Amazing anecdote from a 2016 New Yorker article on the show:
> During one visit to Google’s headquarters, in Mountain View, about six writers sat in a conference room with Astro Teller, the head of GoogleX, who wore a midi ring and kept his long hair in a ponytail. “Most of our research meetings are fun, but this one was uncomfortable,” Kemper told me....
> “He claimed he hadn’t seen the show, and then he referred many times to specific things that had happened on the show,” Kemper said. “His message was, ‘We don’t do stupid things here. We do things that actually are going to change the world, whether you choose to make fun of that or not.’ ” (Teller could not be reached for comment.)
> Teller ended the meeting by standing up in a huff, but his attempt at a dramatic exit was marred by the fact that he was wearing Rollerblades. He wobbled to the door in silence. “Then there was this awkward moment of him fumbling with his I.D. badge, trying to get the door to open,” Kemper said. “It felt like it lasted an hour. We were all trying not to laugh. Even while it was happening, I knew we were all thinking the same thing: Can we use this?” In the end, the joke was deemed “too hacky to use on the show.”
Reminds me of Steven Tyler reacting to Spinal Tap:
Tyler expounded on his reaction in a rare Library of Congress interview made public back in 2012. "That movie bummed me out," he said, "because I thought, 'How dare they? That's all real, and they're mocking it.'"
To be fair, Silicon Valley (the show) never interested me... kinda found it to be boring. But it _is_ hilarious when you run into these art imitates life imitates art things.
oh man, they definitely should have used that. it fits right into the show in every way. i am laughing just reading a straight account of what happened.
silicon valley is really insufferable. i don't understand that place at all and don't ever wish to be there. and i am often reminded of adam curtis' documentary all watched over by machines of everlasting grace. i wish he would do another one along these lines.
It was a great show because of on point, biting satire like this. Then in the last season the writing dropped off a cliff, I guess they got neutered - post Gawker world and all that.
X labs actually does great things. Nobody has invested into such different areas of scientific research as Alphabet. I love SV, but hated that potato cannon joke. They painted X Labs as a joke, which it isn't. Sure, they have had their failures,but I'd rather take their failures rather thn "successes" like Snapchat, Tiktok.
Craig Frederighi demoing Memoji is much more laughable.
Agreed. When the problems they try to tackle are orders of magnitude harder than...making Snapchat, you have to attribute their failure more to difficulty of the problem than incompetence of the people.
Yes. And thankfully, Ruth Porat has controlled the losses otherwise around 2013 they were on fire,bought so many robotics companies etc. Though, the incentive structure at the Self Driving project led to a lot of great engineers leaving the project and making tons of . I was also excited for Project Soli. Haven't seen any update regarding their work in 3 years. Waiting to see how Loon, Wing monetize as they graduated this year from X.
No idea why I got downvotes on my 1st comment above. Probably, Snapchat or other insignificant Social startup employees.
I didn’t downvote you, but I wasn’t surprised to see that comment downvoted. The person you replied to said that they thought the show’s satire was really good. You replied, saying Google X does great things. That is either an off-topic reply or a weak way to disagree with whether the satire is good. Like Gates said, the high technology industry can accomplish great things and have some funny aspects at the same time.
I remember reading a story about someone who got fired from some Silicon Valley tech job, and they almost immediately revoked their key card, so they got stuck in the staircase and had to wait for someone to hold the door open so they could get out of the building. (As if getting fired wasn't bad enough, you have to beg favours from random passers-by.)
Common after layoff to have to return at an arranged later date (exit interview?) to collect belongings. But can be a bummer if your car keys are in your desk!
Sometimes there are conference rooms outside the secured perimeter of a building, in the lobby before you go past the receptionist and have to badge in. I've seen them used for interviews and such. Since Google X has all sorts of top secret stuff, I could see them doing things that way.
That and the idea that he would wear skates to a meeting where he intends to show a group of comedy writers the seriousness of his work make this anecdote very unbelievable.
Those search results are heavily polluted by stories of this interview now. It's weird that they would give him trouble if he always wears them. If only Google had figured out a way for people to have human-powered wheeled transportation between buildings without having to be hobbled indoors...
Do the show producers feel something similar to some in their own industry or their surreality is just reality for them? Are they brave enough to mock powerful people they may wish to work with later?
Would be fun to watch one on Hollywood and they should have very intimate details to bare.
Hollywood have a grand tradition for satirizing themselves mercilessly - from Sunset Boulevard to Tropic Thunder. They don't shy away from presenting powerful Hollywood producers as drug users, as in True Romance, and in The Player you have cameos of Hollywood personalities playing themselves in a movie which present the business as deeply corrupt and opportunistic. I dont' think anybody is as openly cynical about Hollywood as Hollywood itself.
Bojack Horseman does a similar thing for Hollywood. It focuses on the shallowness of Hollywood culture and its effects on the people living in it though, so it swings from hilarious to extremely dark all the time.
You know this about ALL Google meeting rooms? There can't be a higher security room in which you must badge out, or rather, badge into a higher security room adjacent to a meeting room?
A few months ago I wrote a certain story here and to my surprise I received a call from Dan Lyons, one of the writers of the show. We had long discussions about silicon valley and his new book coming out (I'm featured in it). A few weeks ago he was in LA and we had another long discussion about the show.
Silicon Valley is the show most startup founders will refuse to watch. My startup was featured on TechCrunch Disrupt, we were on stage talking about how we will change the world with our product. Then things didn't particularly go as planed.
I discovered the show and started watching it shortly after. It was painful to see that they portrayed our exact journey as it happened. Only the show poked fun of the mistakes we were making. I watched it not only as a comedy, but also as a documentary that would predict our fate. It was eye-opening!
My favorite part (and most humiliating) was when we pitched our startup to a non-silicon valley investor and she simply replied: "OK, cut the crap. Which website are you scraping?"
All my co-founders were offended by the show. I must admit, its painful to watch someone else make fun of the things you put your heart to. But from time to time, someone has to make fun of you or you start to take yourself too seriously.
If you are trying to make it in silicon valley, please watch the show. At best, it will help you make your startup more grounded.
Man, you need to get better co-founders! I agree that Silicon Valley often hits painfully close to home, but that's precisely what makes it so fantastic.
My own startup has been mostly outside of America, but we get enough brushes with Silicon Valley culture -- or, worse, wannabe Silicon Valley culture -- to make the show really resonate.
Even closer to home, for me personally, is the Australian comedy "Utopia" (or "Dreamland", depending on the market). It's about a municipal urban development corporation, which is basically my startup's customer group. One episode features a sendup of what my own startup does (online collaborative infrastructure planning and stakeholder engagement) -- or, more to the point, what some of our would-be customers want it to do. You can tell that the writers know what they're talking about. Damn near killed me to watch it. Highly, highly recommended!
Hah! Anecdotally, I've had the opposite experience watching the show and running a startup in the valley. Most of my co-founder friends have seen it and see it as a sort of catharsis.
"We aren't the only ones, this happens to everyone, so much so, there's a show about it"
And then there's the inspirational, "Let's have the team coalesce around a deadline and jam out something that's never been done before", episodes. Also very real.
We talked a lot about how many founders that somewhat found success, try to be Gavins or Russ Hannemans. But the show doesn't portray these people as the visionaries they think they are. In fact it makes fun of them.
Even the Presidents shit stinks. I'm really wondering how fragile your ego has to be to be offended by watching Silicon Valley. Are these really people who should be trying to "change the world"? Better to work on themselves first.
That's some really interesting insights from a founder, thanks!
I'm a huge fan of the show, but one thing I would like to point out is that I don't think everything of the show is negative. sometimes it makes me wish I was developing (data science here). my favorite moments of the show is when they overcome some huge challenge (spoiler like with 2 days of the condor)
> Silicon Valley is the show most startup founders will refuse to watch.
So, so true. I tried to start watching it when I was running my startup but it literally felt like I was watching the same place and people I was spending 9-14 hours/day at the startup accelerator I was in.
I find the start of Social Network really inspiring. The great soundtrack (Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross) from the scene where he is running back to his room and then getting to work will get me productive every time.
"During the review process once the footage [of Techcrunch Disrupt] was woven in, another editor criticized the crowd shots for not featuring any women and blamed Berg for the oversight.
