WARNING! The following contains spoilers for Cupertino Episode 1, “Michael & Olivia.”
Silicon Valley is filled with stories about ambitious startups becoming billion-dollar companies. Cupertino is more interested in what happens to the people who get steamrolled along the way. The new CBS legal drama from The Good Wife creators Robert and Michelle King stars Michael Price (Mike Colter) and Olivia Siffre (Rachel Keller) as two lawyers who lose their jobs at the same tech company and discover they might be better off working together.
Episode 1 opens with Michael and Olivia sitting outside S-Talk, a tech start up, with each holding a box of their belongings after being fired. Olivia is surprised to see Michael because he’s one of the company’s co-founders. She also inadvertently reveals that she overheard her boss, Richard Everett (Will Brill), discussing how to strip a co-founder of his equity. Until that moment, she hadn’t realized Everett was talking about Michael.
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Olivia has problems of her own. When she worked closely with Everett, he sent her an explicit photo of himself, and she got fired shortly after. Meanwhile, Michael’s attorney, Ry Vance (Steven Pasquale), advises him to let his firing go as he’s highly sought after by other companies. Michael refuses, fires Ry and tracks down Olivia instead.
Michael reveals that before leaving S-Talk, he was asked to prepare a memo about the company’s potential vulnerability if one of its founders were accused of sexual harassment. He proposes two lawsuits: his for wrongful termination and hers involving sexual harassment.
Olivia initially refuses, worried about the scandal and how her conservative family would react. That changes when Olivia learns about Daisy, S-Talk’s new AI assistant. Daisy sounds remarkably like Olivia and can even be made to say explicit things in her voice. Olivia calls Michael and tells him she wants to sue S-Talk for cloning her voice and identity. The two fired lawyers join forces.
Their new legal operation isn’t exactly glamorous. Michael and Olivia work out of an IHOP booth, while Michael’s former assistant, Christy Paladino (Ella Stiller), gets fired and has to go back to her old job at TGI Friday’s for helping him and ends up joining their makeshift team. Thanks to her extensive family connections, she even finds them an impressive-looking Silicon Valley office that’s mostly empty beyond its fancy lobby.
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Ry goes to work for Everett, setting up a courtroom battle before Judge Lincoln Cogswell (Jackie Earle Haley). Michael hopes the litigation will damage S-Talk’s valuation enough to pressure the company into settling, but their case takes a hit when Ry produces an actress who claims she was hired to provide Daisy’s voice.
Ry then offers Michael a lucrative job and partnership if he drops the lawsuit and stops representing Olivia. While Michael considers the offer, Olivia makes a discovery. She repeatedly sings “It’s the Hard Knock Life” from Annie when she’s stressed. When she asks Daisy to name a song from its favorite musical, the AI gives the same answer. S-Talk may not have literally used Olivia’s voice, but Daisy’s personality appears to have been modeled after her.
Michael rejects Ry’s offer, but Olivia still loses her case. She pivots to Michael’s wrongful termination suit and confronts Everett with the explicit photo he sent her. Everett folds.
The resulting settlement is substantial and damaging enough that S-Talk loses funding, delaying its plans by at least two years. Michael and Olivia celebrate with their new “staff,” TGI Friday’s employees recruited to look like Silicon Valley professionals.
More importantly, Michael realizes they’ve found their niche: representing people exploited by powerful tech companies. Their scrappy operation officially becomes Price and Siffre, the Davids taking on Silicon Valley’s Goliaths.
Right on cue, the premiere ends by introducing the person who will need their help next.
There’s a lot of The Good Fight in its DNA
Anyone familiar with Robert and Michelle King’s previous shows will probably recognize Cupertino’s DNA immediately. The series feels particularly close to The Good Fight, which similarly used the legal world to tackle current issues while surrounding its characters with eccentric personalities and occasionally absurd situations.
The Kings have simply shifted their focus to Silicon Valley, an area Robert King knows well as he grew up in San Jose. In a note sent to journalists along with screeners, they explained they’ve “always been interested in the confluence of tech and the law,” but said the evolution of AI made the subject “positively irresistible.”
There’s even a familiar face leading the charge. Mike Colter played Lemond Bishop on The Good Wife and The Good Fight before starring in the Kings’ Evil. This time, however, he’s the one practicing law.
This legal drama is also pretty funny
For a show built around wrongful termination, sexual harassment and the dangers of AI, Cupertino is surprisingly funny. Much of that humor comes from Ella Stiller, the daughter of Ben Stiller and Christine Taylor, as Christy. After getting fired for helping Michael, she almost immediately becomes indispensable to his new law firm. Her seemingly endless supply of well-connected relatives becomes a running joke, as does the fact that she spends much of the episode helping Michael and Olivia while still dressed in her TGI Friday’s uniform.
The premiere also has plenty of fun with Silicon Valley itself. Michael can’t seem to go anywhere without someone pitching him an idea and asking for seed money, including a sheriff’s deputy who wants to launch yet another rideshare company. Even Michael and Olivia’s impressive new office is mostly an illusion: It has a gorgeous lobby but very little behind it. Apparently, in Silicon Valley, everyone has a startup idea. They just need someone else’s money.
The timing feels surprisingly prescient
Cupertino arrives at a moment when Big Tech and the enormous power wielded by the companies and billionaires behind it have become an increasingly unavoidable part of the national conversation.
Daisy and the questions surrounding AI provide the premiere’s entry point, but there’s no shortage of other territory for the show to explore. Privacy, automation, mass layoffs, social media, the collection of personal data and the growing influence of tech billionaires all come with legal and ethical questions that didn’t exist, or looked very different, a decade ago.
That gives the Kings an unusually deep well of potential stories. And considering how quickly the tech world changes, Cupertino shouldn’t have any trouble finding new ones.
Related: Mike Colter Teases His Underdog Return to Primetime in CBS’s Bold New Silicon Valley Drama ‘Cupertino’ (Exclusive)
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