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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 f
by slivym 8y ago
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.
- city41 8y agoI think Mike Judge is the difference here. He strikes me as a genius when it comes to understanding human behavior.
- jjuel 8y agoNot to mention how he used to work in Silicon Valley.
- blocked_again 8y agoAlso the people they hired for consulting was top notch. https://blog.ycombinator.com/the-technical-advisor-for-silicon-valley-on-hbo-ed-mcmanus/ https://blog.ycombinator.com/the-technical-advisor-for-silic... https://medium.com/@timanglade/how-hbos-silicon-valley-built-not-hotdog-with-mobile-tensorflow-keras-react-native-ef03260747f3 https://medium.com/@timanglade/how-hbos-silicon-valley-built...
- ryanmercer 8y ago>He strikes me as a genius when it comes to understanding human behavior - Office Space, check! - Idiocracy, check! - Silicon Valley, check! For Silicon Valley it helps he's actually worked for a startup, a hardware one at that.
- ModernMech 8y agoDon't forget King of the Hill. That's a double check right there.
- city41 8y agoeven Beavis and Butthead captured defiant male teens pretty well
- agoodthrowaway 8y agoBeavis 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.
- auntienomen 8y agoThey were the best music critics of the 90s.
- agoodthrowaway 8y agoThe DVDs were disappointing because they cut out all the videos which were the best parts. I loved their commentary.
- ryanmercer 8y agoDid you watch the new season (2011)? It was pretty good.
- agoodthrowaway 8y agoDidn’t know there was a new one. Thanks for the tip will check it out.
- sneak 8y agoIf you squint a little bit, Tom Anderson is basically proto-Hank Hill.
- amyjess 8y agoOffice 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.
- rbanffy 8y ago> Idiocracy has aged _horribly_. Are you sure? Who is the POTUS now?
- scoggs 8y agoThanks, I was really baffled to see that comment.
- powvans 8y agoAnd 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!
- SamReidHughes 8y agoThe current POTUS is also an ex pro wrestler.
- ryanmercer 8y agoYup, 2 WrestleMania events.
- amyjess 8y agoWhen 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.
- rbanffy 8y agoIdiocracy is, sadly, a bit too prophetic.
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- JustSomeNobody 8y agoIn the US, we have been living it for 2 years.
- skunkworker 8y agoThis Venn diagram always gets me. https://i.chzbgr.com/full/8291744000/h3159FC59/ https://i.chzbgr.com/full/8291744000/h3159FC59/
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- inscionent 8y agoAll of those shows have an acceptable time, place and use for me.
- ham_sandwich 8y agoThis 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.
- amyjess 8y agoYou could also make the same argument about Paris Hilton. By all accounts, she's a really shrewd businesswoman.
- Apocryphon 8y agoAnd for our industry, Ashton Kutcher. But it was only his characters who were dumb.
- Ascolta_Pere 8y agoUnrelated, but this reminds me of a saying we have in Spain about our fascist ex-dictator Franco whenever someone claims he was dumb: Look, he was evil, not stupid.
- clairity 8y agohaving 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.
- kohanz 8y ago> Big Bang Theory 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.
- buboard 8y agodid the authors of that show ever apologize?
- toyg 8y agoChuck Lorre? He’s utterly apologetic... all the way to the bank.
- wingerlang 8y agoApologize to who?
- smsm42 8y agoYou 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.
- noir_lord 8y agoBest description I've ever seen for TBBT is "geek blackface".
- humanrebar 8y ago> ... I was the "smart engineer", so obviously a huge nerd with no social ability... > I got so tired of smiling and nodding (or rolling my eyes, depending on who it was)... > ... Silicon Valley would have likely been much too sophisticated for them. Not to get personal, and I'm sure you're more empathetic in real life, but your frustrations might seem like geeky egotism to your coworkers.
- wil421 8y agoMike 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.
- blocked_again 8y agoPardon my ignorance but what did big bang theory got wrong?
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- Nerdfest 8y agoThey got too popular.
- dokem 8y agoUsing a laugh track.
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- emsy 8y agoI think TBBT started out fine, but over the time it it went from laughing with and about geeks to just laughing about geeks.
- mturmon 8y agoThe 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.)
- 24gttghh 8y ago
- buboard 8y agoMike Judge predicted how democracy turns to idiocracy 10 years ago. i wonder what he thinks about the future of tech
- weihanzhang 8y agoAmerica is already there, it's half hull of tarded mud mutts begging the white man to fix everything for them.
- etrautmann 8y agoThis has no place on HN
- rchaud 8y ago> 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".
- buboard 8y agoyeah that's the present. or rather, mo-lo-so is a few years old now
- ocdtrekkie 8y agoAs 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.
- toyg 8y agoBBT 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.
- dlivingston 8y agoIMHO it doesn't matter who a show laughs at - the essence of comedy is offense. My problem with BBT is that it just isn't funny
- rhino369 8y ago>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. SV is just about 20 times funnier though.
- walshemj 8y agoBBT is punching down not up.
- tootie 8y agoI 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.
- derangedHorse 8y agoSometimes I feel like it got out of hand with how emotional they made the characters.
- wwweston 8y agoBBT 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.
- derangedHorse 8y agoI 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.