'...Those were real shots of the real place, and we didn't frame women out.The world we're depicting is f---ed up.' said Berg"
There's been debate about whether "Silicon Valley" the show should have more diversity than Silicon Valley the place, but Berg argues that a show made for entertainment not meant to be a "social-action wing" or be a force of change - the show is just satirizing the reality that the tech industry itself needs to take care of.
I have no idea where you're working at but if you've ever looked at Google's public diversity report (one of the largest companies in the valley), you'd see that your Silicon Valley career does not reflect what the majority of people in this very large company experience.
My experience is that white male Americans are roughly 25% of the Silicon Valley workforce, but if you bundle in white immigrants and women you might reach 40-50%.
As I remember the TV show, the main characters are 80% white, and the Indian guy is the whitest one I've seen.
Small sample, I know, and I'm not offended. Just a little bored...
So a guy who was born and raised in Pakistan and has a Pakistani accent is culturally white? What exactly does that mean? Does it mean that he’s educated and wealthy?
Funny. When I read this the first time, I looked up the writing credits (including/excluding/only guest writers) and heir genders and there was a picture painted there that was quite amusing :)
Not at all surprising considering it’s Hollywood, but amusing nonetheless.
I always describe Silicon Valley (the show) as being solidly in the Uncanny Valley (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley). It's humorous and absurd, but at the same time so close to reality it's unsettling.
It was the yogurt scene that did it for me. When one of the main characters yells at the other about how all the small spoons are missing, and he can't get the big spoons into the greek yogurt jam section.
Not only did I have that exact same conversation with my coworker the day previously about the exact brand of yogurt, on post-analysis we're pretty sure our company has stocked the exact same spoons they used in the show.
For me, it was the episode where they were doing agile development complete with story cards. I had been in so many of those exact same meetings. It was hysterical but also... refreshing? Someone got it, the ridiculousness of it all wrapped up in earnest desire to implement A Better Process.
But the joke on the show is that Jared is the only person who actually level-headed enough to succeed at a business goal, but the developers just made everything into a joke and a pissing contest, and still let themselves be manipulated by the system they thought was too dumb for them. When the company literally falls off the back of a truck in a later season, another character says "This wouldn't have happened if Jared were still here."
Yup. After we had broken out the first Scrum project, my HR Manager came by specifically to tell me he had learned all about Scrum watching Silicon Valley.
In Austin, my coworkers would always stop at lunch and look if Mike Judge was nearby. We were convinced he just followed us around for Office Space and King of the Hill material.
All of his work is about middle class suburban white people, and their lives. There's nothing wrong with that, 'write what you know', but 'breadth' isn't really the term to describe it.
Race and class demographics are not the only dimensions to a show. A working class conservative family in the suburbs of Dallas is pretty different from the high tech and high paid world of Silicon Valley is different from uneducated teenage slackers giggling at poop jokes.
What Bevis does/thinks/likes versus what Hank does/thinks/likes versus what Richard does/thinks/likes could not be farther from each other. Just because they're all white doesn't mean they're all interchangeable.
In office space Peter Gibbons, our white Alpha, and the only guy with any sense, tries to stay sane and hold it together in a world that has gone haywire.
In King of the Hill, our white Alpha, Hank Hill, the only guy with any common sense, tries to stay sane and keep it from all falling apart in a world that has gone Haywire.
In Idiocracy, our White Alpha, Joe Bauer, the only guy with any sense, tries to stay sane and keep it from falling apart in a world that has gone haywire.
In Extract, Joel, our down to earth White Alpha, tries to stay sane and hold it together in a world that has gone haywire.
And in Silicon Valley, well- you get the idea. I love Mike Judge films, he is an astute observer and hilarious. but his ouvre is not broad. He's got a formula, and it works, and that's fine.
> In King of the Hill, our white Alpha, Hank Hill, the only guy with any common sense
Ah, that's not my memory of King of the Hill. In it Hank is the biggest idiot and it's only those around him that have any common sense.
I probably only watched the first season but I remember one episode in particular where some Laotians moved into the neighborhood and Hank couldn't except that they weren't Chinese or Japanese. His father who fought in South East Asia knew immediately that they were Laotians but Hank refused to acknowledge any kind thing other than Chinese or Japanese. Hank's wife went on to bake a "Apple Brown Betty" (I think that's what it's called) and got upset when the Laotian neighbor made it better.
His new series Tales From The Tour Bus, telling stories about musicians doing drugs and/or being kind of assholes is absolutely hilarious too. I love all of his stuff, King of the Hill especially.
A couple years ago I found myself at a user conference party for the funded SaaS company I worked for. The concert was complete with open cocktail bar, Cirque du Soleil aerial performers, and (you guessed it), Flo-Rida.
For a while I couldn't decide if it was life imitating art, or a tongue-in-cheek nod to the stereotype we were seen as. But it wasn't the latter, the founder/president wasn't that self-aware.
I think a lot of those nerds maybe skipped the dance parties in college, and skipped going to the club as an adult. The experience of being at this kind of event, but where you're the guest of honor instead of an out-of-place spectator, is enticing.
Of course I'm not trying to say all ML researchers are dweebs, but if that description applies to 10% of attendees, you've got a line.
I was at NeurIPS last year, and I can actually confirm that the line to see Flo-Rida went around the block. It's unclear to me whether or not there was genuine interest in the performance, but there was certainly interest in the event.
Say what you will about the world's biggest nerds, but irony, whether purposeful or inexplicably accidental, is not lost on them.
I was all for a name change from a juvenile pun, but "NeurIPS" is hilariously bad. It confirms, that everyone but the press, continues calling it NIPS.
> line to see Flo-Rida went around the block
I mean, if it was a free (already paid for) concert, then I would go for it too.
"Nip" used to be a somewhat common perjorative term for Japanese (i.e. Nipponese; the Japanese word for Japan is Nippon). In case anyone else was confused by this comment.
It’s real but old timey. Unless you’re quite a bit older than the HN average, you probably wouldn’t have heard it. That, of course, doesn’t mean it’s ok.
Flo-rida has just been smart about capitalizing on that easy valley money. I’ve been to several parties where he performs and gotten on stage with him during Dreamforce.
He doesn't get enough credit. The fact that King of the Hill and Silicon Valley come from the same person is astounding and suggests a comic breadth that is hard to grasp.
The Flynn Effect. People aren't getting more ignorant, we're becoming more aware of our ignorance. Of all the foolishness and idiocy in the world, if you look at human history it's always been worse than now.
What mythical better times are Idiocracy theory proponents even mourning? When have literacy rates and educational attainment for the masses ever been better than the present? As a species, we still have a long way to go before the low hanging fruit gains are realized.
To suggest that basic literacy and educational attainment are somehow indicative of above average intelligence or the ability to understand complex and abstract ideas is a bit of a stretch.
With grade inflation and babysitting modern age students, what are the realistic requirements to attain a university degree in a low-difficulty major at a mediocre school? 80 IQ? 85?
The literacy argument is trivially refuted in a similar manner. Reading by itself is not indicative of higher cognitive function above an elementary school child.
Also, proportions are what matter here. I doubt the proportion of people with high fluid/crystallized intelligence is higher now, than it was, say in 1850. The only difference is that now a higher proportion of the general population have degrees.
What made the 70's better than the 60's? In the span of a decade we went from idea (we will put a man on the moon) to execution (Apollo 11) for arguably the greatest scientific feat of mankind.
I realize we're talking about humanity as a whole, but I don't see the appeal of the 70's.
What IQ level is optimal? And what is the role of IQ from a societal standpoint, if you are to presuppose that mass literacy and contemporary education is meaningless? What is the benefit of literacy from your perspective, for that matter
For starters, the real-world trends Idiocracy bemoans are cultural and educational, not genetic. You fix ignorance with education, not fucking eugenics.
"In “Idiocracy,” the secretary of state is sponsored by Carl’s Jr., a company whose chairman very nearly became our current secretary of labor. In 2505, the Oval Office is occupied by an ex-wrestler and porn star named Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho; our president has been on the business end of a Stone Cold Stunner and once appeared in a nonpornographic segment of an otherwise soft-core Playboy VHS tape, dumping sparkling wine onto a limousine. His name is a brand name, too." [1]
He also programmed for a time, so he had some background for Office Space and maybe Silicon Valley. But then he made KOTH so it’s not like he’s limited either.
I’ll second this, first time I tried I got about 5 minutes in, decided it wasn’t funny and moved on. Later I gave it a better try, deciding to at least watch the entirety of the first episode and I ended up binging much of the first season.
