Text: Seapark
What is the world after death? Is it heaven? Or hell? Or is it eternal nothingness? In the new drama "Uploading Freshmen" aired by Amazon in May of this year, an uncommon answer was given-the dead world is no different from the one we live in, but another one dominated by consumerism." Utopia".
"Uploading Freshman" is written by Craig Daniels, the ace producer who has produced "The Office: US Version" and "Parks and Recreation". It combines science fiction and comedy. It is Amazon's highly acclaimed part and a half this year. Hours of episodes.
The story is set in the not-so-distant future of 2033. The handsome programmer Nathan died young due to an autonomous driving traffic accident. His consciousness was uploaded to the cloud, and he stayed in the "Lakeview Hotel" of Horizon's virtual reality system. In this virtual paradise, dead Nathan continues to exist in the form of data, except that he cannot leave the hotel, he lives almost the same life as the outside world. And all his expenses in the hotel are borne by his rich second-generation girlfriend Ingrid.
At the same time, Nora, a staff member of the Lakeview Hotel, was appointed as Nathan's "angel" to help him solve various post-mortem problems. Nora is an ordinary salaryman with no boyfriend, boring work, and often made things difficult by her boss. But in getting along with Nathan, he was gradually attracted by him, and the two sparked a spark of love.
Nathan gradually realized that part of his memory had disappeared after death. All this seems to be related to the "surpassing" of the app he developed before him. With Nora's help, he began investigating his girlfriend and partner. Perhaps his death was not an accident, but a murder?
After "Black Mirror" became popular all over the world, a large number of dramas that used black technology as a selling point and opened up the brain of the future world followed one after another. This batch of works included "Loop Story", "Electronic Dream", "Copy", and even "Western World". This drama is also one of them.
In fact, the biggest "stalk" of the show, the consciousness uploading to the cloud after death, has been used by Charlie Brook in the fourth episode of the second season of "Black Mirror" in 2016, "San Junipello" . In that episode, after death, humans can upload their consciousness to the virtual city of San Junipello, and the living can visit here every weekend. This episode uses the post-mortem upload setting to tell a story of homosexuality in the evening and the collision of different concepts of death. One scene, multiple contradictions, and a lot of extended thinking made this collection one of the pinnacles of "Black Mirror" and won the Emmy Award for Best TV Movie and Best TV Movie Screenplay that year.
Compared with "Black Mirror", which always puts technology and people in extreme situations, it is different from creating moral opposition and anxiety. Craig Daniels' "Uploading Freshmen" has its own personality. As early as the end of "The Office" in 2013, Daniels had already begun to prepare this script to take over his famous drama. However, because science fiction dramas were not so popular at that time, smart phones were not yet popular, and many concepts were not mature and delayed. Today, we are living in a new era where black technology is everywhere, and the former science fiction has become daily life, which also gives this drama soil.
"Uploading Freshman" is not the speculation of "Black Mirror", nor the massive tribute and intensive laughter bombing of "Rick and Morty", but a Daniels-style life-stream comedy, placed in a slightly sci-fi background middle.
Daniels knew that he couldn't do a cold sci-fi moral drama, what he wanted to do was a down-to-earth sci-fi comedy. An episode of 30 minutes is a comedy length familiar to Daniels. The heroine Nora goes to work from nine to five every day. She is harassed by her boss wearing shoes and perverted male colleagues. In the world of death, Nathan is also facing the troubles of a love triangle, the unsuccessful funeral of his own, and the practical problems of not having money to buy traffic. Most of the plots are jokes caused by daily trivial matters, and can even correspond to "The Office" one by one.
Many foreigners have a hotel complex. Unlike Chinese-style vacations (tourists) who always visit a large number of scenic spots in a short time, foreign vacationers are more willing to enjoy the leisure of a hotel, allowing them to escape the exhaustion of reality. The hotel has also become the most direct presentation of "paradise" in this play.
Just as the main stage of "The Office" is the office of a small branch company, "Uploading Freshmen" also defines a stage, namely the "Lakeview" hotel of Horizon Company. This stage is divided into two parts: reality and illusion. Reality is the real office where Nora is located. It is a standard sitcom scene where Steve Carell can be directly airborne. The unreal part is the "hotel" of Nathan's post-mortem simulation program, and it is also the really interesting part of the show.
The hotel is a complex complex in many movies. The densely arranged rooms and the different residents throughout the ages bring a sense of mystery; the false warmth and enthusiasm brings a huge uncanny valley effect.
Kubrick first discovered the relationship between the hotel and the death. In The Shining, an illogical labyrinth-like terrain is used to shape the isolated hotel into a hell. In HBO's drama "Watching the Earth" in the past few years, it used the image of a hotel to shape the world after death. God is the lobby manager and leads the deceased to move in, and heaven is the hotel's uninterrupted dance party.
For the Daniels comedy where daily is above everything else, the hotel paradise in "Uploading New Life" is not a supreme and mysterious thing, but a simple and straightforward Internet "product". This product has bugs and must be upgraded from time to time. It has insufficient computing power and often freezes. The low-paid operators are busy and exhausted, but they still cannot satisfy customers.
Most importantly, Daniels captured the existence of the hotel as the ultimate consumer scene. The hotel can provide all the services of food, clothing, housing and play. As long as you have money, you can play God. The lake view hotel scene in the play, combined with the product thinking of the Internet, has become the ultimate consumerism monster that rules the life after death.
You have to consume traffic for all the scenery you see. You need to consume a bottle of virtual beverage, and you need to consume to change a piece of clothing. There are private customized advertisements wherever you go. When we are alive, we are defined by consumerism, we will continue to consume after death, even because you are already dead, you simply cannot end this cycle by dying again. As a lyric in the Eagles’ famous song "Hotel California" sums it up, "You can check out at any time, but you can never leave."
Although it has an interesting sci-fi setting, it must also be admitted to the essence of the "Uploaded Newborn" soap opera. Promoting the development of the plot is the Jack-Soo-style love triangle and the cliché murder suspense. Talking about half an episode of love, and then using the second half to create some suspense, is the standard rhythm of this play. Even common soap opera tactics such as amnesia, misunderstanding, and false identity can also be found in this play. For the fast-paced science fiction lovers who are used to the episodes of "Black Mirror", the absent-minded and slow advancement of this drama, even the "cliff hanging" suspense plot that does not fill the hole at the end of the season, will cause discomfort.
However, sci-fi fans are not the target group of Daniels. The real audience of this show is actually those casual soap opera lovers who like handsome men and beautiful women to fall in love and mild suspense. At least two protagonists, Robbie Amel, who plays Nathan, and Andy Allo, who plays Nora, are both online. One is called "Little Ah Tang" and the other is "Black Angelababy", which gives the show some idol drama potential. Now that we already have vampire idol dramas, superhero idol dramas, and suspenseful reasoning idol dramas, it’s okay to have one more sci-fi idol drama.
At present, the second season of this drama has been successfully scheduled and will be broadcast next year. In addition to this project, Craig Daniels will also have a new Netflix drama "Space Force", which is cooperating again with Steve Carell, on Netflix at the end of this month. At the same time, the two giants of Amazon and Netflix dominate the screen, and Daniels in the post-"office" era can also be regarded as a successful example of traditional TV people transforming into Internet drama producers.
(Originally contained in Iris)
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