‘Cupertino’ Recap, Episode 7: ‘Yungwood’

As I’ve mentioned before, the key to making a good courtroom drama — and Cupertino is on its way to being a great one — is to ensure that the lawyers facing off against our righteous heroes can make their own compelling cases. I firmly believe that strong arguments make for good television. But how can you do that when the opposition is defending AI slop?

In this week’s episode, an over-the-hill rapper who goes by the stage name Yungwood (Cliff “Method Man” Smith) comes to his old friend Michael Price for help with a lawsuit that is going nowhere. Yungwood relies on the income from streams of his old songs, but his numbers have dropped off precipitously ever since the major streaming services — represented here by the fictional Noisement — started hosting AI music that sounds almost identical to his. Yungwood first retained PSA’s enemy Ry Vance, who dropped the case as soon as the music-tech titans pushed back hard by hiring Bayard Diamond, Michael’s father.

There are red flags aplenty in this case for PSA. The firm still needs some quick and lucrative wins, and with the Yungwood lawsuit, they’ll be dealing with an unpredictable client who films himself nearly 24/7 for his social-media followers, making inflammatory comments that compare music-industry executives to slaveholders. They’re also up against a deep-pocketed opposition who can drain their coffers with motions and delays.

Still, a few episodes ago, Michael allowed Olivia to pursue her “crusade” against WorkSource in exchange for her promising to back some future crusade of his own. Now is the time for Michael’s crusade. Not against Noisement necessarily, but against Bayard.

The case itself provides some fantastic theater, and not just because father and son can’t stop themselves from making multiple petty objections, needling each other and infuriating the judge (Danny Burstein). No, what’s more fascinating about the way this lawsuit plays out is that it pushes the Cupertino viewers — who, I assume, are all inclined to think that AI ripoff artists are all lazy, parasitic scum — to think hard about what music is, who makes it, and who benefits from that work.

Let’s take this one by one, but out of order. First: Who makes it? On one side we have Yungwood, an artist well past his prime, whose declining streaming numbers could have just as much to do with a recent incident where he assaulted a man at a bar. But at least Yungwood can prove in court that he composes his songs himself, starting with a guitar that he actually plays. On the other side we have Purvis Beer (Amir Malaklou), who turned Yungwood’s biggest hit, “Booty Bass,” into the deceptively titled sound-alike “Bass Booty,” and who can’t even play a C chord on a piano, despite claiming to be a “born musician.”

Which raises the next question: What is music? And it’s here that this episode becomes genuinely challenging. Can Michael argue that what Yungwood does — deriving songs from a long tradition of folk music and spirituals, many of which melodically resemble “Booty Bass” — is wholly distinctive from Purvis Beer layering instrumental tracks using AI prompts? After all, both songwriters are relying on their tastes, their memory, and their relative facility with the musical tools at hand.

Of course, there has to be an end to this stalemate for the dramatic tension to resolve. And ideally it should be a break in favor of our side. So we come to the final question: Who benefits? This is where Noisement and the AI music producer Gold Artist Studio get kind of caught with their hands in the cookie jar. PSA is able to prove that Noisement is manipulating its algorithm to deprioritize Yungwood and other legacy artists in favor of the cheaper, more lucrative GAS knockoffs. When the judge pulls out his phone to listen to Jimmy Buffett and is directed toward some slop that sort of sounds like Jimmy Buffett, it’s game over for Noisement.

As has happened a couple of times in this first season, the ending is both satisfying and a bit abrupt. It feels like there’s more that could’ve been mined from this debate over musical authorship, which predates the AI boom. (But I did like that Yungwood uses the controversy to get famous again, in part by hiring a bot farm in Peru to goose his numbers.)

The biggest reason why the Yungwood story line feels curtailed is that about a third of the running time this week is dedicated to a subplot carried over from “Harper.” As Olivia suspected, her older brother, Jacob, is being scammed by a pig-butchering operation working out of Krakow. The most damning piece of evidence arrives when Jacob tries to help his “girlfriend” get through “customs” by providing personal banking information, which ends up compromising the Siffre family’s Christian publishing business.

There’s a twist here, and it’s a good one. While Olivia is working with “Josh Frank” from “One Coast Bank” to protect her parents’ accounts, she suddenly wonders if she herself is being played. If you’re the kind of person who reads every possible long-form article about frauds and swindles, you know that Olivia is right to be wary, because “saving you from a con artist” is also a common con. (Once again, there is a great New York Magazine article about this phenomenon from The Cut.)

Olivia gets Vik to help her scam the scammers, using what he calls a “beaconing payload” to track them down and infect their network with malware. Again, this is a satisfying outcome, if maybe too neat. But if I’m being honest, my biggest beef with how the One Coast subplot resolves is how dopey it looks. As the malware hits the Krakow office, all of the computers start making loud beeping noises and popping up big warning windows.

That’s the sort of thing you’d expect to see from a much cornier show, and not one as savvy about tech as Cupertino. It’s pretty sloppy … no offense to all the AI artists out there.

• We learn a bit more in this episode about Michael’s dead sister, Anna, who jumped off a balcony because she was tired of the pressure from their demanding father. She was apparently a Yungwood fan, which is another reason why Michael took this case.

• Natalia gets to put her law degree to use in this episode, filling in for Olivia in court, where she struggles to figure out how best to stand while questioning a witness. (The judge: “Try perching.”) She also laughs at Bayard when he accuses her of being a wannabe who “spread your legs for the third-richest man.” While smirking straight in his face, she whispers, “You shouldn’t drink before court.”

• Natalia makes Michael nervous by suggesting that she’s not as rich as she may need to be to keep the firm afloat. But when Michael is not around, she tells the people building her office that she needs to have her own shower and that she’ll be covering the expense from her personal account. Is Natalia making promises she can’t keep?

• A nice, realistic touch: Over the past few episodes, the cut that Olivia got on her cheek in “A.J. & Buddy” has gradually shrunk, until by the end of this episode she’s no longer wearing a bandage.

• Olivia is very flirty with Vik this week, and the episode ends with the two of them going out to dinner at a place Christy suggested — someplace very loud with a dance floor. It’s nice to see Christy enjoying herself, and yet I couldn’t help but notice that she’s still downing her booze pretty hard.