'Cupertino' review: 'Good Wife' creators soar with new legal eagles

WHAT IT'S ABOUT Michael Price (Mike Colter, "Evil") is a successful Silicon Valley lawyer, until he's fired by his duplicitous former partner at a high tech startup to cheat him out of stock options. Now, he's out for blood. He quickly meets someone else on a similar mission, Olivia Siffre (Rachel Keller, "Legion") who got fired by the same creep. Together, they launch a law firm, but need to raise capital first. Will Mike take a handout from his plutocrat-pirate father, Bayard Price (Joe Morton)? Will Olivia get some much-needed $$ out of Natalia Boutella (Busy Philipps), a brassy, tough divorcee who's in a pitched battle with her billionaire ex? Ah, the Silicon Valley money chase. Around and around it goes. (Renée Elise Goldsberry is also on board here, as another lawyer who's got a romantic/complicated past with Mike.) This comes from Robert and Michelle King, of "The Good Wife, and "The Good Fight." (Irony alert: "Cupertino" is shot in New Jersey.)

MY SAY The Kings have spent the last 17 years producing a few high-quality legal procedurals that insist on looking at the Way We Live Now. Both writers are sharp, occasionally subversive observers of the human comedy who explore that hard, cold line between the powerful and the powerless, and how the legal system allows the former to job the latter. You wouldn't expect them to drift too far off script with their first deep dive into Silicon Valley, would you?

For the Kings, "Cupertino" — named for one of a dozen-or-so regional high-tech hubs, and best known as home to Apple — is the TV equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel. So many targets, where to begin? With the most obvious, artificial intelligence. Without getting too spoiler-y, an early plot line pushes the question of whether general artificial intelligence (surpassing human intelligence) should have legal rights. Sounds frivolous, or better suited to "Black Mirror," but not in "Cupertino." Why shouldn't a human creation that surpasses humans have the right to call a human lawyer (just like humans) when the need arises? Who's the powerful or the powerless in this context? And how does a human — in this case Michael and Olivia — even begin to adjudicate something like this? Leave it to the Kings to try to figure that out, too.

But what's really in their sights are humans of the flesh-and-blood variety. This David versus Goliath series comes with a point of view that feels right in step with anyone who's ever screamed about a data center going up in their backyard, or someone else who just lost their livelihood to an AI bot. In "Cupertino," this technology truly has landed in the wrong hands at the wrong time, and while AI might not necessarily be evil yet, it could easily become evil.

The humans, the good ones, aren't faultless either. They, too, are part of the big money ecosystem of Silicon Valley, or the small fish to the larger ones in that barrel. For Michael, this means "they'll take on lawsuits no one else will. ... We're small enough to shake some cash loose, stay out of courts and squeeze them in depositions and pretrial hearings." Sounds like a plan — a reasonable one — which also queasily occupies the moral gray zone of "Cupertino."

The Kings have brought back a key member of their stock company, Colter, who's immensely likable here, along with Keller. At least "likable" in contrast to everyone else.

BOTTOM LINE Another King winner.