That new CBS show from the creators of The Good Wife, The Good Fight, and Elsbeth, centered on Silicon Valley and the ways in which tech companies have screwed over the little guys and gals among us, is premiering in three weeks, and we have some new details.
Almost a year ago we learned that CBS had greenlit a new legal procedural drama from The Good Wife showrunners Robert and Michelle King, called Cupertino, and starring Mike Colter — who was featured on The Good Wife and its spinoff The Good Fight, and starred on the Kings' four-season supernatural series Evil, which ended in 2024.
It's been billed as a "David versus Goliath" story in which Colter gets screwed out of his stock options when he's pushed out of a Silicon Valley tech company, and joins forces with a fellow attorney, played by Rachel Keller, to launch a firm specializing in helping individuals who are taken advantage of or otherwise wronged by Big Tech.
And, keeping true to the Kings' procedural style, each episode will center on a particular court case, with various interpersonal dramas involving the recurring cast woven in, a la The Good Wife.
Amusingly, Cupertino isn't being shot anywhere near the real Cupertino, or even California. The law office set is in Kearny, New Jersey — reportedly because of a) tax breaks, and b) access to the New York theater actor set who were the life blood of the Kings' earlier series.
Busy Phillips has joined the cast — she recently shared how she began shooting the pilot just weeks after having surgery to remove a rare, slow-growing brain tumor — in the role of Natalia. Her character is described as "the beautiful and delightfully blunt first wife of an AI billionaire" who recently divorced her as soon as she turned 40. She agrees to bankroll Colter and Keller's firm in order to seek revenge on her husband's company and other companies like his.
Also starring is Renee Elise Goldsberry, who won a Tony Award for playing Angelica Schuyler in Hamilton and starred on Girls5Eva after appearing as a series regular on The Good Wife. Similar to her prosecutor role on The Good Wife, Goldberry plays a character her named Renee, a "brilliant opposing attorney" who has a previous romantic connection to Colter's character.
The new show makes sense in the trajectory of the Kings' writing for television, especially in light of how AI has been dominating headlines. Many of the legal plot lines on The Good Wife and its spinoff were "ripped from the headlines"-style explorations of novel legal issues that have arisen because of various tech innovations — at the time these often involved a fictional Google/Facebook stand-in company called Chumhum that could always afford high-powered lawyers to defend them.
As Robert King tells the New York Times this week, "What we like is long-form storytelling mixed with a magazine-like interest in the present day."
But the very clearly liberal point of view of the Kings might run counter to the new overlords at CBS, led by Larry Ellison scion Doug Ellison — The Good Fight in particular made great use of its main character, Diane Lockhart (Christine Baranski) and her hatred of Donald Trump.
The Times notes that the new show "overlays" the Kings' typical concerns with politics and power "with an appraisal of new technologies and the force, often malign, that they exert on individual lives."
And Robert King doesn't mince words in telling the Times why they wanted to sideline and/or skewer tech bros and billionaires with this show: "Because they’re really the stupidest and dumbest people. Look at them, they’re not fun people."
Cupertino premieres on Thursday, October 8, on CBS and will be streaming on Paramount+. See the teaser trailer below.
Previously: New CBS Legal Drama From 'Good Wife' Creators Robert and Michelle King to Focus on Silicon Valley Tech World
Join the conversation
Comments
Comments load automatically as this section approaches.