I think that's the whole point. It's meant to be satire, so it (the show) draws attentions to the quirks of Silicon Valley (the place) by exaggerating them.
Except a bunch of satire can't exagerate the excess, or even show it faithfully, because no-one would believe it.
This is what Iannucci says about making more of The Thick of It -- it's impossible to do because current politicians are self satarising in ways that are unbelievable if you put them on screen, even if those things actually happened in real life.
Yeah I couldn't get watch it for this reason -- at the time it came out I was just emerging from the process of an acquisition into a BigCorp, and it was just too real. I found I hated the characters on screen as much as I found I hated their equivalents in real life.
Great way to summarize this experience - way too close to real in my experience. I finally got over this and just enjoyed the humorous aspects of the show. RIGBY...
It's quite amazing how good a job Silicon Valley does considering how badly wrong it could go (I'm looking at you Big Bang Theory). I'm sure there are quite a few industries that could have similar comedies about them from people who really know what the industry is like. W1A is another great example.
This chart holds only in the sense that the Kardashians play dumb caricatures of themselves. They may cater their brand to the lowest common denominator but they most certainly aren’t dumb themselves. They essentially parlayed Robert Kardashian’s friendship with OJ Simpson into a media empire; there is something to be said for how media savvy they are.
I met someone who worked for the kardashians on the show and said they are king, generous and respectful to the staff working their brand. Said that they know full well they are managing a brand and that they are parlaying that as they know it shall run out soon.
They said that the mom is the eagle-eye over the brand and pushing it to ensure max profit for them.
While i wanted to respect that, and i respect the hustle, it just shows that you can go too far with brand exploitation.
The daughter had the brand advanced through high profile sexual scandals (sex tape, personal relations etc)
The fucking dad had a transitional sex change to keep the limelight ( Nobody cares if he "wanted to be a woman his whole life" - thats his business. Not mine and not worthy of attempting to grab attention dollars.
IMO, the kardashian enterprise ilustrates only one thing:
The dicotomy of the education gap in this nation. Never mind a wealth gap. Education gap is why the US is doomed.
Or just awareness of how brands are operating now in general. I don't know if it's as dramatic as education.
It used to be the brand name/logo/trademark itself held all the value (e.g. Apple, Nike, etc.), except now we're seeing the value shift to how the brands correlate with consumer's identities (e.g. privacy, kaepernick, etc.). Kardashians, political parties, and corporations are especially cognizant of this social shift and are adapting faster than people are aware of it happening.
I personally blame social networks, which have made consumers hyper-aware of how decisions affect their carefully-constructed image of themselves online - but it's probably more complicated than just that.
If you ever find you've entered a cafe and need to sign a waiver because they're filming a reality show scene in there, I highly recommend staying to observe the process. It is hilarious the extent to which they fake the drama on these shows.
The scene was two women fighting over something. Between takes, the director and players were riffing and helping each other to develop their nasty insults and "bitchy" comments.
having money (as you note, the family wealth came from kris jenner's husband) makes it easier to make more money, with no implications about the intelligence of the wealth holder.
take trump for example. nytimes detailed about $600+ million in wealth transfer to him from his dad. while we don't have tax returns or financial statements to confirm this, he's probably worth about a billion dollars now. that rate of return is (roughly) less than 2% yearly. he would have been way better off putting that money in an index fund--he'd be worth about $3 billion if he had.
A index fund doesn't follow the index. There is a broker fee, stock transaction fees for the broker to keep the fund balanced and stock falling out of the index (because of the company eg. halfway to bankruptcy) is a loss for the fund but in the index the next biggest stock just takes it's place.
To keep up with the index is probably really hard.
The iShares S&P 500 ETF (quote: IVV) has an expense ratio of 0.04%, is offered commission-free on many brokerages, and based on some quick calculations, follows the official index to within about 0.5% returns. You're right that it's not completely "free", but the total "cost" is only about half a percentage point, meaning you can pretty closely follow the index in the long run with a single ETF purchase. I don't know what could be easier. :)
it's not that hard (and there is no "the index", just various approximations of a market portfolio). vanguard is well known for low-fee, no-frills index investing (among other things). invest in one of their funds and you'll likely net over 5% over the long run.
and sorry, i misremembered the numbers. he got over $400 million (at least) from dad, and that would be worth about $2 billion if simply invested in an index fund (according to the article).
yes, but that doesn't matter. at the end, they estimate the current value from indexing to be about $2B.
the trump wealth transfer started over 60 years ago. over the long run, market timing doesn't matter that much.
(EDIT: and that opinion piece was not coherent; the author mixed up trump's businesses with his net worth, and convoluted other finance concepts to render his desired "opinion". it was awful.)
That's just not the case - if you assume he bought in during a low point you'll get a much higher figure.
Besides, there's no claim that he was given anywhere close to $400M over 60 years ago, nor can anyone be realistically expected to invest their inheritance starting at the age of 12.
> that rate of return is (roughly) less than 2% yearly.
Don't forget to factor in Trumps' heavy spending over those years which greatly reduces his rate of return. You could just as easily say that he is keeping his value level with respect to inflation and spending the rest.
The whole reason that the investment industry exists is because nobody puts that much money at risk in an index fund. Hedge funds literally exist for that reason. This whole idea that trump would drop his wealth in an index fund is propaganda, its meant to manipulate you about trumps incompetency.
With that much $$ Mr Trump should have done better than the index if he is that good.
And at least in the UK people and families that want preserve wealth actually run their own funds. There are a number of listed self managed Investment trusts (with low TER) based on preserving family wealth.
RIT Capital Partners is one example 12.6% pa for 30 years its base was Rothschild family money and there are others Much older.
According to actual tax filings, he inherited 600 mil in the year 2000 in the form of NYC real estate, which of left untouched would be north of 10 bil now.
Wow this is hilarious, but are the KK crew actually dumb? I don't think so. Where do you think Silicon Valley sits on this graph? Is Silicon Valley is a show for smart people about smart and dumb people?
I think Silicon Valley needs its own Venn diagram of "self aware" and "not self aware". That said, I can't think of any shows that adopt the Silicon Valley mindset hook, line and sinker. There was an awful Bravo reality show a few years ago though.
That said, Silicon Valley probably belongs on both sides of the Venn diagram. Lots of people enjoying the show without realising they are the joke.
Not a perfect rule... Kids In The Hall demonstrated for me, that in some cases, audience laughter adds an acutely essential ingredient to comedic performances.
The Kids In The Hall is a seminal example of sketch comedy, but as a broadcast show, the audio from the live audience had to be engineered into the sound channel of the program, since live performances have to mic the audience, to capture their laughs as part of the recording, and mix it properly, so that its volume pairs well with the broadcast performance, just like a sporting event.
The show really does hold up, years after the original recordings, still proving funny and awesome. But it turns out that the sounds of the audience change the whole dynamic of the humor. This is demonstrable if you stand it next to their movie, Brain Candy, which is also funny and watchable, but a different experience, without the noise of an audience.
You could argue that the performers have had their performances altered by the demands of improvisation and the give-and-take interaction that occurs with a live audience, but in retrospect, as a viewer watching the same show twenty years later, I don't really care about whether the audience effects are manufactured or not.
The truth is, the quality of the show has the sounds of the audience built into it as an integral quality, that boosts the entertainment value of the show.
The Kids In The Hall seem to have realized that the live improvisation really was a strong aspect of what made their show good, which is why they opted to engage in touring as a live show, instead of continuing as a broadcast series. I think if anyone were so inclined, though, the right kind of genius could be applied purely as post-production. It's just that the authenticity is preferred for obvious reasons, and ultimately, it's probably actually cheaper to just be talented.
That's a bad test. It mainly just filters out shows filmed in front of a live audience.
If you film a comedy in front of a live audience, the actors have to adjust their delivery to speak around the laughter. If you take the laughter out of the final cut the pauses were the actors were waiting for the laughter to die down make it weird and awkward.
If a scene only needs one or two takes to get right, they can just go with the laughter from the live audience. If it takes several takes, they will still be getting laughter from the live audience, and so changing the timing of the delivery, but it won't be as intense as it should be for the quality of the joke, and if that live laughter was used it could change the perception of the joke for the broadcast audience. (Our perception of a joke is influenced by how we think others perceive it).
Hence, if you use a late take you need to replace the late take live laughter with either earlier take live laughter or laughter from a laugh library.
