Drama
Below
Netflix’s ‘Below’ offers Shyamalan-esque thrills but adds a frigid wave of harsh content that audiences may not be expecting.
In the tech-focused world of Silicon Valley, it’s good to be an industry giant.
Sure, plenty of small start-ups get the financing they need to grow or get bought out by one of the bigger corporations. But it’s the Goliaths of the tech world—Apple, Google, Facebook, OpenAI—that see real success.
So what happens if an underdog—a David, if you will—starts getting pummeled by those more established companies?
According to Michael Price, there’s not much recourse for a David. Michael is a Silicon Valley lawyer who co-founded a startup of his own—the AI chatbot enterprise S-Talk—providing most of the seed money to get started. But just before the business began its Series A funding (which is where investors like Michael start to see real money), he was unceremoniously fired.
Richard Everett, Michael’s co-founder at S-Talk, accused him of leaking proprietary information—a fireable offense that also stripped Michael of his equity in the company.
Michael was innocent. But when he went looking for help, there was none to be found. Apparently, Silicon Valley’s lawyers don’t care about ethics or values. They just want to make money, and the best way to do that is to work for the corporate giants.
Luckily for Michael—not so luckily for S-Talk—he wasn’t the only lawyer fired without cause.
When Richard sent an unsolicited photo of his genitals to Olivia Siffre, she didn’t report the sexual harassment. Olivia grew up in a small, conservative Midwest town. Her faith is very important to her and her Christian book-publishing parents. And she didn’t think it was right to make the abuse a matter of public record.
That was before Richard cloned Olivia’s voice and personality without her permission for his very sexual AI chatbot, Daisy.
Realizing they each know something about the real reason the other was fired, Michael and Olivia team up to take Richard down, agreeing to represent each other’s cases in court. They even manage to use Richard’s fancy new chatbot against him (sorta like how David used Goliath’s sword in 1 Samuel 17:51).
If the little guys can win not just one but two cases against a Silicon Valley giant, how many more wronged people might they be able to help?
I guess they’d better start searching for some small, smooth stones to sling.
As legal dramas go, CBS’ Cupertino is about what you’d expect. Michael and Olivia aren’t battling with swords and slingshots; they win wars with underhanded tactics and heavily researched arguments.
That isn’t to say that we don’t see evidence of violence on this show. Indeed, their firm’s very first client charges into their office sporting a bevy of scrapes and bruises. One of their partners carries a gun in her purse.
But violence can take many shapes: As Michael and Olivia begin their crusade against Silicon Valley’s elite, they realize that technology can be just as dangerous as a loaded gun. For instance, what if a drone crashes into a crowd and kills a man? Or a chatbot encourages a child to kill his own father?
But that’s not all that’s happening on Cupertino: Language can get a little dicey. A use of the s-word is cut off in the first episode, and while we likely won’t hear it in full since this is a network television show, we still hear uses of other, milder profanities. We can see hints of inappropriate photos that show some skin. And when characters turn off the parental controls of the Daisy chatbot, the AI almost immediately turns things sexual, describing things like sexual acts and positions.
Cupertino gives us a pair of legal do-gooders—one of them a practicing Christian—determined to take down some villainous tech titans. But that doesn’t mean the show is free of content villainy. Its own problems are just a stone’s throw away.
(Editor’s Note: Plugged In is rarely able to watch every episode of a given series for review. As such, there’s always a chance that you might see a problem that we didn’t. If you notice content that you feel should be included in our review, send us an email at letters@pluggedin.com, or contact us via Facebook or Instagram, and be sure to let us know the episode number, title and season so that we can check it out.)
When two lawyers are fired without cause from their Silicon Valley jobs, they team up to take their boss to court.
Olivia is a Christian, and she says her faith is important to her. She asks God to grant her peace after she gets fired, she wears a cross necklace, and she listens to hymns. She tells Michael that her family is conservative and that her parents are Christian book publishers. When security guards pack up her desk, they put her decorative crosses and a degree from Liberty University in a box. We hear several references to David and Goliath throughout the episode.
When someone asks the Daisy chatbot—which is partially based on Olivia’s personality—how to pray, it responds that there are many forms of belief and many ways to pray. It then suggests praying out loud in the same repetitious way that Olivia prays.
It should be noted that Richard personifies this chatbot as a woman. And the chatbot itself is programmed to use first-person pronouns and act like a real person.
When characters turn off Daisy’s parental controls, the chatbot immediately becomes sexual, describing several sexual acts and positions in a sultry tone. Olivia becomes angry when she hears it since Daisy’s voice is a clone of her own. She emphasizes that she would never say such things, and she’s especially appalled when she learns that her hometown pastor’s son was caught having an explicit conversation with the chatbot. (Her anger is directed at Richard, who cloned her voice without her permission, not at the teen.)
Richard sends Olivia a picture of himself without clothes. The camera angle blocks his lower half from view, but when Olivia sees the photo, she storms out of the office. We see a woman’s bra as she changes clothes.
Michael suspects he was fired over a matter of greed. However, the company’s main investor makes several racist comments against Michael (who is Black), which Michael and Olivia use to their advantage in winning their case.
In order to get a better settlement payout, Michael and Olivia trick their opponents into believing that they are much more successful than they are. Olivia lies to her parents about why she was fired. Even though she loves her parents, there seems to be some discord there, since she doesn’t want to return home to work for them. Michael similarly does not want to return to working for his father. Strangers who recognize Michael (whose dad is a famous celebrity lawyer) pitch their tech ideas to him, hoping he’ll fund their ideas.
When Michael’s assistant, Christy, gets fired shortly after him (under suspicion that she’s helping Michael win his lawsuit), she asks her uncle, who is doing construction work for S-Talk, to mess with the company’s electrical system. We learn about a corrupt judge. A girl jokingly calls her cousin a fascist. Someone heckles a man in court.
At the end of the episode, a man walks into Michael and Olivia’s office with several cuts on his face.
We hear singular uses of “d–n,” “h—” and “p-ss.” Someone starts saying “bull—-,” but they’re cut off. Someone says, “God forbid.” At one point, Olivia calls Richard “Dick,” which acts as a double entendre since it’s both a nickname and an allusion to his wrongdoing.
Netflix’s ‘Below’ offers Shyamalan-esque thrills but adds a frigid wave of harsh content that audiences may not be expecting.
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