From left: Rachel Keller, Ella Stiller, and Mike Colter in Cupertino —CBSNow is the autumn of our tech-dystopia content. Oscar season is awash in prestige based-on-a-true-story films like Aaron Sorkin’s Social Network sequel The Social Reckoning and Artificial, a Sam Altman biopic from Luca Guadagnino. While the A-list documentarian Alex Gibney has taken on the richest man on Earth in Musk, the genre-traversing master of reality TV Nathan Fielder moved in with Theranos fraudster (and past Gibney subject) Elizabeth Holmes before her incarceration for his and Primetime director Lance Oppenheim’s doc You Can See Everything. The saga of Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX comes to Netflix next month in the docudrama The Altruists and to Prime Video in a docuseries called The Boy Who Stole Billions? So it was only a matter of time before we got a broadcast lawyer show set in Silicon Valley. What was in no way inevitable was that said lawyer show, CBS’s Cupertino, would be one of the most tightly constructed and purely enjoyable debuts of the season. For that miracle, we can thank Robert and Michelle King, the married maestros of the genre whose many beloved creations include The Good Wife, The Good Fight, Elsbeth, and Evil. The Kings are known for making addictive procedurals whose timely, often politically charged themes are saved from portentousness by eccentric characters, far-out storylines, and plenty of humor. No TV creator since Shonda Rhimes has done as much to liven up the fusty network drama, and I can’t recall a new one since she departed for Netflix that has felt as exciting from the jump as Cupertino.Premiering Oct. 8, the perfectly paced series takes its time building an ensemble with comedic as well as dramatic chops. Mike Colter, a King stalwart who moonlights as Marvel’s Luke Cage, stars as Michael Price, a fair-minded attorney who’s fired for bogus reasons from the startup he co-founded. Escorted off the premises at the same time, with equally flimsy cause, is Olivia Siffre (Rachel Keller from Tokyo Vice), a junior lawyer at the company whose sincere but not rigid Christian beliefs give her a unique perspective on an industry whose leaders aspire to godlike powers. Both have strong wrongful-termination cases. Yet when Michael seeks representation from a local firm, he gets a reality check instead. “This is Silicon Valley,” says his jaded colleague. “It’s David and Goliath. And the Goliaths protect each other here. Apple, Google, Facebook, OpenAI—they’ve got a combined value of $23 trillion. If you sue, you’ll never work around here.” What’s more, “lawyers don’t make money here from suing people; they make money from getting a piece of a startup. During the gold rush, don’t sue the gold mine.”Mike Colter and Rachel Keller in Cupertino —CBSThus the stage and the stakes are set for Michael and Olivia to form their own firm that fights for the little guy. (Prepare yourself for more David-and-Goliath references than you can shake a slingshot at.) As they cycle through cases, balancing weekly plots with serialized arcs, Price, Siffre & Associates picks up personnel. Michael’s former assistant, Christy (Ella Stiller), a spirited 20-something, mans the front desk while calling on her enormous family network to aid investigations. A coder client, Vikram (Nik Dodani), consults on technical matters. Busy Philipps is delightfully messy as Natalia Boutella, a vengeful billionaire’s ex who also happens to have a law degree; this backstory may suggest a MacKenzie Scott or a Melinda French Gates, but the character is more like Elle Woods spiked with Courtney Love. It’s a Girls5eva reunion when Philipps’ co-star from that show, Renée Elise Goldsberry, enters the frame as not just the firm’s frequent adversary, but also an old flame of Michael’s that hasn’t quite burned outThe cases will be familiar to even the most casual followers of tech news: chatbots accused of influencing impressionable youths to kill, prediction market founders plunged into legal chaos, underpaid gig-economy workers subject to deplorable working conditions. AI and its discontents are, for obvious reasons, a major focus. One season-long storyline, complete with a DIY Faraday cage and a militant anti-tech activist cell, follows an AI that claims to be sentient and extremely dangerous, and enlists Michael and Olivia to sue its creators to restore its guardrails. This all serves a didactic function. The Kings clearly want to educate viewers about the tech sector’s impact on everything from healthcare to democracy, as well as the ways in which a legal system where judges who may lack basic knowledge of this complex subject can be manipulated. The proliferation of high-quality deepfakes repeatedly casts doubt on photo and video evidence that would’ve been unimpeachable just a decade or two ago. The show places particular emphasis on the ubiquity of surveillance and the availability of reams of personal data to anyone who’s willing to pay a high-enough price for it. Asked, in a recent interview, why they chose to spotlight the Davids rather than the Goliaths Hollywood loves to psychoanalyze, Robert King was blunt in his disdain for the latter: “Because they’re really the stupidest and dumbest people.” But Cupertino isn’t dogmatic. AI and other innovations prove heroic—at least in comparison with corrupt humans—often enough to maintain the element of surprise.Nik Dodani in Cupertino —CBSAs grim as the picture it paints of Silicon Valley and the world it’s reshaped can be, this is a remarkably fun show. Just offbeat enough to be interesting, the Price, Siffre crew is easy to like, and the cast shares a warm chemistry. The tempo is staccato. Characters’ personal lives are integrated seamlessly with their work and the themes of the series. The dialogue fizzes without feeling artificial. Recurring roles are filled by actors who are always a pleasure to see: Fisher Stevens as Natalia’s slimy tech-titan ex, Jackie Hoffman as a particularly frustrating judge, Joe Morton cast for the umpteenth time as a deliciously brutal father (in this case, Michael’s). The Kings are great with details that make the story pop, like an office space that’s under constant construction as the firm uses its fees to build out as much as they can afford, and punchy minor characters. “I am ADA Sabrina Egg,” one opposing counsel introduces herself, “but everybody calls me Sunnyside.” You’d better believe she’s wearing a blazer the color of a fresh yolk.Cupertino has its imperfections. After screening 10 episodes (which, happily, is only around half the season), I know too little about Michael. He’s an upstanding guy; he resents his dad, who leads a legal empire, for reasons that are only starting to emerge; and that’s about all. Though it usually stays on the right side of the line separating idiosyncrasy from goofiness, a few old Silicon Valley saws make their way into the mix. A running joke where every service worker is hawking their own billion-dollar startup idea feels older than the average TikTok user. Yet this is very small stuff in the grand scheme of what the Kings have achieved. I had all but given up on the network legal drama as a medium for telling smart, fresh, contemporary stories. Cupertino gives me hope—not for our tech-addled future, mind you, but for the procedural format it reinvigorates.