Greg Daniels talks ‘Upload’ and comparisons to ‘The Good Place’

Greg Daniels has been working on Upload for a very long time. 

In fact, the buzzy sci-fi series, out today on Amazon Prime Video, has been sitting in The Office writer’s notebook since his first major TV job over thirty years ago.

“So I’m in New York working for Saturday Night Live and I’m wandering around the streets with this reporter’s notebook, trying to think of ideas,” Daniels tells Mashable over the phone. “And I went past one of those electronic shops down in Midtown — they were talking digital versus analog in some display — and I started thinking about what would be the ultimate thing that you could digitize.” 

A life-long lover of futuristic fiction, Daniels soon imagined a world where people had the option to digitally clone themselves before death, effectively forgoing the pearly gates for a Sims-adjacent afterlife. Eternally tethered to their loved ones (and a hard drive), these pioneering souls could triumph over mortality through a high-tech solution. 

It’s an innovative slate that provides ample opportunity to explore the big questions of human experience: right versus wrong, what really matters in life, how we want to be remembered, and more. Of course, that’s not an SNL sketch. So, over the following decades, Daniels tried it as a short story, then a book proposal, and finally as a TV show ripe for streaming. 

After all, it’s a great idea — one aren’t hesitating to compare with someone else’s great idea. When I bring up Mike Schur, Daniels’ Parks and Recreation co-creator, he knows exactly where we’re headed: The Good Place. 

“Then later, when I realized he’d done The Good Place? Oy vey.”

Schur’s afterlife-centric series, synonymous with from 2016 to 2019, won the hearts of NBC viewers everywhere. It was inventive, hilarious, addicting, and entertaining. Its cast and crew earned Golden Globe nominations, Emmy Awards, Critics’ Choice picks, and more. In 2019, the series was honored with a Peabody. Right now, I’m betting you can see the show’s banana-colored ad campaign complete with Kristen Bell’s smiling face in your mind’s eye.

Now, Daniels has never seen The Good Place. But its legacy? Well, that’s hung over him and Upload since production began. 

“So, the funny thing is I had dinner with Mike in 2016,” Daniels recalls. “And he was like, ‘How’s it going with your project?’ And I was like, ‘Oh, you know, I just turned in the first draft.’ And he says, ‘Oh, I just wrote something too.’ And we were like, ‘Yeah, we ought to exchange it and read it.’ And we never did. Then later, when I realized he’d done The Good Place? Oy vey.”

Naturally, the similarity in subject matter raised alarm bells for Daniels. He’s quick to point out no one creator can monopolize a genre — ”You can’t be like, ‘I did a medical show and then somebody else did another show set in a hospital?! God damn it!’” — and Schur wasn’t the first (or even most recent) creator to wonder what happens when we die.

But genre competition wasn’t the only obstacle Daniels faced when it came to entering Schur’s presumed domain. In addition to co-creating Parks and Rec, Daniels and Schur both cut their teeth at SNL, wrote for many years on The Office, and share an approach to humor that has frequently gotten them clumped together in analyses of modern comedy.

“I actually think Greg had the no swearing joke early on in one of the versions.”

Both Daniels and Schur are on-record as enjoying each other’s work (Daniels reiterated as much in our interview), and seem to share a genuine affection for one another as people. It’s no wonder Upload and The Good Place took the two in similar creative directions. 

“I actually think Greg had the no swearing joke early on in one of the versions of Upload,” the new series star Robbie Amell tells Mashable, referencing one of The Good Place’s most . A big fan of The Good Place and Black Mirror — another relevant series which Daniels hasn’t seen, and Schur — the Upload actor readily admits the peculiar challenges that faced Daniels and his team. 

“Whenever we were talking [about the script], I’d be like, ‘Oh, this reminds me of this from Black Mirror, or this reminds me of this from Black Mirror,” Amell recalls. “I mean, the poor guy. You would always see him be like [sigh.] He had thought of it before but nobody was ready to pull the trigger and make it. Now, we live in a post-Black Mirror world where people are much more receptive to that kind of sci-fi.”

Even with writers on staff dedicated to making sure Upload didn’t explore too much Good Place or Black Mirror territory, Amell and the rest of the cast and crew kept watch for material already covered in other series. According to Daniels, that often meant cutting jokes he loved.

Then, as if that wasn’t enough, the news cycle began presenting its own eerie obstacles. 

With Upload’s pilot episode shot in 2018 and the rest of its installments filmed in 2019, a number of details from Daniels’ fictitious vision of the future began to come true in real-time.

One example of many, per Amell and Daniels: a joke about the potentially lethal consequences of vaping written long before reports of began making headlines.

“Can you believe that? I just put that in,” Daniels recalls. “I wrote it in the script, and then after we shot the pilot in 2018, all the studies came out about that.”

“It’s remarkable how many times I’ll get an email from one of the cast and they’ll go, ‘Oh my God, it’s happening again.’”

Similar jokes, including one about an unnamed that takes the life of one of Upload’s supporting characters, remain in the series as creepy reminders of the bizarre patterns of coincidence.

“We joke about it all the time!” laughs Upload co-star Andy Allo. “We’re like, ‘Greg, a lot of stuff you wrote in the show is coming true, man. Be careful what you write next.’”

Daniels says the phenomenon is continuing to happen as of late. “It’s remarkable how many times I’ll get an email from one of the cast and they’ll go, ‘Oh my God, it’s happening again.’”

With so many hurdles to avoid, it’s a wonder Upload even made it to audiences. And yet, in conversation, their overwhelming love for the world Daniels has built is evident — and they all see it as unique. 

“I think it is so weird and fresh and different,” Amell says with audible glee. “Even though there are similarities to shows like The Good Place and Black Mirror, I think Greg has given [Upload] such interesting world-building. I was always just so excited to see where it was going to go next. The tone doesn’t really lie in one genre.”

“That special sauce is Greg Daniels.”

“[Upload] is everything you loved about those shows, but then adds its own kind of special sauce — and that special sauce is Greg Daniels,” adds Allo. “You get a show that’s these incredibly layered and diverse characters, and put that in with hilarious situations that are incredibly relatable. Then you bring in the technology, you bring in a little mystery, and you’ve got this chili of a show that takes you on a ride and you have no idea where it’s going.”

As streamers everywhere dial into the world of Upload this weekend, comparisons are sure to linger. But like The Addams Family and The Munsters, Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie, even The Office and Parks and Recreation, perhaps Upload can find its spot among its peers. Then, we’ll all be in TV heaven. 

Upload Season 1 is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.