies were during this vote. We learn that the party line, from the company’s smarmy CEO — distinctly more JD Vance-like than Elon Musk-esque — is that people wanted a return to innocence, and apparently that’s all we’re getting. It’s also implied by a single queer character that queer people have been “getting around” the straights’ sex laws for time immemorial, so this is NBD to them, but this is less a commentary on queer ingenuity or resistance than it is a reason to make that character sit this one out for a babysitting gig. We don’t get a good answer on the divorce or birth rate in SexPurgelandia — although teen pregnancy is down, which… aren’t the kids not chipped? — and it’s unclear if married people can swing (I’m guessing yes). 

Where’s the pushback? Where are the people digging the chips out of their skin, refusing to get tagged, storming the Capitol and doing it doggy-style on alternate-universe Nancy Pelosi’s desk? That might be the film’s one kind of neat trick, if you’re feeling very generous. This law is widely unpopular but only lacklusterly protested by a complacent public. We see plenty of graffiti, “Resist” signs in brownstone windows, a well-funded benefit concert. But we see a lot more corporate buy-in with cutesy “One Night”-themed advertising. A society too busy buying and selling things to fight back against religiously inflected fascistic oppression and sex weirdness? I can’t say I have questions about where the creators got that idea.