The it crowd is one of my absolute favorite shows. Maybe it will work better without a laugh track but there are a lot of British shows id rather have with a track than without the show in my life.
There's a lot of stuff filmed outside the studio though I'm certain they don't have a live audience for. The IT Crowd does use a laughter track a lot of the time.
Yeah, they film those parts before the live recording and then show them on a screen to the audience to get reaction audio, and also so the audience has context for later live scenes. It's a surprisingly involved process.
I can never get over how ahead of its time the IT crowd was. I just went back and watched a couple episodes and it still nails many things right on the head
I didn't like the IT Crowd but if you want something ahead of its time, track down Nathan Barley. It kind of foreshadows the rise of vlogging, memes and 'lad culture' but was released in 2005. Written by Charlie Brooker and Chris Morris.
Beavis and Butthead are hugely underrated. I recall people making fun of me for watching it back in the 90’s. It was almost the only TV I ever watched.
Office Space and Silicon Valley, sure, but Idiocracy has aged _horribly_.
That movie is full of memes that haven't been relevant since the mid-00s (and specifically, the humor in the movie has a distinct Bush-era vibe which straight-up feels foreign in 2018... it feels like a period piece even though it's set in the future), and I lost whatever enjoyment of it that I had left when actual Neo-Nazis began using the movie to promote their pseudoscience about race and intelligence.
And in the movie the POTUS was Dwayne Camacho an ex pro wrestler... and in real life many people want an ex pro wrestler named Dwayne Johnson to run for POTUS as an improvement to the current POTUS?!
I'd say you can't make this stuff up, but Mike Judge made this stuff up before it was real life!
When I said "Bush-era", I was talking more of the national zeitgeist during Bush's presidency and not so much about how Bush himself was perceived.
The Bush era—or rather the core of the era, from about 2002 to 2007 (i.e. after the dust from 9/11 settled and before the housing crisis), was a boom time, and much of the future situation feels like it comes from "what if this boom lasts forever?" (i.e. society becomes wealthy enough to automate everything, so people just sit around and watch Ow My Balls and drink Brawndo every day instead of having to work). Something made nowadays would probably start with a premise that comes from "Millenials can't afford anything".
Mainstream culture during the Bush era was also before the sudden explosion in nerd culture. Superheroes hadn't eaten the entertainment industry yet, nostalgia wasn't yet a driving force in pop culture, and it was still uncool to admit that you enjoy RPGs or reading comic books or doing whatever else nerds do. A parody of modern cultural memes would resemble Ready Player One more than Idiocracy, and Ready Player One wasn't even intended as parody. Instead, Idiocracy spends a lot of time lampooning shock reality TV (e.g. Ow My Balls), which was a huge thing in the mid-00s with shows like Jackass and Fear Factor but isn't big anymore. And the general culture is different. Like, you had people saying things like "you talk faggy", which sadly was common in real life during the mid-00s, and as such it was a ripe target for parody, but would be completely taboo now. Even in bro-culture you wouldn't see that in 2018 (I mean, there's still a lot of homophobia around, but you don't see those slurs dropped casually anymore), and so a parody of modern bro-culture probably wouldn't even mention it. TBH, a parody of modern bro-culture would probably involve MRAs and redpillers and pseudo-intellectuals who worship Jordan Peterson.
Like, the _idea_ of a movie about the future being full of stupid people would still be relevant in 2018 (and you can thank Trump for that), but it wouldn't be Idiocracy because Idiocracy was more about parodying mid-00s pop culture than anything else. I'd imagine a late-10s Idiocracy would involve some combination of nerd culture turned mainstream eating the world, '90s nostalgia (with "only '90s kids remember" somehow being reiterated over and over 500 years in the future), avocado toast, and nobody being able to afford a house.
This is a pretty great pop cultural analysis of American society of when Idiocracy was created.
I think the movie is a reflection of the time it was created, but it's a little less tied to that moment than you think. If you think of it as a subversion of the generic Jetsons vision of automation leading to mass complacency then it could be a more universal film than you portray it as. (Probably pre-Jetsons but '50s postwar sci-fi probably exemplifies that vision the best. Or maybe it extends further back, and the Idiocrats are just tackier versions of the Eloi from Wells.)
I think the big realization we have now is that automation is far less utopian than we expected, it comes with complications and externalities and inequality, with a lot of what we have now is just abstracting away work so that someone less well-off and farther away is doing it. Funnily enough one minor "plothole" I always had with Idiocracy is that if everyone is stupid, how were the machines still semi-functional? How did their society produce the cameramen at the monster truck death rally? Obviously, the whole movie is a satire or lampoon, but it made me think how society could culturally regress while still remaining technologically semi-functional, buoyed by artifacts of the ancient past like the Eloi or some descendent race from a fantasy setting.
I think if you were to make an Idiocracy today it would have to be focused on how social media and the 24/7 online culture have disrupted the way we relate to one another. Instead of 1001 channels of trashy reality TV it would be conspiracy theories and fringe ideas and charlatans appealing to both emotion and pseudo-logic. (Interspersed with unboxing videos and ASMR and live-streaming, sure.) It feels like anti-intellectualism today is fueled more by anger and zeal (this applies to all political stripes). The current boom feels a lot less even and people are far more desperate and stressed out. Our attention spans are even more frayed. Whereas the original Idiocracy was more about complacency birthed from prosperity, as you pointed out. (Though that rather ignores specific Bush administration policies that could be criticized as anti-intellectual, whether culture wars at home or military aggression abroad. But maybe their absence from that film makes it, as I mentioned earlier, more generic.)
> The Bush era—or rather the core of the era, from about 2002 to 2007 (i.e. after the dust from 9/11 settled and before the housing crisis), was a boom time
It was a fairly modest aggregate growth period with unusually poor distributional effects, where the bottom 3 quintiles so real income drops and the fourth was flat.
Which is actually a lot like the subsequent expansions.
> what if this boom lasts forever?" (i.e. society becomes wealthy enough to automate everything, so people just sit around and watch Ow My Balls and drink Brawndo every day instead of having to work).
Er, the trend of automation and distraction hasn't really changed (indeed, it's gained even more cultural currency), though the shock genre has moved from reality TV to online video venues, often relayed by social media; not any less of a thing, just a slightly different medium. Though I guess a VR headset worn on the smart toilet would be more 2018 dystopian futurism than the big screen.
> Like, you had people saying things like "you talk faggy", which sadly was common in real life during the mid-00s, and as such it was a ripe target for parody, but would be completely taboo now.
No, using slurs implying homosexuality and lack of manliness as anti-intellectual insults isn't less of thing now than it was then. If anything, both anti-intellectualism, it's time to homophobia, and it's tendency to conflate those two opposed things has increased.
> but you don't see those slurs dropped casually anymore
I've seen them about as much in the last two years (including on mass media outlets) as I did in the whole of the 1990s, in the specific confluence of homophobic insults with anti-intellectualism. Less of “gay” as a generic equivalent of “bad”, sure, but that wasn't the context of “you talk faggy”.
Yeah, Idiocracy is kind of insidiously awful because it thinks that cultural changes are actually genetic. You don't have to follow its arguments very far at all to come to the conclusion that ignorance can be fixed, not by education, but by restricting breeding rights. We all know where that leads.
> Yeah, Idiocracy is kind of insidiously awful because it thinks that cultural changes are actually genetic.
But...they are (or, rather, they can reasonably be expected to produce genetic changes which reinforce themselves.) Because cultural changes effect mate selection, and also otherwise improve the relative fitness of those naturally inclined to thrive in the cultural environment.
Most people who obsess over celebrities, or fall for every ad they see, or whatever else Idiocracy thinks is the downfall of society, aren't mentally impaired. They were raised in a society that discourages critical thinking skills and devalues education. They're ignorant, in other words. You don't fix ignorance with eugenics. You fix it with education.
Which group of people do you trust to decide which other groups should be allowed to continue and which should become extinct, without any bias or personal preference?
Eugenics is always political.
> It’s certainly ethically dubious. And I’m not certain it actually has any effect.
> If it does works it is entirely possible it will lead to a healthier and smarter society.
Sure, and if Elon Musk invented flying hamburgers we could solve world hunger, which is just about as plausible as successfully using genetic selection to solve a non-genetic problem. The premise is false; anything that proceeds from a false premise is useless.
