Upload Creator Greg Daniels Teases Season 2 Plans

Over the weekend, Amazon Prime debuted Upload from Greg Daniels, a haphazard look at a not-so-distant future where people can be “uploaded” to digital heavens after their physical bodies passed on. When we had Daniels on the phone last month, we spoke at length about Upload, largely in part because it’s the first thing the funnyman wrote since he finished work on The Office nearly six years ago.

In fact, Daniels started writing the series right after The Office ended and it’s taken the past six years for the show to finally come to fruition. “It’s been a long time coming,” Daniels tells us. “I was writing episodes in 2017, and then we shot a pilot in 2018. And then we shot the series in 2019. There were so many special effects, that it took another year to do all the visual effects. It’s been a long time coming, and it’s great fun.”

As the writer explains, the series is a cross-genre comedic thriller, if that’s even a thing. “It’s romantic. It’s sort of a futuristic Jim and Pam situation, a bit,” the writer explains. “I think it’s a very intense show. I tried to be very cinematic. You know how the Bollywood movie has a lot of stuff in it? It’s almost as if you only get to see one movie a year, they’re trying to give you all of the entertainment they possibly can, in one movie?”

He adds, “That’s how I was trying to do with this. I was like, ‘There are so many shows and if you’re going to commit to one show being your show, your special show, it has to be really a big extravaganza.’ I know that was sort of my thinking, going into it.”

Right now, Amazon has a 10-episode first season on the docket but if Daniels get his choice, it’ll be back for another go-around. In fact, the writer tells us he pitched it as a two-season show from the get-go.

“Well, when I pitched it, which was literally back in 2015, I had two seasons broken, and the pitch,” Daniels says. “I think I could see extending it past that, but at the moment, we are writing a second season. We’ll see how things are affected by recent events.”

He concludes, “But yeah, no, it’s not meant to only be 10 episodes. But it’s also probably not meant to be 100 episodes. I mean, when I was doing it, the Amazon guys kept saying, ‘Think of it as a five-hour movie.’ So I tried to do that.”

The first season of Upload is now streaming on Amazon Prime.