July 30, 2026
As AI increasingly becomes a contentious cultural issue blamed for job losses and the decline of education, the culture wars are beginning to focus their ire on the CEOs of these AI companies: Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Elon Musk. That zeitgeist of tech angst has now found a new home at CBS in the form of a series called Cupertino.
If the name sounds familiar, that’s because it’s the headquarters of Apple. The iPhone maker was founded in Los Altos but officially incorporated in Cupertino back in 1977 and has kept the city as its base of operations ever since. For tech insiders, the more obvious Silicon Valley area name for a show slamming tech—especially as it relates to AI—would have been Mountain View, the home of AI giant Google. But Cupertino is immediately more recognizable to mainstream viewers due to the Apple connection, so the artistic choice makes sense.
The plot of Cupertino focuses on a couple of tech startup attorneys who have been fired and decide to use their skills to fight for other supposedly unfairly dismissed tech workers in Silicon Valley.
The show was created by husband-and-wife writing/producing team Robert and Michelle King (BrainDead, The Good Wife, Evil) and brings them back together with Mike Colter (Marvel’s Luke Cage, Jessica Jones, Evil). Also starring in the series are Rachel Keller (Fargo, Legion) and Busy Philipps (Cougar Town, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Dawson’s Creek) in roles that seem to offer a good bit of comic relief from Colter’s generally stoic acting persona.
Because it’s CBS, no one should expect the kind of edgy tech bro scenarios seen in HBO’s Silicon Valley or AMC’s The Audacity, but the mere existence of a traditional TV network taking on Big Tech so directly in a series is yet another sign that the honeymoon may be over for tech elites who were enjoying the spotlight as culture setters.
Cupertino premieres on CBS and Paramount+ on October 8.
Cover image via CBS
