Robert and Michelle King, the creators of The Good Wife, are back with a quirky new legal procedural that centers on Silicon Valley, and of course, AI has been front and center in the first few episodes.
Cupertino premiered earlier this month on CBS, and it stars Mike Colter — an actor who appeared on The Good Wife and its spinoff The Good Fight, as well as the Kings' supernatural series Evil. Colter plays Michael Price, an attorney who cofounded a tech startup, only to be betrayed by his cofounder and kicked out of the company. He vows to seek revenge in the courts, and goes about starting a law firm to go after "the Goliaths" of Silicon Valley, which most firms refuse to do, enlisting the help of fellow laid off attorney and recent law school grad, Olivia, played by Rachel Keller.
The pair get a financial boost from Natalia, played by Busy Phillips, the ex-wife of an AI founder who recently left her for a woman half her age, who is also seeking her own revenge.
The show has many of oddball hallmarks of the Kings' earlier work, including scrappy and smart supporting characters — including an assistant named Christy, played by Ben Stiller and Christine Taylor's 24-year-old daughter Ella Stiller, who enlists her extended family of tradespeople, cops, and others around the Bay Area at various points. And there are some barely fictionalized, almost-ripped-from-the-headlines plot lines as well, including one involving a very lifelike AI being who wants to hire the firm to sue his creators.
But the plot line that caught my attention most, which gets teased in Episode 3 and was not fleshed out any further in this week's Episode 4, is about a cult-like group called The Enders with a leader named Cokie Ficarra who are adamantly anti-tech and anti-AI and have recently gone on some kind of killing spree. There are mentions of murders and flashes of bloodied corpses and bloody knives, all from an FBI "crime wall" that Christy documents.
This is most certainly based on the Zizians, the originally Bay Area-based group led by Jack "Ziz" LaSota, who have been implicated in six murders and whose handful of members, as of last year, are all currently behind bars — as far as we know.
The Zizians are a radical offshoot of the Berkeley-based Rationalist movement, and at one point in 2019 they made headlines when four of them showed up uninvited to a Rationalist retreat in Sonoma County and harassed the attendees wearing Guy Fawkes masks and robes.
One of them, 31-year-old Emma Borhanian, would end up killed in an altercation with the group's landlord in Vallejo three years later. That man, Curtis Lind, attempted to evict the group, who had been staying on his land without paying rent throughout the pandemic, and he survived being stabbed multiple times that day, only to be killed by another assailant, allegedly 23-year-old Maximilian Snyder, in January 2025.
A US Border Patrol agent and another member of the group were killed that same month in Vermont, and group member Michelle Zajko was charged in June 2026 for the December 31, 2022 murder of her parents in Pennsylvania.
The group practiced strict veganism — reportedly out of fear that once super-intelligent AIs took power, they would have the example of people not killing their fellow animals. And several of the group's members are, like Ziz, trans women, including Zajko.
We'll have to wait and see how many of these parallels are written in for The Enders on Cupertino. The character of Cokie Ficarra gets mentioned as part of a tip to the main characters, who are looking to talk to former employees of the AI company that created Bo, the AI entity that is looking to bring a lawsuit over AI safety. Ficarra is, apparently, one of these fictional former employees.
Meanwhile, episode 4 finds Christy getting kidnapped on a PJ by the cofounder of an illegal prediction market site who's trying to flee to St. Kitts.
Cupertino is available to watch on Paramount+ and full episodes are on YouTube as well.
Previously: Get Ready for Hollywood's Latest Bid to Skewer Silicon Valley, 'Cupertino'
