TV producer/writer Greg Daniels, creator of The Office USA, Parks & Recreation and new series Upload.
My favourite thing before the pandemic was to work in various coffee shops and diners. I'd go work for a couple of hours, look out the window, and then that location would be burnt out for me for a couple of days and I'd have to go somewhere else.
During the pandemic, I couldn't do that. I quarantined in Canada before shooting Upload on a place called Pender Island. I had an Airbnb with the nicest window, which had a gorgeous view looking out. It was very similar to Lakeview, the digital afterlife in Upload.
The idea for Upload started when I was walking around New York in the late 80s as a writer for Saturday Night Live, trying to think of a sketch idea. There were all these advertisements for CD players and digitised music and I was like, "What if you could digitise yourself and people could make their own heavens?"
I thought all the heavens would be different depending on which organisation made it, but they'd all be reflective of the problems within the organisation. It wasn't appropriate for a sketch, so I left it in my notebook.
Upload is set in 2034 and in order to write and prepare we did a lot of research on what was coming from consumer electronics. The comedy and the imagination are to say, "Okay, if this exists, what would it be like if everybody had it and was using it every day?" Some of that is just taking an idea and making it worse; for instance, on the show, there's a dating app called Nightly where you rank people with stars, like a restaurant, right after you've slept with them.
How the digital upload works when you die is the hardest piece of technology in our show. I have my own private explanation: I think it's a photographic process where a very, very bright light burns off a layer of cells one at a time and then it's photographed. It goes all the way down and the computer reassembles the very high-definition photography into a complete 3D model of your every molecular connection. I don't know, it's all bulls***!
But I'm kind of looking forward to this actually working because it's our shot of something persisting afterwards. I think you do exist, in the effect that you have on other people, their memories or whatever. I'm not sure if there's a cloud that we all sit on, wearing robes.
My father is a great storyteller. He tells humorous stories about everything that's ever happened to him so I grew up hearing that. Then I had to pick a livelihood. At the time I was thinking maybe I would try to be a lawyer or maybe I would try to write stories. Most people I knew thought it was a bad idea for me to go into law because I was already argumentative enough.
I have a lot of ideas for products that nobody wants. You can only exploit the ideas you're in a position to exploit, right? I'm a TV producer so if I have an idea for a TV show I can generally get someone to listen to that, but if I have an idea for a backup camera for a car that begins recording for 30 seconds when someone rear-ends you, what am I supposed to do with that?
My number one storytelling rule is you have to surprise people. You're looking to surprise someone which means you have to hide your true intentions until the right moment and then suddenly reveal them. That's important because if the audience knows what's going to happen from the beginning it's like, "Meh."
The Office was a situation where there was this great British show and American TV didn't look anything like that at the time. I was very excited to try and use the American TV system to pull off something like that. Then when we started Parks and Recreation it was like, let's give this a different feel from The Office, let's make it more colourful and optimistic.
At first, most people thought The Office was way too boringly realistic and dark, while Parks and Recreation was too optimistic. But ultimately all good stories have to have great protagonists, great characters and original situations to put them in. And a certain amount of pace to it. At least that's what I think.
And you want to zig as much as you can when everyone else is zagging.
As told to Karl Puschmann
Greg Daniels' series Upload begins its second season this Friday on Amazon Prime Video.