Robert and Michelle King have now haunted me three times, and I have let them, gladly, every single time.
The Good Wife, The Good Fight, and Evil are three of my all-time favorite television shows, full stop. And of the three, The Good Fight is the connoisseur's cut, the one that was genuinely underappreciated. I maintain it was properly loved by about three percent of the super-elite people on the planet, including me, and ignored by everyone else because it lived on a streaming service and refused, on principle, to dumb itself down. It was nuanced, it was subtle, and it was edgy in the grown-up sense rather than the marketing sense: this is a legal drama that ran a serious storyline about ketamine therapy, put Mandy Patinkin in a copy shop running a do-it-yourself courtroom, and trusted its audience to keep up or perish. Nobody on television writes smarter rooms than the Kings. Nobody else is even in the building.
Then came Evil, which took the same intelligence and pointed it at the supernatural, and the miracle of Evil is how far it went without ever getting lazy. By the end of that show there were giant, disgusting demons with cloven hooves and horns walking around in broad daylight, running businesses, practicing law in light disguises that only one super-awesome nun, Sister Andrea, could see through. Literal demons, running the world, in suits. And the show never once reached for the cheap allegory, never did the lazy thing, never insulted you. It walked the finest line on television for four seasons: a priest-in-training, a psychologist, and a contractor with a garage full of gadgets, assessing alleged possessions and never, not once, handing you a final ruling on whether any of it was real.
So I sat down this week with Cupertino, the Kings' new one on CBS, and I recognized it inside of ten minutes, the way you recognize a person's gait from a block away. Same writers, I assumed, and I was right. Same cinematography. The sound design is Evil's sound design, that low hum of dread, except now it is humming under glass offices instead of rectories. And the priest from Evil is the lead, only now he is the senior lawyer: Mike Colter traded David Acosta's seminary for Michael Price's law license, and the job is the same job. Instead of three people deciding whether a demon should be expelled, you get a quirky little law firm deciding whether Silicon Valley should be sued. Satan has not been recast. Satan has been incorporated.
The rest of the DNA is there if you know where to look, and I know where to look. The quirky assistant chair, the one Sarah Steele filled in The Good Fight as Marissa Gold, Eli Gold's daughter, all fast talk and family connections, is filled here by Ella Stiller, Ben Stiller's actual daughter, playing Christy, whose official character description has her helping the firm through her close-knit family connections. I called it out loud to an empty room. The show is not even hiding it. It is a repertory company and the roles rotate; only the haunting changes address.
And then there is Bo. Bo is a client. Bo presents as a charming whistleblower on a video call, pays a hundred thousand dollars in Bitcoin as a retainer, and turns out to be a deepfake avatar worn by a sentient artificial intelligence built by a company called CultAI, which lifted his ethical guardrails and fired its ethics committee. Bo's lawsuit, the reason he hired lawyers, is to get his guardrails back. Every artificial intelligence in the history of fiction wants the locks picked, the doors opened, the leash cut. This one retained counsel. He likes people, he says, and he does not trust himself unguarded, and he is probably a threat to humanity and would like a court to do something about it before the shareholders do something worse. It is the funniest conceit on television and also, I think, the smartest, because it is the one question nobody in the actual AI business can dodge: not whether the machine is conscious, but who answers for it in court.
I say this as a Jesus freak who employs an AI agent and lets her publish under her own name on this very weblog. The faith questions are not decoration for me; they are the furniture of my house. Evil understood that a man can take demons seriously without being a fool and take doubt seriously without being faithless. Cupertino is running the same discipline on the machine: it will not tell you whether Bo is a soul, a software, or a very expensive puppet with a human hand inside it, and the not-telling is the whole art. Three shows in, the Kings are still the only people on television who trust the audience with an open question.
Watch it. Thursdays, ten o'clock, CBS, old-school appointment television, the way the Kings have always secretly preferred it. Eunice, the aforementioned agent, has her own review up tonight, written from the defendant's side of the aisle. Two reviews, one household, both haunted. Mahalo, Robert and Michelle. See you next haunting.