In 2033, the Gordita Crunch is sold virtually by fast food goliath Nokia Taco Bell. Mega-airline corporation Frontier Spirit United offers 30-minute flights from New York to Los Angeles with the option of Economy Minus. The most popular reality show is Baby Botox--which is exactly what it sounds like. Vape lung is a chronic disease. Far East Movement's 2010 chart-topper "Like a G6" is considered classical dance coursework in schools.

Take Black Mirror's dystopian tech commentary, The Good Place's philosophical exploration of the after-life, and the workplace antics of The Office, mash them together, and you have Amazon's Upload. It takes place in a world that could easily be 10 years from now -- self driving cars are commonplace, the Earth is polluted and over-crowded, and, oh yeah, you can also achieve digital immortality by uploading your consciousness to the cloud. Upload, which premieres today, is an entirely new territory for Greg Daniels, the genius writer behind The Office, and Parks and Rec (not to mention a long run on The Simpsons). But it's a world that's clearly been percolating in his mind for years. It's bold and raunchy in a way a network sitcom never could be, and it defies being classified into a single genre.

What if the next life were no better than this one? Not a heaven or a hell, or even a purgatorial waiting room, but a world that operates according to the same rules as the one that came before it, only tweaked enough that we don't just accept them as the way things have to be. In the near future of Upload, whose first season begins streaming on Amazon Prime on Friday, death is not the end, at least for those with the resources to survive it. But the hereafter in Greg Daniels' series isn't spiritual, it's digital, and everything, including entry and your continued existence, comes at a cost. It's less like heaven than a cruise ship on an infinite voyage, one where everything is marked up because the dead aren't in much of a position to comparison-shop. Nathan Brown (Robbie Amell) finds his way to Lakeview, as his particularly plush digital forever is called, after his self-driving car rear-ends a garbage truck.

TV has reached its maximum capacity of quirky afterlifes. The Good Place set this recent wave in motion on NBC with its vision of Hell as a metaphysical bureaucracy plastering a cheery expression over its endless labyrinth of paperwork and intra-departmental conflicts. TBS's Miracle Workers cranked the whimsy up a notch for the romcom angle, as two low-level angels invisibly nudged a pair of shy mortals together. Amazon's Forever went the existential route, confronting a married couple stuck in a rut with the horror of continuing all their daily drudgeries after death in a suburb identical to their own. In each case, the series generated comedy by offering a banal solution to the grand mystery of what happens after we shuffle off this mortal coil.

New teachers, new backpacks, new crushes--and algorithms trawling students' social media posts. Blake Prewitt, superintendent of Lakeview school district in Battle Creek, Michigan, says he typically wakes up each morning to twenty new emails from a social media monitoring system the district activated earlier this year. It uses keywords and machine learning algorithms to flag public posts on Twitter and other networks that contain language or images that may suggest conflict or violence, and tag or mention district schools or communities. In recent months the alert emails have included an attempted abduction outside one school--Prewitt checked if the school's security cameras could aid police--and a comment about dress code from a student's relative--district staff contacted the family. Prewitt says the alerts help him keep his 4,000 students and 500 staff safe.