Oh how I loathed that show, especially at height of its popularity. I got so tired of smiling and nodding (or rolling my eyes, depending on who it was) as non-technical people at work and even my mother-in-law made it clear they thought of me when they watched that show (simply because I was the "smart engineer", so obviously a huge nerd with no social ability). None of these people were my age though, they were all signficantly older and Silicon Valley would have likely been much too sophisticated for them.
I'm being a bit over-dramatic, truth be told (I never had the courage to roll my eyes at any of them). I put "smart engineer" in quotes because that was really just a label (for my MIL, it meant I was the only engineer in the family, for people in the company, I was one of many smart nerdy folk). I'm primarily a self-deprecating guy with a healthy bout of impostor syndrome once in a while.
My strong dislike from BBT comes mainly from people associating me with a show that I find wholly unfunny. Not because it makes fun of geekdom and I don't like that, but simply because I don't find it funny at all. I saw a lot of parallels in the type of comedy on BBT and that on "2 and a half men" and could never understand their high ratings.
You know, I was fine with them making fun of the geeks (essentially me) when it was funny. When it stopped to be funny - which is by now years ago - it just became a silly pointless caricature.
Mike Judge is really great at capturing Americana. Bevis and Butthead was great at capturing the 90s MTV youth, King of the Hill for Texas/country/southern stuff and Silicon Valley has been laugh out loud funny for me.
As someone who fits almost all of the boxes for people Big Bang Theory has made fun of, I still enjoy the series immensely, as I have since it started. Sometimes I wonder if it just hits too close to the truth for some people, or if on the opposite end, they are too detached from the sort of people it characterizes and hence don't see where it draws from.
Silicon Valley is a very different show, but definitely on solid ground. And it's unique in that it seems quite popular amongst people its blatantly making fun of.
BBT laughs AT nerds, reinforcing stereotypes in non-nerds and reassuring the mainstream about its superiority.
SV laughs WITH nerds, satirising the excesses of a culture that is presented as filthy rich and dominant beyond belief. It also deals with the actual wet dreams of the culture in a fairly realistic way.
Think about the material that a dim bully could get from BBT (tons), versus what he could get from SV (very little). That’s all the difference.
>BBT laughs AT nerds, reinforcing stereotypes in non-nerds and reassuring the mainstream about its superiority.
BBT definitely laughs at nerds. But I don't think reassures the mainstream about its superiority. The characters on BBT are depicted as god-tier geniuses that are successful at doing important work. The nerds are the protagonists.
SV on the other really sticks it to developers and VC. I don't get a sense the SV writers respect was the valley does at all.
I haven't watched a great deal of BBT, i'm not a fan, just what I've caught watching with other people.
I've never seen an episode where they were depicted in actually doing work, just in talking about their social group and the character interaction. They could have all been sitting in a coffee shop or bar for all of the links to their job it had. Whereas SV does have content about their life outside of work, a lot of the comedy comes from their "jobs".
I also really don't think the BBT people are depicted as genius'. One episode I do remember is when one of them was struggling with a physics problem with electron behaviour. He finally solved the problem that had been plaguing him (a 'super smart' physics researcher, because he started thinking of the electrons as waves, and not as particles. Which any 16(17)-year-old physics student would have realized in about a minute.
BBT has quite a few episodes portraying work at the university, but it's definitely a minor amount, and it's not really intended to be scientifically accurate bleeding edge science. Big Bang Theory is far more worried about getting right details of various super heroes than presenting an education on theoretical physics.
I think in both shows there are occasions where you laugh with AND at the "nerds". I think the problem is a lot of people judge BBT without even seeing more than a couple episodes.
> i wonder what he thinks about the future of tech
Have you watched SV?
Season 1 ends with TechCrunch Disrupt, where founders nervously stammer on stage about how their "mobile-first, local-first social media network" will "make the world a better place".
BBT is a great foil for SV. It's caricature vs satire.
BBT is outsiders laughing at the image of a nerd archetype many have in their head. It can be entertaining; it can tell you a lot about their relationship with that archetype. But as with all caricature, the distorted image can be a little ouchy.
SV satirizes insider territory with surprising resolution. It can be entertaining; it can tell people a lot about the culture. Where it's ouchy, it's ouchy because the truth can be painful as well as funny.
The characters, especially the female characters, were just too far off the mark. Also, too many girl-meets-boy plot lines. It got worse as the show went along with no new ideas. "Friends" with nerd jokes.
(I live next door to Pasadena and am acquainted with many Caltechers.)
Pardon the terminology, but I consider that show to be Nerd-Blackface. I'm not sure how else to describe it. I find how the show deals with anything technical to be an affront to intelligence in general.
I think you set your expectations way to high if you expect a general-appeal TV show to get what theoretical physicists to right. That said, a couple of moments were pretty good - e.g. when the guys were thinking about something with "eye of the tiger" playing on the background. Nice lampshading of the fact that it's impossible to show intellectual work on TV. They had some pretty good moments early on. They should've stopped there.
Yes! That scene was hilarious. I also like the scene when they're super excited that they hooked a lamp up to a port on the open internet and someone turned it on. Then someone asks, why spend the time to do this? And they respond, because we can. It reminded me of me and my friends in college, and the response we would get for some of the things we did.
>The minstrel show, or minstrelsy, was an American form of entertainment developed in the early 19th century. Each show consisted of comic skits, variety acts, dancing, and music performances that mocked people specifically of African descent. The shows were performed by white people in make-up or blackface for the purpose of playing the role of black people.
They aren't the same thing: minstrelsy is the root offensive thing, blackface is offensive by association with minstrelsy. “Nerd blackface” could be any instance of non-nerds portraying nerds [0], “nerd minstrelsy” would, at least if you take the modern objection as defining [1], be the unfavorable portrayal of nerds (whether by actual nerds or non-nerds) for the entertainment of non-nerds.
[0] which is problematic as a blanket characterization of TBBT, though it may apply to some players; it seems pretty clearly not to apply to Dr. Bialik, for instance.
[1] historically, from some quarters it was roundly attacked on the opposite basis, for excessively sympathetic portrayal of blacks, especially during slavery, and especially for it's frequent positive (from the viewpoint of those objecting) portrayal of runaway slaves.
All comedy exaggerates and stereotypes. You are just butthurt that people like you are the butt of the joke.
And the butthurt is misplaced. The nerds of the show are definitely a source of the comedy but they are protagonists you are supposed to root for. They have foibles but generally, you are supposed to respect their intelligence and commitment to science, etc.
It's a far cry from steve urkle.
It's much much much closer to a George Lopez show making fun of Mexicans than to Minstrel shows.
It's a fairly traditional laugh-track sitcom with "lol nerds" as the window dressing. It's just fine as a sitcom, if you like sitcoms (I do) but actual nerds love bashing it since, surprise surprise, a network sitcom's characters are more caricatures than actual nuanced characters.
All of these commenters seem genuinely offended by the demographic representations on the show but I'm here to tell you, it's awful because of the terrible writing, predictable humor, reliance on a laugh track to sell its "jokes" and it's overall just aimless and boring.
I'm with you. I'm not quite sure what elevated it beyond "yet-another-sitcom" in the eyes of so many people, but it really seemed like standard sit-com fare to me, the few times I watched it (terrible writing, predictable humor, etc).
Someone on a podcast I listen to called it "nerd blackface", which I think is a fair assessment. The main characters have so many different stereotypes and so many different personality quirks rammed into singular people that it's borderline ridiculous; they don't feel like real people. It's still a really well-written show though, but many people will choose to blindly hate them instead. Much like the same hate Lorre's other show, Two and a Half Men (Sheen era), got.
I watched a bunch of Halt and Catch Fire. It's trying hard to be an accurate history of the early days of the internet, but at the same time it's a melodrama conveyed by ridiculously good-looking and wildly emotional people.
I don't understand the Big Band Theory hate. Maybe it looks weird and exaggerated to most tech people for people to act like that, but I've definitely seen that type of behavior with the people I've spoken to in academia. It's also a pretty funny show IMO.
