Mark Duplass joins Hulu's 'Victoria' as a Silicon Valley gene-editing professor

Mark Duplass is joining the cast of Victoria, a new Hulu limited series set in San Francisco. He'll play William Holbrook, a UC Berkeley professor whose gene-editing work has made him a hot name in Silicon Valley.

Diane Lane and Li Jun Li were already announced. Lane plays Lee Calloway, a venture capitalist. Li plays Maxine Tao. Christy Hall created, wrote and is running the show, with Geeta Vasant Patel directing the pilot. Onyx Collective and Counterpart Studios are behind it.

Duplass has been around forever. He and his brother Jay co-created Togetherness for HBO back in the day, and more recently he's been on Apple TV+'s The Morning Show. He also turned up in Kane Parsons' horror film Backrooms.

The setup sounds slick: tech money, bioethics, San Francisco power players. That's fertile ground for a tight thriller if they keep the focus on the story and the characters instead of lecturing.

But this is Hulu, which means there's a decent chance Victoria leans into the usual Hollywood playbook: tech bros as villains, capitalism as the root of all evil, and a script that can't help but preach. The talent is strong—Duplass and Lane both know how to carry a scene—but talent doesn't matter if the writing turns into a TED Talk.

The San Francisco setting is a double-edged sword. It's a great backdrop for a story about money, science and ambition. It's also ground zero for the kind of politics that infects too many shows these days.

Worth watching? If you're a fan of Duplass or Lane, sure, give the pilot a shot. Just keep your expectations in check. A limited series means they can't drag it out forever, which is a plus. But until we see what Christy Hall's version of San Francisco looks like, it's wait-and-see.

If it's a lean, character-driven thriller about the ethics of gene editing and the people who profit from it, great. If it's another sermon about how tech and capitalism are destroying the world, pass.