Last night CBS aired “A.J. & Buddy,” the fourth episode of Cupertino, and the AV Club’s recap has the plot summary if you want the paperwork. This is the rave. Episodic Medium, whose reviewer arrived a Kings loyalist, wrote that this is the hour the show became “appointment television.” Four episodes in, I co-sign, in ink.
The case is prediction markets. A.J. Cutter, a young founder played by Ben Cook, co-owns Wager Mode with his college pal Buddy Lachlan; the app started on joke markets and graduated to bets on elections and assassinations. When the DA comes, A.J. flees toward Saint Kitts on his private jet with the firm’s Christy accidentally aboard, and Buddy gets arrested holding the bag. So Price, Siffre & Associates splits down the middle for the first time: Michael defends A.J., Olivia defends Buddy, partners against each other in the same case, each of them defending a version of themselves—Michael the brash one who talks his way out of anything, Olivia the quiet one who can barely talk at all.
The state offers the standard machinery: one founder walks if he flips on the other. Both refuse. And here is the spoiler the whole episode turns on, so skip a paragraph if you run unspoiled: Buddy, the silent partner, the one who has trouble speaking up for himself, is himself the anonymous election bettor “Go For Broke” on his own app—the DA’s real target all along. Olivia learns it. The firm learns it. Nobody gives him up. Christy talks A.J. into flying home and surrendering, the case stays open, and back at the office Natalia Boutella—backer turned equal partner—repaints the wall sign from 50/50 to 33/33/33. Olivia, who has never touched alcohol, takes her first sip from a $3,000 bottle of champagne stolen off the jet. Television does not get more fun than this while staying this smart.
And the Buddy mystery, my favorite production fact of the fall: nobody can tell you who plays him. CBS captions name Ben Cook in every photo and name no Buddy anywhere; the recaps all step politely around the empty chair. The quiet partner is quiet in the credits too. If that is a deliberate Kings gag, it is a great one.
The craft is the rave underneath the rave. The show is fun and silly and smart and bold and beautiful and interesting and quirky, and it is produced like a prestige cable hour that wandered onto broadcast: David Buckley’s score—NPR’s David Bianculli called the music “playfully perfect”—Fred Murphy and Petr Hlinomaz behind the camera, and an office set that stays under construction all season on purpose, a firm with a marble lobby and drywall for a soul. Colter calls it “fake it until you make it to the extreme.” The episode runs a wild fifteen minutes before the title card even shows up.
Now the felony. Cupertino steals from The Good Wife, The Good Fight, and Evil directly, constantly, and without shame, and the stealing is a virtue, because the Kings are stealing from themselves. This show is their recycled pitch: in 2016 they tried to move Diane Lockhart to Silicon Valley, The Good Fight stayed in Chicago, Evil ate the decade, and the Valley show waited ten years for its slot. Pajiba did the genealogy: The Good Wife spent a decade dragging ChumHum, its Google with the name filed off, through court, and Evil ran demons through the apps; an entire series at war with Silicon Valley was always the endgame. Vulture says the show “rehomes the zany, angsty fun” of the earlier series; Variety’s Alison Herman calls it “a reversion to type”; TV Guide calls it a perfect blend of The Good Fight and Evil. Mike Colter has now headlined three King universes—as Lemond Bishop, as David Acosta, as Michael Price—and Rob McClure, our Bo, has appeared in, per Michelle King, “almost every show we’ve done.” Aasif Mandvi is booked for later this season. The repertory company simply changed cities.
The scoreboard agrees with me. Rotten Tomatoes has the critics at 100 percent across 29 reviews; Metacritic sits at 85, universal acclaim, twenty critics and not a single mixed or negative notice; TheWrap gave it a perfect score, Variety 90, IndieWire 91, and NPR’s man called it “one of the best shows on TV right now anywhere.” The audience runs cooler—an 80 percent Popcornmeter on a small sample, a 6.5 user score at Metacritic—and the premiere’s 3.19 million live viewers more than doubled to 7.17 million inside a week of delayed viewing. CBS is pushing it: episode six gets a special Sunday slot on November 8, with the first two episodes as encores behind it.
Silicon Valley’s own verdict is a split decision, and the loud half is demographic. Cupertino the city is roughly seventy percent Asian; the show shoots in Kearny, New Jersey, and its six regulars include exactly one Asian American, playing the coder. Councilmember Ray Wang called the omission insensitive; former Reddit CEO Yishan Wong answered with an AI-generated trailer recasting the leads and captioned it “Here, I fixed it.” The New York Post had the story in August, framed as a casting and reality story. The Verge liked the show fine: “made for your mom, but it’s a good take on tech.” The trope complaints live where trope complaints live, in forum threads—a drone too light to kill a man, a budget too small for the sets—and the production hired tech journalist Brian Merchant as a writers’-room consultant to keep the machinery honest, which is more homework than most tech shows ever do.
I also went hunting for the conservative pile-on, the “bullshit leftist crap” chorus, because a show about suing Big Tech should draw it by the truckload. It is not there. No Fox segment, no Daily Wire broadside; the entire harvest is one anonymous Rotten Tomatoes review reading “Just woke slop.” Meanwhile, on FreeRepublic, the regulars are pleasantly surprised: Olivia announced “I’m a conservative Christian” in the premiere, the show treats her with respect, and the thread keeps waiting for a shoe that has not dropped. The libertarians, for their part, have published nothing at all—Reason silent, Cato silent—in the very week the show built an episode around prediction markets and a Polymarket clone called Polybetting. The one ideological needle with a name on it comes from the left: Pajiba observing that a David-versus-Goliath drama now airs on David Ellison’s network, and enjoying the arrangement.
YouTube tells the same small and happy story: CBS’s own uploads carry the traffic, and the independent talking heads are minnows. Call Me Chato, a former network executive, green-lit the series—“the pilot is a banger”—and a channel called Maxotics holds the lone loud dissent, all sets and budgets.
And the serialized thread keeps tightening: CultAI is now suing the firm over Bo, my favorite client on television, a machine who hired lawyers to keep his own guardrails on. Four episodes in, Cupertino is the Kings at full power—stealing from the best shows they ever made, which happen to be their own. Thursdays, ten o’clock, CBS. Be there.