During one visit to Google’s headquarters, in Mountain View, about six writers sat in a conference room with Astro Teller, the head of GoogleX, who wore a midi ring and kept his long hair in a ponytail. “Most of our research meetings are fun, but this one was uncomfortable,” Kemper told me. GoogleX is the company’s “moonshot factory,” devoted to projects, such as self-driving cars, that are difficult to build but might have monumental impact. Hooli, a multibillion-dollar company on “Silicon Valley,” bears a singular resemblance to Google. (The Google founder Larry Page, in Fortune: “We’d like to have a bigger impact on the world by doing more things.” Hooli’s C.E.O., in season two: “I don’t want to live in a world where someone makes the world a better place better than we do.”) The previous season, Hooli had launched HooliXYZ, its own “moonshot factory,” whose experiments were slapstick absurdities: monkeys who use bionic arms to masturbate; powerful cannons for launching potatoes across a room. “He claimed he hadn’t seen the show, and then he referred many times to specific things that had happened on the show,” Kemper said. “His message was, ‘We don’t do stupid things here. We do things that actually are going to change the world, whether you choose to make fun of that or not.’ ” (Teller could not be reached for comment.)
Teller ended the meeting by standing up in a huff, but his attempt at a dramatic exit was marred by the fact that he was wearing Rollerblades. He wobbled to the door in silence. “Then there was this awkward moment of him fumbling with his I.D. badge, trying to get the door to open,” Kemper said. “It felt like it lasted an hour. We were all trying not to laugh. Even while it was happening, I knew we were all thinking the same thing: Can we use this?” In the end, the joke was deemed “too hacky to use on the show.”
The latter one, in particular, implies that the writers had a deeper than average understanding of the different youth cultures of the US and South Asian cultures at a particular time in history.
They ring true. Some moments don't even have to exaggerated to be funny. That is exactly how being "cool" works in parts of India, and just the fact is enough to make a person from the west crack up.
Dinesh is one of the few nerdy Indian stereotypes that I do not mind. All the others seem like caricatures and generalizations of South Asians. Dinesh on the other hand, could be sitting right across my table, coding....
If The Big Short is considered a great "documentary" for the 2008 crisis, then SV does even better for the Valley.
> That is exactly how being "cool" works in parts of India, and just the fact is enough to make a person from the west crack up.
Indeed. In the context of the show, and American culture, it was Dinesh's perspective that stood out as seeming odd or unique.
But I wonder if the post-1950s American/Hollywood understanding of "cool" - the glorification of rebel/outcaste that Gilfoyle's personality represents - is itself really the anomaly on the global scale.
I'd imagine many/most parts of the world don't develop a romantic cultural trope around the underdog, or the person who doesn't fit in with the mainstream. But I'd be interested to learn otherwise.
That’s Kumail Nanjani’s actual experience being used. If you listen to his early material, on podcasts like Harmontown or standup, there are a lot of similar jokes about his youth.
In rare instances, the show just misses stuff and it annoys me since they get a lot of things right, especially the characters. The season 1 adderall episode annoys me because it felt like the writers on that episode didnt do their homework. Someone who is good at breaking into stuff is not the same as someone who is good at building stuff. Also the plot where Hendrix couldn't figure out how to explain the benefit of their compression technology to normal people also drove me insane. In real life, there's a very small chance that everyone on the team from the other devs, QA, to support, or even the VC's themselves couldn't borrow / miss the "unlimited storage space" marketing trick from the telecoms and ISPs?
Other than those two things so far, I really love the show.
I love the running joke that the main characters work on fake technobabble, but the background companies (particularly the TechCrunch episode) are babbling about stuff that sounds fake but is real tech. “Making the world a better place through Paxos distributed consensus!”
I mean, it would be kind of odd if the show's writers came up with something novel and instead of rushing to patent it decided to make a TV show out of it. Meanwhile, it's OK for the other companies to work on things that already exist–it adds to their run-of-the-mill-ness.
> A compression algorithm that works well enough to make a P2P Internet practical seems like a ground-breaking technology that is close-to-believable.
That’s not the amount of transfered data that makes a P2P Internet practical or not, but rather its reliability, something a compression algorithm can’t do anything about.
Such a compression algorithm could make it much cheaper for the community to volunteer capacity to the network (short-range relays? data storage nodes? crowdfunded cell towers?), which could make it much more feasible to build a reliable P2P network.
If this were true, there would be much more P2P networks today than fifteen years ago, but that’s not the case. According to [1], in 2004 BitTorrent accounted "from 20 to 35% of all traffic on the Internet". At that time the bandwidth cost was at least two orders of magnitude higher than today. The price of hard drive has since been divided by 40 [2] and the total Internet traffic has been multiplied by 40 [3].
My argument was only that bringing the cost down would make it easier to build a more reliable P2P network. I doubt that reliability/cost are the main reasons P2P networks aren't more popular, rather that the average person doesn't really care or even know about their existence.
A P2P Internet is not only practical but used in practice. BitTorrent at one point accounted for the majority of Internet traffic.
My problem with that technology is that, if the main character actually wanted to do good, he'd donate that algorithm to Apache and the show would be over in ten minutes. Or, if he wanted to make loads of money, he could license it for millions. Instead he wound up launching an ICO. The show should have been over in half an episode, but they turned the hero into a moronic sociopath to drag it out for five seasons.
But that’s the point of the show: a lot of “startup culture” is actually hypocritical, and doesn’t necessarily acts rationally. People want to be “the next Zuck” more than they really want to change the world or make money.
BitTorrent is free and open but Bram Cohen also created BitTorrent the company, which this year was acquired by a Chinese cryptocurrency/blockchain company, so. Life often holds examples that follow art.
I find it hits a bit close to home, so much so as to ruin the comedy sometimes... it’d be funny if it weren’t so true, which is depressing.
Still watch it, and love it though. And super impressed that a Hollywood production finally understood Northern California. That never happens (see: The Social Network, Hackers, every Steve Jobs movie, etc.)
I would highly suggest checking out Halt and Catch Fire. It's a period piece, but I think it captures the spirit of Northern California. The first 2 seasons are in Texas before they jump ship to San Francisco.
H&CF is a great series and switches gears every season. The final season has some of the most beautifully written and acted character moments I've ever seen on TV. I finished it almost aching for the characters on the show and I rarely ever have a strong reaction to TV.
ditto. Its starts off with a young ex-IBM executive trying to build the first IBM compatible machine and everything that goes with launching the new product.
Later seasons go into things like server farms, early gaming, and social networking.
I really like the historical/tech story lines but the soap-opera interpersonal relationships wrecked it for me. The whole "broken imperfection" thing often goes to far and really detracts from the story.
I agree. It feels like it's trying to be a film festival movie about a tumultuous relationship and "complicated" hero/heroine that just has the beginning of the personal computer age as a backdrop.
I really enjoyed that series. Early in my career I spent 6 months in Dallas in the early 80s, same space-time as the first 2 seasons. They captured working in a "tech" company in Dallas perfectly.
I love how H&CF talked about innovations of the 80s-90s that we think of as revolutions now that they have taken off: online games, social network, streaming, time-sharing/cloud computing.
I kind of have this feeling for most of Mike Judge's stuff. I think we've all been in an Office Space situation. Being from the same part of Texas that King Of The Hill is based on, I totally know people that I could swear Judge based the characters off of for the show. At this point, Idiocracy should be moved from the comedy category and into the prophecy/documentary category.
I agree with most of your comment except Idiocracy - while sometimes funny it is a trite classist argument, already made in various form centuries ago ("the poor are inferior and reproduce quickly, ergo each generation will be lesser than the previous").
While in reality e.g. IQ score baselines keep getting adjusted to account for the fact that kids keep getting better and better scores as time goes on[0].
The world is not getting dumber and if it is there is no evidence for it and plenty against it.
It's as if public education, improved nutrition and healthcare, better means of travel, better communication, etc. result in making the population smarter. Who would have thought that if everyone got some of the advantages only the wealthy had in the past that things would turn out better?
I love Silicon Valley as much as I loathe Big Bang Theory. Talk about a show that plays to what "regular" people think nerds are like. I am absolutely dumbfounded how popular it is. Then again, Chuck Lorre has a track record for that type of garbage...
If it has a "studio audience" laugh track, I'm out.* If the joke is funny, I don't need a laugh track to tell me about it. If it's not funny, it's not funny, and a laugh track doesn't make it funny. If it's so esoteric of a joke that I missed, then I missed it. Silicon Valley has a lot of these. "Is it Apple Maps bad?" There was one about Theranos that if you had no idea what Theranos is/was, then you'd never have a chance to understand the insult.
Seinfeld had a laugh track also, and still managed to be one of the funniest and most original shows on television, breaking major ground for its time. Don't blame Big Bag Theory's gaping inadequacies on the laugh track; the writers, actors, and producers are largely at fault.
