Cupertino might be made for your mom, but it’s a good take on tech

The Social Reckoning has been outsmarted by a new CBS procedural.

Meredith Haggerty

Oct 8, 2026, 11:30 AM UTC

Ella Stiller, Mike Colter, and Rachel Keller star in Cupertino.

CBS

Meredith Haggerty

is a news and reports editor with more than a decade of experience. She was previously an editor at Vox.com and Racked.

Cupertinobrings 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 It turns out the seemingly outdated tools of broadcast TV are a fantastic way to tackle our uncertain future.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 thinkCupertinois some kind ofBlue Bloods Bay AreaorCSI: The Computer.(Sorry, I meanCSI: 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 wonderfulElsbeth,Evil,The Good Wife, andThe Good Fight. The Kings are often credited asuniquely sophisticatedfor 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 toGodspell— 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 secretGirls5evareunion, 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 Wifewas called “the most tech-savvy show on TV” byWiredin 2013, the same year thatBuzzFeedsaid “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 calledCupertino.

Olivia Siffre (Rachel Keller) and Michael Price (Mike Colter) are as surprised as anyone that they’re founding law firm to take on Big Tech.

CBS

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.

Cupertinoarrives at a time when tech backlash is coming to screens in a big, big way — in cinemas withThe Social Reckoning,You Can See Everything,Artificial, andMusk, and on TV too withThe Altruists, a Netflix show about FTX coming in November, and AMC’sThe Audacityhitting Netflix this past summer. But whileThe Audacityfelt 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.

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