Greg Daniels Interview: Upload

Greg Daniels is one of the best-known men in the world of comedy today. His early days working on Saturday Night Live and The Simpsons (he wrote the seminal "Bart Sells His Soul" episode of the latter series) led to him creating shows of his own, from the American remake of The Office to Parks & Recreation.

This time, Daniels is heading to streaming giant Amazon Prime for his latest show, Upload. Set in the near future, Upload follows Nathan (Robbie Amell), a man who is critically injured in a mysterious accident involving his self-driving car. Rather than risk traditional death, Nathan's consciousness is "uploaded" into a virtual reality simulation based on a high-end retirement home. The series is set partially in "Lakeview," the post-modern retirement community, and partially in the real world, where the uploaded souls are monitored by working-class attendants, whose responsibility falls somewhere between nurse and tech support.

While promoting the release of Upload on Amazon Prime, Greg Daniels spoke to Screen Rant about his work on the show, from his long-standing interest in cutting-edge technology and VR, to his excitement at being able to write F-bombs into the scripts, knowing that the premium streaming service would be far more lenient on adult content than NBC network censors ever could.

Upload debuts its 10-episode premiere season May 1 on Amazon Prime.

First off, I'm not a binge-watcher by nature, but I just couldn't help myself with your show. I watched the whole season in a day. I loved it so much. And now I feel terrible because who knows how long I'll have to wait before the next batch of episodes!

Thank you, that's very nice!

So, this is some high-concept stuff that I think people who casually follow your work might assume started with something like the final season of Parks & Rec, which was Parks & Rec, but with a twist. And then we've seen you build off that with your subsequent shows. Can you talk a bit about taking the television formula and the way you turn that particular screw?

That's a good question. Let's see. I've always tried to stay away from the standard television formula in my career. I started out doing sketches on Saturday Night Live. And probably the next big thing I did was The Simpsons. My goal at that time was, I had these late-night comedy sensibilities, and I didn't know how to bring it to a normal sitcom. And The Simpsons was good because it was conceptual. I wrote an episode called "Bart Sells His Soul," which may have been, if you think about it, some kind of meditation on this subject matter or something. Then I stayed in animation for a while, and for King of the Hill, I felt like I was trying to do something that was much slower-paced than your normal TV show, which is always "faster and funnier, faster and funnier!" Then, when it came time to adapt The Office, I think one of the things that allowed me to get along well with Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant was the notion of a different pace from normal TV; something that was awkward and slower and stuff like that. And the mockumentary was also kinda high-concept compared to normal TV at the time. I feel like there is a lot of high-concept stuff here because it's set in the future, and it's also set in virtual reality. Everything is in the imagination. It's a world that doesn't exist anywhere. But on the other hand, the point is to tell stories about characters and to care about the characters and what they want and the weird other people they interact with. So, from that standpoint, it reminds me of a lot of stuff I've done from my whole career.

Was there a specific spark in the news or in your life that gave birth to the idea of using VR technology in the show? Do you follow that scene at all?

I do. I used to go to VRLA. At one point, I thought I would be a science journalist, when I was a kid. I've always liked to read about technology, and I did a lot of research for this show about the various consumer electronic shows in Las Vegas over the years, and what gadgets they were bringing to market. And I went to the VRLA Exposition a couple of times and tried different AR and VR sets. One of the things I like about setting the show in this future world is that you get to maybe be the first person writing comedy about the experience of being in a self-driving car! You know what I mean? And, like, a real self-driving car that doesn't have a steering wheel. I feel like some of those scenes are things people are going to be writing about routinely in ten years. And I get to be the first person to do it in a comedy sketch.

It's very easy for people to go, "Greg Daniels, the comedy guy." But there's always so much more. And not to be reductive towards comedy, but your work always has so much heart and soul. This show has mystery and romance, sometimes it's a straight-up cyberpunk thriller.

I'm glad you liked that part of it! To me, some of my favorite moments are like sci-fi horror moments, almost. When I pitched it, I pitched it as a philosophical romantic comedy science fiction mystery thriller. I was really pitching it with a lot of genres. I feel like, in this world of so many television shows, if you want somebody to commit to your show and watch it the whole way through, it's got to really deliver a lot of stuff. That's what I was thinking when I was doing the show. I don't know if it's true, but that's what I was feeling.

Most of your stuff has been on network television, but did you have a "eureka moment" when you were on set and like, "We're on Amazon! The gloves are off! We can drop F-bombs now!"

Yes. For sure! (Laughs) There's some nudity, which was interesting. I thought it was kind of fun to just not have to worry about that. The way it turned out, we didn't do that much of it, but it feels more like a premium cable experience, or a movie. I was trying to be very cinematic, just in terms of the cinematography and the scope of it and the visual effects. It's a lot more complicated than the stuff I'd done before.

It doesn't get drunk with the idea of including racy content, but it does include it, which is fun.