I Interviewed The ‘Parks And Rec’ Creator About His TV Show That Predicts The Future

I binged a lot of TV in 2020. Mostly comedies that could take my mind off the trash fire that was the world at the time. Shows like Schitt’s Creek, Community, The Office US and Parks and Recreation became my daily escape.

So, when I heard that Greg Daniels – creator of Parks and Rec and showrunner of The Office US – had dreamed up a new show that combined sci-fi with rom-com tropes, I was instantly sold. Season 1 of Upload dropped in 2020, Season 2 in 2022, and now, Season 3 is finally here. 

The premise of Upload is relatively simple. It’s set in the future, 2033 to be exact, and humans on their deathbeds can choose to upload their minds to a virtual world. The hope is that eventually, they’ll be able to download back into a clone of their human body and in essence, live forever. 

There’s some social commentary that goes along with this, touching on dark topics like inequality of wealth, problems in society and capitalism through a comedic lens. If you’re a bit rusty about what’s happened in Season 1 and 2, I’m about to give you a quick recap. There’ll be some spoilers, so if you haven’t watched the show at all, feel free to skip the next section and head straight to my interview with Greg Daniels. 

Robbie Amell as the lead character Nathan Brown. Image credit: Amazon Prime Video, Upload

The show revolves around Nathan Brown and his rich girlfriend Ingrid Kannerman. After Nathan is involved in a car accident (that later turns out to be murder), his girlfriend makes sure he’s uploaded to Horizen, a posh virtual world that only the rich can afford. 

Once he’s there, he begins to fall in love with his customer service agent Nora Antony, who lives in the real world but has an avatar in Horizen. During Season 2, the conspiracy around Nathan’s murder is revealed – he had created a digital world called Freeyond that would allow anybody to upload, no matter their wealth – and the show ended with Nathan being downloaded into a clone of his body that Ingrid had been growing in the real world. The only problem with this whole situation? The last person to download into a physical body got midway through the transformation before his literal head exploded. 

I asked Parks and Recreation creator Greg Daniels every burning question about his new show Upload, and here’s what he said. 

Note: This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. 

Punkee: What’s in store for Season 3? 

Greg: Nathan and Nora are trying to solve the mystery of who murdered Nathan while also trying to have a relationship in the real world for the first time. Meanwhile, since Nathan has left Horizen, the low-level employees panic and they restore a digital version of Nathan from a backup copy. So there’s now two of our lead characters, and it’s a really fun way to tell a satiric, entertaining story like Sliding Doors or Truly, Madly, Deeply. 

One of the themes this season is that in a world with digital people and real people, how do you navigate that ethically? There’s a lot about capitalism and income equality, but that’s underneath. The surface is covered with jokes, fun, romance and crazy moments of sci-fi. 

Punkee: Can we talk about the exploding heads for a second? How do you ask VFX people to make it gross and realistic… but also hilarious? 

Greg: It’s really hard because a lot of the time the people doing VFX are not coming from comedy, because most of the time comedies don’t have the budget to do that kind of stuff. So most of their experience is horror or science fiction. On the show Barry, there was a really good featurette that Bill Hader did about the motorcycle chase scene in the show. He talked about how he had to continually work with the SFX stunt people to not do the coolest version, but to do the funny version of stuff. 

I sent that to everybody at the beginning of Upload Season 3 to say, ‘Yes, this is what’s going to happen to us too. We’re going to be doing these visual effects, but the’re supposed to be funny.’ It’s not about the coolest, most loudest thing happening, it’s about figuring out what the funny angle is. 

Allegra Edwards as the hilarious Ingrid Kannerman. Image credit: Amazon Prime Video, Upload

Punkee: How many seasons do you want to make of Upload and do you know where the story is going? 

Greg: When I sold it back in 2015, I had two seasons mapped out, but that was before knowing the cast. When you cast something, you start to go, ‘Oh, gosh, this person is great. I want to hear more from that person’. So it does change things. 

And you have to be open to all the new ideas that come when you have a staff of writers. I definitely want at least one more season because there’s a lot of stories that are unresolved, possibly two. We’ll get into it when the writers get a chance to reassemble for Season 4, which I hope is going to happen.

