SDCC Exclusive: Series Creator, Greg Daniels & Executive Producer, Maxwell Vivian Chat The Final Season Of ‘Upload’
Upload celebrated their fourth and final season at San Diego Comic Con this past week, BeautifulBallad, along with fellow reporters, for the chance to sit down with Series Creator, Greg Daniel, and Executive Producer: Maxwell Vivian to chat about the final season.
On the final season of their hit series and the excitement that went into it:
Vivian: “Everything went into that. I think one of the great things about the room this time around is we had a little more time and we really were able to consider everything. Every idea got its time in the sun and we really walked down the road with these ideas before we determined that they didn’t work. And sometimes you can’t get that time back and the idea doesn’t work out, but sometimes you walk something down the road and it ends up being better than you can possibly imagine. So I think that really served us well in Season 4.”
Daniels: “And there’s whole ideas that were considered to be like, let’s say this is the whole ending of the show and then later they’re kind of crushed into an aspect of it so that by the time you get to the end, it’s a very rich stew”
On how the onset of AI in real life affected how they approached the show over the years:
Daniels: Well, it’s huge. I don’t know if you guys have seen the ending, but there is a whole storyline of the AI under sort of enormous pressure to return on the investment, starts to cut some ethical corners, and then also becomes self-aware. That is one of the challenges of the ending. We spent a lot of time on it and never thinking in the early seasons that AI was going to catch up this fast to the show. But I think fundamentally the point we’re trying to make is that AI needs to be given a value system the way a teenager does. Sort of any new member of society has to be inculcated with the values of your society or it’s going to be destructive. So our message, which is probably being ignored, is that we really need guardrails and a sense of ethics in the AI.”
On how they balanced the comedic tone with the high-stakes, timely things about the AI:
Daniels: “We are telling the story, right? If you get too worried that the AI is going to overwhelm society before your show drops, I think maybe there’s a little bit of doing what we are trained to do as storytellers and trying to tell a satisfying story, even if the robots will be the only audience in a year. I hope not. I don’t think that’s true. And the whole show is about balancing genres. Do you remember there was a hamburger called the McDLT like 10, 15 years ago? That’s very important to me because that hamburger came separate and there was a cold side with the lettuce and a hot side with the hamburger. I use that as a metaphor in the writers’ room a lot is that if you’re going to mix two genres, they still have to have their genre characteristics. When you bite into it, you still have to feel the cold crunchy lettuce and the hot juicy hamburger. You kind of mush them together so that everything’s lukewarm, it’s not as tasty. So we try and keep the genres separate and have them work as themselves.”
Vivian: “And I think that by the time AI came out there was sort of a groundwork laid already in the show for how the AI works in the show. So we were never going to turn around and make it exactly like one of these big models out there. But we were able to scoop up the uses and themes and the questions that those things raised and speak to those rather than doing a one-to-one GhatGPT or whatever.”
On whether they were satisfied with how the series wrapped up:
Daniels: “I do. They’re very long episodes, so the whole thing ends up about two-and-a-half hours. And when you think of it, it’s sort of like a big fat movie. But we’ve also spent time exploring some new ideas. It’s not all wrapping up and callbacks. There’s a lot of new weird things to explore. They go to a longevity spa for tech billionaires, which we talked about in the last season. Each episode has got its own storyline and theme. We also go to another upload. I think there’s a lot of good stuff.”
Vivian: “We packed a lot in four episodes and I think we took our time and did a good job of, like Greg was saying, making the season not just wrap up. There’s new stuff, there’s new storylines, but at the same time there is a sense of finality at the end that I think fans are really going to enjoy.”
On the vibes in the writers room:
Daniels: “A lot of times those have a nugget of truth in it. There is, I think, an Israeli researcher who’s using AI to translate animal sounds and they’re applying it to whale sounds. So we’re taking the idea that self-driving cars are not infallible. Also, there was something in World War II that was super interesting. They had the Manhattan Project to develop the atom bomb, but B.F. Skinner, the behavioral psychologist, had a second project that was training pigeons to fly kamikaze drone things. So this idea that maybe a trained squirrel that could talk to you would be better than a self-driving car because it could react to new impulses. I don’t know. We come up with a lot of bizarre ideas and they usually have a grain of something in the science news.”
Season four of Upload will premiere on Prime Video on August 25.
*This interview has been edited for length and clarity. BB would also like to credit the amazing reporters seated at our press table, and their wonderful questions.