Michael Price (Mike Colter) and Olivia Siffre (Rachel Keller) get fired from the same Silicon Valley company on the same day for two completely different reasons. By the end of the hour they have started a law firm together anyway. That is the whole engine of “Cupertino,” the new CBS legal drama from Robert and Michelle King. It premiered Thursday, October 8th at 10 p.m. ET and also streams on Paramount+. Michael is senior counsel and an equity co-founder at the tech company S-Talk while Olivia is a recent law school graduate at the same firm. Neither of them planned on this and both get pushed into it anyway.
Robert and Michelle King built this show the same way they built “The Good Wife,” “The Good Fight,” “Evil” and “Elsbeth.” There is one sharp legal premise up front. A case of the week sits on top of it with a season-long arc running underneath the whole thing. Colter already worked with the Kings on “Evil,” so this is a reunion, not a cold start. The pilot is called “Michael & Olivia,” and our account of what happens in it comes from the after-air recaps that followed the broadcast. This review leans on those recaps and on the advance reviews, not on an early screener.
Michael’s problem starts with his own partner: Richard Everett (Will Brill) co-founded S-Talk with him. Right as the company is about to take off, Richard accuses Michael of leaking proprietary information. The accusation is false. It is also convenient, since it lets Richard seize Michael’s equity on the way out the door. Olivia’s firing is uglier: Richard sends her an explicit photo, she rebuffs him, and she is fired before she can tell anyone what he did. No law firm in the Bay Area will touch either case because nobody wants to make an enemy of the “Magnificent Seven” tech giants. “You’re in the gold rush,” a lawyer warns Michael, in a line TVLine’s review quoted from the episode. “Don’t sue the gold mine.” Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for “Cupertino” season one, episode one.
By the end of the hour they have started a law firm together anyway.”
Michael proposes they fight back together, filing wrongful termination and sexual harassment suits at once. Olivia says no at first. Her family is religious and traditional, and they would not want something that private made public. She changes her mind that night, after watching Richard give an interview about S-Talk’s newest product, an AI model named Daisy. Daisy speaks with Olivia’s exact voice and personality. Richard built it without her consent, and that is the moment the show stops being about a grudge and starts being about something worse. Her parents have already flown in to bring her home. She tells them she is staying in California to fight.
They build the case out of an IHOP, since neither of them has an office anymore. Christy Palladino (Ella Stiller) is Michael’s old assistant. She gets fired too, for the crime of taking his calls, and she joins them. Christy comes from a big blue-collar family, and she uses that network to land the new firm a space it can afford. It is a beautifully finished lobby sitting in front of rooms that were never built, left behind by previous renters who ran out of money before the offices got built. “We build a new wall with each case,” Christy tells them. For most of the episode that is a plan, not a joke.
Court does not go cleanly. Michael and Olivia represent each other, and in TVLine’s recap his case gets thrown out almost immediately. Michael’s father Bayard (Joe Morton) is a wealthy celebrity lawyer with a strained relationship to his son. He shows up unannounced during the court days and knocks Michael off balance. Then a lucrative job offer lands in Michael’s lap, with one condition: he has to sign an NDA and drop Olivia’s case entirely. Olivia tries a second angle in court, arguing that Michael’s firing was racially motivated, since S-Talk’s biggest investor has spoken out against DEI. The judge does not buy it, and that argument fails.
So Olivia plays her last card and calls Richard to the stand. TVLine’s recap has her turning a laptop so only Richard can see it and flashing the explicit photo he sent her before she was fired. Richard panics and urges his lawyers to settle. The payout is big enough to spook S-Talk’s investors and set the company back. When Richard and his lawyer come to the new office, the lobby is packed with Christy’s fellow TGI Friday’s waiters, posing as staff and clients so the firm looks established.
Michael tells Olivia there is no law firm in Silicon Valley that represents the people the industry chews up, and he knows, because he already tried to find one. That is the pitch, and Olivia and Christy take it. Michael and Olivia write up their fifty-fifty partnership on a pillar in the lobby, and before the ink dries, a frantic, scratched-up stranger stumbles in asking for a lawyer. He is Vik (Nik Dodani), the new firm’s first client. “They’re out to get me,” he says. Michael’s answer closes the premiere: “Welcome to Price & Siffre. Who’s out to get you?” It is a clean pilot engine, built to reset itself every week without losing the season-long thread running underneath.
The A.V. Club’s recap caught a few details worth keeping. The opening seconds have Michael packing up his desk, and the first thing into the box is a chocolate bar named David. It pays off at the end, when he describes the firm’s mission as David against Goliath. Robert King directed the hour himself. Debra Monk and David Aaron Baker play Olivia’s parents. Steven Pasquale plays Ry, S-Talk’s lawyer, and he defends Daisy in court with a line that should worry anyone who has ever posted anything online: “We train from everyone’s personalities online. Millions of people from Reddit, X, Meta, from novels, articles, and on Zoom. It’s the grand melting pot of AI. It’s called fair use.”
Critics landed on this one hard and fast: “Cupertino” opened to a 100 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes off its first six reviews, with an average rating of 8.60 out of 10. TVLine’s Dave Nemetz called it a drama that tackles Big Tech “with brains and precision,” while The A.V. Club’s Saloni Gajjar called it “the strongest new broadcast series in recent memory.” TheWrap’s Liam Mathews went the furthest: “No one else is making broadcast drama at this level anymore.” The Hollywood Reporter’s Daniel Fienberg, quoted by Screen Rant, hedged a little. He wrote that the ten episodes sent to critics may not reach the Kings’ best work, then still landed on “must-watch.” That range runs from rapturous to merely enthusiastic. It still beats what most new broadcast dramas get in their first week.
Gajjar’s review raised one fair knock: “Roughly 70% of the people living in the real Cupertino are Asian, a segment of the population largely represented by one character.” CBS ordered a full twenty episodes for this freshman season: a rare vote of confidence for any new drama right now, let alone one about AI lawsuits. The show is set in the Bay Area but, as TheWrap put it, “very clearly filmed in New Jersey.” None of that undercuts what the pilot sets up. Michael and Olivia have a firm, a client walking through the door, and an entire tech industry that would rather they did not exist.
What Do You Think? Does Price & Siffre earn the David-versus-Goliath premise over a full season, or does the case-of-the-week format wear thin? Was Olivia right to sue over Daisy, or did the writers stack the deck too hard against Richard? And which real Silicon Valley controversy do you want “Cupertino” to put on trial next?
See you on the next binge!