Punkee: If uploading was real, would you do it? 

Greg: I think I would because there’s people that I want to find out the ends of their stories – I’m curious! I think it would probably be really frustrating and weird a lot of the time. But overall, I’d rather be here than not here I think. 

Punkee: There are a few easter eggs to your other shows, The Office’s Creed Bratton was in Season 1, and in Season 3, Ingrid says “ReTreat Yo’ Self”, obviously a homage to Parks and Rec. Do you like referencing your previous work?

Greg: I do, I think I’ve always done it. I like to name characters after old friends of mine, for instance, I was hanging out with Jim Halpert and Andy Bernard in the summer. You work so hard on these shows and you’re up late some nights. It’s nice to feel like, oh there’s a little reminder of something good that I experienced, a little friend is with me in the editing room. 

The show combines sci-fi and romance in the best way. Image credit: Amazon Prime Video, Upload

Punkee: How do you come up with these futuristic inventions? I particularly love the ‘Spray On Ham’ and ‘3D Printed Turkey’. 

Greg: A lot of it is figuring out what actual inventions are happening. There’s the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, and they preview different technological gadgets that they intend to sell in a couple of years. We then extrapolate that into something exaggerated for comedy. 

But what’s really interesting is that the world starts to catch up with you, and then they become real. In the pilot, which was written in 2017, I had stuff about ‘vape lung’, even though vaping wasn’t supposed to be bad for you. We also had 3D printing steak which I thought was a joke, but now, they can actually print steak! 

You’re trying to be funny and you start with something real and exaggerate it, but then there’s other people who are starting with something real and trying to figure out what’s next so they can make money off of it. Sometimes you bump into each other two years later. 

Punkee: Do the actors (Robbie Amell, Allegra Edwards, Andy Allo, Zainab Johnson, Kevin Bigley, Owen Daniels) get to improvise much? 

Greg: Some of them do. Not as much as in mockumentary shows like The Office or Parks and Recreation but a lot of them do and I love their improvs. AI Guy (editor’s note: played by Greg’s son Owen) and Ingrid especially, they’ll do a lot of it and it’s really fun to use them. 

It’s a bit hard sometimes because we’re shooting a lot of stuff and there’s VFX to be added later. It’d be really fun to have a blooper reel, but you wouldn’t see a lot of things in it because there are missing VFX elements. 

The cast are all very funny and charming and I wish they were doing the press tour, but they’re on strike, which is another example of our show predicting the future. On Upload, there was an unsuccessful actor named Boris Netherlands. He was digitised and paid a flat fee of $1200 to become the AI Guy, which is like the Alexa of Horizen. That’s one of the reasons that SAG-AFTRA is on strike, because they don’t want to be given one fee and then manipulated by a computer forever. 

There’s some nifty tech available in 2033. Image credit: Amazon Prime Video, Upload

Punkee: AI has become more accessible to the public with the introduction of Chat GPT. Did you always plan on the AI Guy becoming more human? 

Greg: Chat GPT is super famous and bounded onto the scene faster than anybody ever thought. But the idea of Artificial Intelligence has been around a long time. This season, the AI Guy has outgrown line-by-line coding and he’s now having to learn from people. They’re having trouble with a lot of the things that are very normal for humans, because they’re thinking of it from a machine standpoint. 

It’s a good statement about AI in a way, because you have to worry about the value system behind AI, and somebody needs to teach AI the same way you need to teach any sort of adolescent – how to fit in, how to be a member of the society and not harm people. 

Owen Daniels as the AI Guy is a standout. Image credit: Amazon Prime Video, Upload

I don’t think they’re spending a lot of time doing that with AI in the real world, I think they’re just forking over billions of Tweets on X or whatever and saying, ‘Learn from this’, but it’s filled with crazy misinformation and bigotry. It’s important to say that the AI in the show is not just an AI that can do stuff, it’s a good AI that’s going to try and help people. 

The first two episodes of Upload Season 3 will be available to stream on Amazon Prime Video at 6.00pm AEDT on Friday, 20 October. New episodes will be released each Friday, with the final two episodes available on Friday, 10 November. 

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Image credits: Amazon, Upload