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.