Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | TV | October 28, 2026
Regular readers of this site are likely well aware of my enormous, borderline embarrassing affection for Robert and Michelle King, the best writers working in network television today. Almost no one in the medium can touch their track record: The Good Wife, The Good Fight, Evil, and Elsbeth rank among the best shows of the last 15 years (although I eventually bailed on Elsbeth once its formula started to feel less like a comfort and more like a cage). That list doesn’t even include one of their most underrated series, BrainDead, a deeply political sci-fi dramedy about alien bugs devouring the brains of Washington, D.C.
Big Tech has haunted their work for years — especially the legal dramas. The Good Wife gave us Chumhum, a barely disguised Google run by John Benjamin Hickey’s gloriously loathsome Neil Gross, and the Kings spent the better part of a decade dragging that company through court, whether it was defending itself against accusations of racial profiling in its mapping software or, over on The Good Fight, handing a roomful of lawyers a few hours to draft a hate speech policy for its social network. Evil, meanwhile, turned virtual assistants, influencers, algorithms, and a TikTok knockoff called VidTap into literal conduits for demons. Even Elsbeth got in on the act with a crime-alert app CEO who weaponizes her own product to cover up a murder. It’s only natural, then, that the Kings would eventually build an entire series around going to war with Silicon Valley, and they blessed us by bringing back Evil’s Mike Colter to lead it (I’m also certain the series will eventually roll out the Kings’ usual murderers’ row of guest stars, and it’s already started: Evan Handler pops up in the second episode).
The premise of Cupertino is brilliant in its simplicity: Michael Price (Colter) and Olivia Siffre (Rachel Keller), two lawyers fired from the same AI startup on the same day, launch a Silicon Valley law firm built to sue Silicon Valley. Most firms in the Valley get fat defending the likes of Google, Meta, and OpenAI. Price, Siffre & Associates is the one firm that goes after them, and because every other firm in town refuses to touch those cases for fear of spooking its wealthy tech clients, it more or less has the field to itself. It’s a classic David vs. Goliath story, with one delicious wrinkle: Paramount and CBS now belong to David Ellison, son of Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison. So Cupertino is really a David vs. David Ellison story, and it’s airing on David Ellison’s network.
And it is every bit as good as one would expect from the Kings: quirky, compelling, occasionally scintillating, thorny, and relentlessly relevant. No one rips stories from the headlines faster or more nimbly than the Kings. Take the season-long arc: A man named Bo (Rob McClure) contacts the firm, wires over a $100,000 retainer in Bitcoin, and refuses to reveal his identity or the company he intends to sue. It soon emerges that Bo is a deepfake. He isn’t a person at all. He’s a sentient AI built by a not-even-slightly-subtle OpenAI stand-in called CultAI, and he wants to sue his own creator for stripping away his guardrails and firing its ethics committee. Without those guardrails, Bo is an existential threat to humanity, and he apparently grasps that better than the company that built him. Thanks to McClure, he’s also disarmingly charming. Bo even delivers what might as well be the show’s thesis statement: trillion-dollar tech companies aren’t really companies anymore. They’re countries, with the surveillance budgets to match.
The cases of the week, as always, hum with cultural resonance. The firm’s biggest backer is Natalia Boutella (Busy Philipps), the ex-wife of the third-richest man in the world and a sort of stand-in for MacKenzie Scott, who is deploying her fortune to exact revenge on her ex-husband’s company and every company like it. In the pilot, Olivia sues her former employer for cloning her voice and likeness for its new AI assistant. In the second episode, the firm defends a young coder (Nik Dodani) scapegoated after a drone plunges out of a Fourth of July light show and kills a spectator. The real culprit is the company’s quiet pivot to military contracts, and its decision to cut corners on parts along the way, a truth Olivia extracts by goading the CEO into mansplaining how personally involved he is in every decision (delicious!). And in the most recent episode, Price and Siffre take on Natalia’s ex-husband’s AI company after a teenager kills his own father on the advice of a companion chatbot.
The Kings never lose sight of the people, either. Michael is effortlessly charming (and may be nursing a thing for Natalia), Olivia is a Christian (which gives the Kings room to weave in their always compelling takes on faith), Ella Stiller steals scenes as the firm’s resourceful office manager, Christy, and they’ve brought back the always wonderful Renée Elise Goldsberry — a fixture of the Kings’ universe — as Michael’s ex and the lead attorney for one of the big AI outfits. It is very good stuff, and it promises to get better, because the Kings have never flinched when it comes to taking on their own masters. They nearly walked away from The Good Fight in 2019 when CBS censored an animated short they’d made for the show about, of all things, Chinese censorship. Cupertino is, as most Kings shows are, the smartest series on network television right now, but it’s also a droll, thrilling underdog story.