>Seinfeld had a laugh track also, and still managed to be one of the funniest and most original shows on television, breaking major ground for its time.
People keep saying that, but what it really that funny and original? I'll take e.g. MASH any day.
"Whoever is first to do something isn't likely to be the best at it, simply because everyone that comes after is building on their predecessors' work. Named after the sitcom Seinfeld, which many people won't watch any more because everything about it has been copied."
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeinfeldIsUnfunn...
Yeah, though I'm not sure about that (Seinfeld not being appreciated because it was a pioneer show).
I still find funny very manny pioneering shows -- heck, even back to Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Laurel and Hardy, and all kinds of 80s and even 70s sitcoms.
Laugh tracks are of their time. It's unfair to pick TBBT out as a bad show because it has a laugh track. TBBT is a bad show because it's a bad show. There are plenty of good "laugh track" shows - old ones.
While my reply was to a comment about BBT, I never mentioned it. I don't care what it is, but if a laugh track is used like that, then I'm not a fan of it. It's the final part of the equation of pandering to the lowest common denominator. I understand why they choose to do it. Without it, they'd have a fraction of the fan base. With it, they have/had the highest watched show. So clearly, the numbers don't lie; it's a good show. <ducks>
>Laugh tracks are of their time. It's unfair to pick TBBT out as a bad show because it has a laugh track.
No, it's a bad show because it's badly written, cliche, and lowest common denominator humor, just with nerds as subjects instead of some regular families as per usual.
Oh there's other problems too, real needs (really, real people) would say "it's cold as hoth out there", on BBT they would say "it's cold as hoth, the ice planet from star wars", which tells you who the real audience is
You could laugh at the characters and the show still be good (if the characters deserve to be laughed at). The important thing is the quality of the joke.
Hackers is best enjoyed, IMHO, if you interpret it as a hyperbole of the media stereotype of the hacker culture of the era. I tend to revisit it every year and have grown to appreciate it more and more with time.
I love Hackers. I also love snickering at all of the technical lapses throughout the movie. 28.8 kbaud? Yeah...you're streaming that 3d Gibson interface over that... Yeah, I know, they had to Hollywood it up, but still...
Hackers is, in my opinion, something that was written by someone who was very knowledgable about the subject matter and directed by someone who very clearly was not. Every spoken line of dialogue in that movie is pretty accurate and realistic - it's only when you get to the direction and the visuals that things get wacky.
"AAAAaaaaaah! here is this completely benign part of the software development cycle that we are dramatizing because the sky is falling and our company won't survive!!!!!"
I love the show, but there's a lot of things that Silicon Valley is that it does not cover. It's not the fault of the show - it probably would be much worse if it did. But some aspects of SV - like how much it is integrated into the big politics and yet how much they try to downplay it and make it look like their behemoth companies are just young and agile rebels playing this new Internet thing, as if it were the early 90s... Or how monocultural and group-thinky many places are, and how office politics often becomes more important than tech (but don't tell this to anyone, we're not like those old industries!) SV series kinda touches on this, but only lightly, mostly concentrating on things around tech. It probably makes for a much better show.
They did do an episode on the monocultural aspect in the latest season. Richard unintentionally "outs" a guy as being Christian and some of the programmers feel uncomfortable working with a Christian.
The guy later pulls Richard aside saying that he wasn't "openly Christian". The whole episode was hilarious.
In Hooli there's one big player - Benson - who is erratic and egomaniacal, and everybody else does what he says. He is a personification of a jerk (I mean, look at his signature!) and serves as a kind of super-villain that is the source of all evil. But usually there's no super-villain, there's just "culture" and everybody is playing by the set of rules that nobody in particular invented.
I thought the whole "failing upwards" thing was a funny part of the early show, but I didn't realize it was a real thing until I saw it in person. It's amazing how accurate that portrayal is.
It’s pretty crazy how the real SV has been obligingly giving the real show new material since it first debuted, with ever-increasing excess, quixotic ventures in search of markets, worsening scandals, and externalities everywhere!
> Somebody gets an idea almost right, but not quite, and their business fails; then someone else does it just a little bit better and they are viewed as a genius for the rest of their life.
I'm still thinking about this comment about Fieldbook shutting down [1], and the "What Happened at Fieldbook" [2] article:
> In contrast, our closest competitor, Airtable, seems to be getting more traction.
Read the same article yesterday, which got me thinking.
I'm not familiar with Fieldbook, but I do wonder if they weren't as savvy as Airtable when it came to sales & finance strategy.
Products alone rarely make a business. It's a perfectly viable strategy to keep forging ahead at a loss while you slowly gain market share. You obviously need to show revenue growth (sales savvy) to keep the funding coming through (finance savvy).
I'm definitely guilty of getting all caught up in product and neglecting the business side of things.
Outside of dumb luck, I don't see a plot arc that favors Richard's team at all.
Especially when one of the overarching themes is that over the seasons the "underdog" throws friends under the bus, hacks competitors, rents a botnet, lies, commit fraud, and all kinds of other abuses.
What's the difference between Richard dumping a gf because she uses spaces and Gavin screwing over Jack because Jack wanted to get dropped off first from the private plane? The only difference I see is that Richard's narcissism doesn't come with the weight of a $100 billion company behind it.
Richard's bad behavior comes off as less jarring because almost all of the time he has considerably less power than Gavin. Richard doesn't have a wall of lawyers who he can casually probe about assassinating a foe. Gavin does.
King of the Hill has also resurfaced on Hulu recently after not being available to stream anywhere. Mike Judge has a real talent for nailing essence of a culture.
Woah, I had no idea Mike Judge was involved with King of the Hill.
Growing up in Texas, I never appreciated how on-point the show was, until I left the state and realized that the subtle culture cues of Texas didn't exist elsewhere, which means that King of the Hill nailed it. I mean, every detail is perfect.
I've never even been to Texas, but I consider King of the Hill to be on the best written sitcoms ever. My wife and I still make jokes about Aisle 8A all the time. No other TV show I've seen has ever crossed that threshold of comedy so beautifully.
Hank Hill is ripped straight from Tom Anderson, a character from Beavis and Butthead. AFAIK Tom Anderson appeared on the show very early and the timeline you're suggesting doesn't make sense.
I always like to compare Silicon Valley to The Big Bang Theory. TBBT seems like a parody of the stereotype of the people they are parodying while SV is a true parody. I'm always thinking "haha, that's so true" when watching SV, but never while watching TBBT.
TBBT is not a "parody". It is your standard-issue broadcast network sitcom about 3 males, 3 females and their friendships as they date and break up with each other, marry each other and have kids. This is a successful premise that has stood for decades in American TV. Friends and How I Met Your Mother followed the same principles almost to a tee. That's how you get a show that runs for 10 seasons in this day and age.
Pointing out that TBBT's parody is poor is like saying Will & Grace did not portray a representative picture of gay urbanites.
It's funny that you compare TBBT to Will & Grace, since they have very different receptions among their subjects.
I know lots of gay urbanites who feel well-represented by Will & Grace. I know lots of people in the "trad nerd" set, but none of them see The Big Bang Theory and say "yep, that's me".
He's got another one out now, "Lab Rats", on how open offices and other trends are making office work miserable. (Not sure there's much on how unpredictable scheduling of retail workers is making their lives even more miserable, but some of the motives of management are at least broadly similar...)
Yes, Dan Lyons is hilarious. He had written a book about Jobs called "Options" that was really excellent, and of course he was the author of the Fake Steve Jobs blog.
I'm not sure he has a great personality, and went offtrack during the Linux/IBM/SCO fiasco, but man is he funny.
I asked my friend if he watched it (I don't) and he said it hit too close to home. I nodded, then he added "... because I'm a consultant for the show, and every year they meet with us and we give them ideas from our jobs and things to put in scenes"
Dan Lyons, author of "Disrupted," is also on the writing staff for the show. Not quite Silicon Valley but if you read the book, some of the stuff from his time at Hubspot makes it into the show.
Judge surrounded himself with a lot of different perspectives on all of this.
I loved Dan Lyons fake Steve Job columns, but Disrupted didn't work for me at all. He presented himself as the lone adult in a sea of misfit children, but came across as a clueless and bitter crank. The same (admittedly keen) observations about the corporate culture would have gone down so much better (for me) if he hadn't tried to crammed every page with so much smug superiority.
