Upload: The Future of Comedy Is Now

Amazon’s most popular comedy is beloved by science fiction fans. What does Upload’s success say about the current state of comedy TV?

Greg Daniels got his start writing for Saturday Night Live, then went on to write for The Simpsons in its heyday. He helped Mike Judge create his iconic King of the Hill series before showrunning NBC’s adaptation of the BBC comedy The Office. After that show reached massive success, Daniels began another NBC mockumentary, Parks & Recreation, that found a huge audience of its own. Daniels’s latest series, Upload, is another comedy that’s getting rave reviews from critics, as well as some serious love from Ranker voters on lists like The Best Recent Comedies On Amazon. So why is Upload so different from every other show Daniels has created?

Upload is not a sitcom, nor is it a straightforward comedy. The series, set in a not-so-distant future where people can upload their consciousnesses into a digital afterlife, follows the journey of one recently deceased computer programmer as he struggles to maintain a relationship with his still-living girlfriend and comes to grips with the possibility that he was murdered. The show’s comedy is much subtler and darker than that of The Office, its story unfolds over the course of entire seasons rather than single episodes, and it adds elements of science fiction and mystery. It’s clear from this show that Daniels has decided to move beyond the basic sitcom formula, and the show’s success makes clear that TV audiences appear to have moved along with him.

If you use Insights to look at the audience for Upload, you’ll find some surprising results: namely, that fans of Daniels’s new show are only slightly more likely to love The Office, a massively popular series beloved by TV fans of all stripes. And while they’re 3X more likely to love Parks & Recreation, they’re twice as likely (6X) to count themselves fans of Humans, a British drama about AI-powered, humanoid robots. How is this possible? It’s because Upload appeals even more to science fiction fans than it does to comedy fans.

First, it should be noted that the two audiences Upload is favored by most are fans of science fiction television and fans of science fiction movies. The former audience is 3X more likely to love Upload, making it that group’s 11th most popular show ahead of The Mandalorian, Altered Carbon, and Black Mirror. In general, Ranker’s considerable sci-fi audience seems drawn to Amazon Prime’s catalog, because it’s also fond of The Expanse and Phillip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams. But that doesn’t detract from the fact that an ostensible comedy would take such a prime spot in the minds of sci-fi TV fans.

Among the shows most likely to share fans with Upload are the dystopian anthology series Black Mirror and Love, Death, and Robots, the Netflix time travel drama Travelers, and Fox’s sci-fi series Fringe. Upload fans also tend to enjoy comedies, but their preferences diverge from the 30-minute sitcoms that have for so long defined comedy on television. Upload fans are 5X more likely to enjoy The Good Place, another afterlife-based comedy from Greg Daniels’s Office collaborator Michael Shur. They’re also 5X more likely to love Living With Yourself, the limited series about a man who must live with a clone of himself. They’re 4X more likely to watch HBO’s Avenue 5, as well as Netflix’s Russian Doll. Aside from the fact that these shows all premiered less than six years ago, the link between them is the use of science fiction or fantasy to take viewers outside the confines of the average workplace or family and into new worlds.

That Upload should be such a great example of the newest trend in comedy TV is appropriate, given that Daniels was such a huge part of its last great trend: the workplace mockumentary. The influence of The Office was clear in virtually every show that premiered after 2006, including workplace comedies like Workaholics and Superstore, as well as shows that adopted The Office‘s documentary format, like Modern Family and Australian series Summer Heights High. Now, with streamers offering more creative, cerebral alternatives to the comedies we’re used to seeing on primetime TV, Daniels isn’t sticking to what worked in the past, but adapting to new conditions.

Ranker’s list of The Best New TV Comedies Of The Last Few Years (4K votes) demonstrates how widespread and diverse this trend is. At the top of the list is Ted Lasso, a comedy primarily focused on sports, and one that has no shortage of dramatic elements. At #2 is Space Force, Daniels’s other new comedy. Space Force has more punchlines than Upload, but is primarily focused on the creation of the military’s newest branch and is therefore as much a political show as it is a comedy. Also popular are HBO’s superhero farce Peacemaker, FX’s vampire satire What We Do in the Shadows, Netflix’s mystery/crime dramedy Dead to Me, and Avenue 5, a series from Veep creator Armando Iannucci about an interstellar cruise ship. Whether it’s sci-fi, politics, mystery, horror, or superheroes, the most popular recent comedy series demonstrate that TV creators are tired of drawing inside the lines of the genre, and audiences appear more than happy to follow them.

If the makeup of Upload’s audience leans slightly more toward sci-fi junkies than it does comedy fans, does that mean Amazon should target more people who love traditional sitcoms to expand its audience? Maybe, but there’s evidence to suggest that whatever strategy Amazon is currently employing is working: Space Force is Daniels’s more traditional current comedy, and although it sits higher on the list of new TV comedies than Upload does, its approval rating across all Ranker lists is 55%, almost 10% lower than Upload’s. Maybe the series isn’t quite as popular with people who prefer straightforwardly madcap half-hour comedies, but when you look at the big picture, it seems that group makes up a smaller and smaller portion of the greater TV viewing public. In a few years, there’s a good chance we’ll look back on Upload the same way we look back at The Office today.

These stories are crafted using Ranker Insights, which takes over one billion votes cast on Ranker.com and converts them into actionable psychographics about pop culture fans across the world. To learn more about how our Ranker Insights can be customized to serve your business needs, visit insights.ranker.com, or email us at insights@ranker.com.

MORE INSIGHTS LIKE THIS: