Cupertino TV show: Legal procedural that questions the ethics of Big Tech

Cupertino is not the epicentre of Silicon Valley but the name is familiar to anyone who has held a physical Apple product in their hand.

Plus, Menlo Park, where Meta is headquartered, just doesn’t have the same punchiness to it, Mountain View, the home of Google, sounds like a western film, and Palo Alto and Silicon Valley were already taken.

So, now, Cupertino becomes the stand-in for the whole American tech industry in this new series from prolific TV writers Robert and Michelle King.

Even if you don’t know the Kings’ names, you’ve certainly seen one of their shows, most notably The Good Wife, the 2009 legal drama starring Julianna Margulies as the spouse of a scandalous politician who returns to work after he’s carted off to prison for corruption.

The Good Wife was a high-end broadcast show which balanced a case-of-the-week format with ongoing story and character arcs. It was glossy but deep, and featured a fantastic cast which also included Josh Charles, Archie Panjabi and Christine Baranski.

After the end of The Good Wife, Baranski followed the Kings into a spin-off show, The Good Fight, which dialled up the politics and absurdity given was contemporaneous to the first Trump administration.

The Good Fight, in particular, engaged with modern politics and events head-on with many of its storylines directly commenting on news lines. Memorably, there were arcs about a potential kompromat Putin might have over Trump (the so-called “pee-pee tape”) as well a fictional tour through Jeffrey Epstein’s storeroom.

It’s that willingness to fold into The Good Fight present-day issues, one matched in scripted TV by only South Park and Law & Order, that suggests the Kings are absolutely the right people to mount Cupertino.

Also, we’ve been missing a good legal drama. They exist, but, you know, they’re most forgettable or laughable (All’s Fair, looking at you on the latter point). The other The Good Wife spin-off, Elsbeth, is a Colombo-style detective comedy-drama rather than a legal one.

The series is centred on Michael Price (King stalwart Mike Colter), a lawyer and co-founder of a tech company who is duplicitously fired from his role “for cause” by his ratbag colleague which robs him of any stakes he was entitled to.

On the same day, a young associate lawyer, Olivia Siffre (Rachel Keller), is also let go after she rebuffed the same bad dude’s sexual harassment advances.

Michael wants to sue, but no one will take his case – his own lawyer warns him that no one gets rich in Silicon Valley by going after the big guys. So, he and Olivia start their own firm with the purpose of representing the underdogs who are getting screwed over by the tech companies.

In 2026, tech companies aren’t exactly the good guys anymore. They may have built products, services and platforms that have utility, but people are increasingly aware of the flipside, of what they’re paying through being robbed of their privacy and being exploited by algorithms.

And now the AI revolution is upon us, which stirs up a whole new raft of anxieties that the next planned obsolescence might actually be humans. Meanwhile, those in charge of the companies are getting cosy with the government and the military, and reaping hundreds of billions for their efforts in selling everyone else out.

A show like Cupertino (albeit, from a media network owned by David Ellison, whose purchase of two studios were funded by his father Larry Ellison’s tech billions) presents a lot of these conflicts in a micro, digestible way.

It’s smart TV because that’s what the Kings make – smart, engaging TV that keeps it fresh, doesn’t get bogged down in lore, is character-driven and performance-driven, and that gives you a reason to come back week after week.

Not out of obligation because of a manipulative cliff-hanger, but because you want to.

Cupertino is streaming on Paramount+