Just like the show, many times the fake Steve was more real than the real Steve, and spot on how some things eventually unfolded. Dan is an excellent journalist and a candid visionary.
Finished Lab Rats last week, and contrary to Disrupted which was a very enjoyable modern age tragicomedy-autobiography, it hit home very bad and left me with a sense of despair. IMHO it should be an obligatory reading for everyone in tech these days.
I mean, he's not really from Silicon Valley, so I guess we should take his viewpoint with a grain of salt ;)
> I have friends in Silicon Valley who refuse to watch the show because they think it’s just making fun of them.
But yeah, it's good to take a look at satire of yourself once in a while. Often they can tell you stuff that you may have overlooked, and generally they're not too hurtful when doing so.
Maybe it’s longing for byegone days on my part but it feels like the atmosphere of the Valley and tech in general has changed so much so quickly that my head is spinning.
It feels, well, not fun anymore a lot of the time. Development by copy-and-paste and gluing other peoples code together to arrive at a half-baked solution instead of exploring the code to try to understand it as a system so the solution you arrive at is the most effective that time and skill permit.
Being more infatuated with nerd culture than building something great. (I see this a LOT!) Chasing dollars instead of knowledge. And, don’t get me wrong; it’s ok to want to make money. Even a lot of it. But that should be the icing on the cake of solving real problems.
I feel like we used to do this stuff because it was what we loved to do. But now it feels like too many people do it because they want to look cool and/or they want a lot of money. The romance is dying.
I found that the first few seasons (maybe first 2 or 3) did a great job at parodying the Valley. They were truly uncanny to watch for me sometimes, and I don't even live in SF.
The past few years, the quality degraded significantly IMO. It mostly turned into "The Office but with developers and geeks!!" - which doesn't make it a bad show, but not as witty and thought provoking. I wonder if it's past the point where it needs to reach a wider audience, just like any other show.
The Office deliberately has a mockumentary style with the characters breaking the "4th wall" in a very believable way. SV doesn't have that and you don't really know the "real" motivation and feelings of a character till the plot unravels. They couldn't be further apart in structure.
> Even a huge believer in technology like me has to laugh when some character talks about how they’re going to change the world with an app that tells you whether what you’re eating is a hot dog or not.
sorry bill but one could argue in a round about way that andrej karpathy did do just that ;P
the hot dog identifying app is one of my favourite examples of how spot on the show is
here(o) is a question i asked to one of the show's technical consultants whether the choice of 'not hotdog' was a reference to one of karpathy's early demos(i||ii)
(i) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6aEYuemt0M&t=465 ; Title: Deep Learning for Computer Vision (Andrej Karpathy, OpenAI) ; Desc: The talks at the Deep Learning School on September 24/25, 2016 were amazing. I clipped out individual talks from the full live streams and provided links to each below in case that's useful for people who want to watch specific talks several times (like I do).
(ii) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyovmAtoUx0&t=5787 ; timestamped from the full stream; Title: Bay Area Deep Learning School Day 1 at CEMEX auditorium, Stanford ; Desc: Day 1 of Bay Area Deep Learning School featuring speakers Hugo Larochelle, Andrej Karpathy, Richard Socher, Sherry Moore, Ruslan Salakhutdinov and Andrew Ng. ;
> This kind of back-channel relationship—satirists texting casually with the satirized—is a departure from much of comedic history.
_Yes, Minister_, which satirizes the British government, supposedly had close access to several people in government, though it was probably careful rather than casual.
The clips on Youtube are all distorted, don't bother with them, but find S01E04 "Big Brother".
It's possible to get a somewhat accurate view from watching these, but you have to know which parts to completely ignore. I kind of wish there were "this is accurate" edits of those shows and movies.
There's also the short-lived Betas, on Amazon Video. It wasn't as good as HBO's show is (the characters are far more grating), yet the younger and scrappier milieu feels like it captures the youth-obsessed, juvenile segment of startup culture better. And it's also based in San Francisco, unlike the South Bay-centered Silicon Valley.
He is a Steve Ballmer sendup, but Gates and Ballmer worked closely for many years at Microsoft and had many fundamental disagreements about the direction the company should take. Ballmer refocused Microsoft from software to hardware when he became CEO (hence "The Box" joke on the show).
Ballmer himself probably doesn't like the caricature (he's a bit of an internet darling, isn't he? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I14b-C67EXY), but would someone who worked with Ballmer find it accurate? Likely.
Not to mention, Gates wrote the article about Silicon Valley linked in this thread.
So how does one subscribe to this show without subscribing to HBO? I looked at their website and don't see anything else I would want to watch. I really want to watch Silicon Valley, but that's the only thing HBO offers that I'm interested in. Can I buy just this one show from them?
Thanks, I suppose that would work. It would probably take me a few months to watch all the episodes, but if the show is as good as everyone says, it would be worth it.
Aside from the completely overused line "Hello IT, have you tried turning it off and turning it back on again?", the show has almost nothing to do with IT. Apart from a couple of IT-related plotlines, most of the episodes take place outside their office.
"The Internet" device. All the tech illiterate coworkers. Jen's imposter syndrome. Moss's on-the-spectrum reactions. Online dating when it was still nerdy. Novelty websites. Viral cultural events.
But it wasn't exclusively geek humor. There were broader episodes involving Jen's and Roy's romantic lives too.
I have bought Netflix subscription - but I am dissapointed now - the library of historic films available for me (in Poland) is very small and the current productions are kind of mechanistic. And no SV in Netflix.
It’s sad that’s all you got out of it. There’s a quite a bit of subtext in the show, particularly if you’re in SV. I often wonder if people outside the valley pick up on the themes or if it’s jusy slapstick to them.
I have a copy of the Conjoined Triangles of Success tacked to my office wall. I don't think anyone I work with has keyed in on the fact yet that it's a joke from a TV show. It captures serious business jargon and corporate culture so well that it doesn't read as anything but.
This well-written article has been discussed before, but I figured it was worth posting. It's a bit more in the "black humor" vein than Silicon Valley, but it also just nails the real SV vibe:
In 1999 we were working a very long shift waiting for the batch process on the AS/400 to go through and our FTP "edi" trNsfers to Sun to complete (an ftp script written for us by these four hacks, who founded linuxcare after this episode) (sifry, dibona, etc)
We decided to go grab a beer and play pool while we waited for this new thing to execute based on this new language sun was having us convert everything to, XML...
While at the pool place these girls in lingerie were walking about selling raffle tickets.
We asked what they were for.
"We are putting ourselves through school and we are selling raffle tickets for the lingerie we are wearing, for $5 a ticket."
"I see, where are you ladies going to school"
"Oh, we go to silicone valley college..."
----
I wish this was a scene in Silicon Valley... it was ridiculously funny.
I haven't watched the show much, as I've lived and worked in Silicon Valley for 20+ years and I don't see much besides a superficial resemblance. I saw a bit of an episode where a few 'brogrammers' were making fun of the main character like it was a 'mean girls' high school, and I thought it was ridiculous. Then I saw another bit where one of the characters was threatening a kid for his Adderall prescription and, again, thought it was moronic. I haven't watched much else.
I compare the show to Entourage: Amusing to those outside Hollywood, but completely ridiculous to anyone who actually works in the industry.
Mike Judge does his homework. Being in the industry myself, he does many other aspects in the show. I recommend you try another episode, such as one that involves the VCs.
> During one visit to Google’s headquarters, in Mountain View, about six writers sat in a conference room with Astro Teller, the head of GoogleX, who wore a midi ring and kept his long hair in a ponytail. “Most of our research meetings are fun, but this one was uncomfortable,” Kemper told me....
> “He claimed he hadn’t seen the show, and then he referred many times to specific things that had happened on the show,” Kemper said. “His message was, ‘We don’t do stupid things here. We do things that actually are going to change the world, whether you choose to make fun of that or not.’ ” (Teller could not be reached for comment.)
> Teller ended the meeting by standing up in a huff, but his attempt at a dramatic exit was marred by the fact that he was wearing Rollerblades. He wobbled to the door in silence. “Then there was this awkward moment of him fumbling with his I.D. badge, trying to get the door to open,” Kemper said. “It felt like it lasted an hour. We were all trying not to laugh. Even while it was happening, I knew we were all thinking the same thing: Can we use this?” In the end, the joke was deemed “too hacky to use on the show.”
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/how-silicon-v...