Will HBO’s new sitcom escape the two dimensional man traps of ‘Entourage’ and ‘Mad Men’? Argun Ulgen wonders.
There is a desire for our entourage sitcoms to brim with bromantic inclusiveness; to create the belief even years after the show has ended that the crews we let into our homes would let us into theirs. Ironically, however, sitcoms with sweeping promises of inclusive narratives have fallen into the trap of being overly exclusive. Perhaps even more counter intuitive, HBO’s new sitcom Silicon Valley—for all its narrow techie veneer—has had an oddly inclusive feel during its first season on HBO.
Valley is the latest update in the lineage of modern day city crew satires. It was but ten years ago—when we were still sniffing the sweet embers of the Clinton Administration economy—that Entourage (2004) effectively entertained an all encompassing ethereal lifestyle; a ready-made, luxurious 24/7 Hollywood vacation for a scrappy gang from your local neighborhood.
But it’s now 2014 and those ideas have fallen from our country’s once exceedingly generous suspended disbelief. The bridge decimated by the 2008 Market Crash, which is right around when Entourage’s repetitive display of manifest partying, hooking up, and multimillion dollar deals started to feel a little too incredible. Stratospheric pinnacles are considered today more as symbols of merciless exclusivity, the select members of which bear endless and increasingly taxing membership rituals as seen in the wax museum style drama Mad Men (2007).
Silicon Valley takes none of these exclusionary story lines, despite its feel from the get-go that if you are not well versed in code or can’t scheme up a profitable “App” you most likely won’t belong in a Palo Alto start up anytime soon. But that’s fine, if not paradoxically inclusive. Most mid-20s male entourages operate in this same way, with some sort of common penchant for sports, video games, business, or (increasingly so) technical gadgetry. And further still, most, as is the crew in Silicon Valley, are living it up on the ground floor.
This show’s techie company—lamely named Pied Piper—encompasses a refreshing variety of self defeating (if not success sabotaging) quirks at once responsible for the minor advancements and major downfalls which accurately reflects mid-20s entrepreneurial living. One part of the Pied Piper partnership is a diminutive coder named Richard who so blinded by his anxiety and insecurity that he initially overlooked the enormous power of his genius file compression algorithm used to run an otherwise obsolete music application he initially pitches when the show begins.
When others finally cue Richard in that his algorithm has the potential for a multibillion dollar windfall, he starts Piper and eventually teams up with his taller, out of shape alpha self named Erlich. A slacker unless otherwise putting in supreme efforts toward inanity, Erlich cashed in on a flash in the pan app idea (“Aviato”) which landed him just enough capital to become a staker in the programming world. In exchange for room and board in his college dorm style suburban home, Erlich claims 10% of any programmers App profits.
Their surrounding incubator mates are an equally rum bunch: two foul mouthed programmers, Dinesh and Gilfoyle, from Canada and Pakistan, respectively, and Jared who, clad in tight fitting monochromatic sweater vests, is more super square den mother than ruthlessly corporate business strategist. Jared cajoles this crew of misfits to at least entertain sound organizational principles; in return for his nurture, they socially loath him.
All to say, the character dimensions and narrative struggles in Valley exceed perpetually condoned philandering (Mad Men) or evanescent pock marks under the pale of preordained luxuriant escapism (Entourage). Most of “Valley” exists in an entrepreneur purgatory existence of a room where escapism comes in the dry comedic ennui and surreal levels of stupidity: a bet that one could find an object in a clutter strewn house within an hour; a decision to spend a heap of cash for a renegade street artist to spray paint a risque (to put it mildly) company logo on the garage in a suburban hamlet.
Dating is but an afterthought, in large part due to a typical “nerd” storyline, but also because Pied Piper is teetering on financial ruin and working at home to get out of it. In a sense, refreshing stuff to an audience at home: you may not know Boolean code, but in a sense, they’re with you.
Valley has its exclusionary imperfections, including to some degree its treatment of women. Monica, the lone regular female supporting character on the show, is the intelligent, business savvy assistant to Pied Piper’s billionaire funder Peter Gregory. Thus far, Monica’s job has been relegated to encouraging Peter to go full throttle as a venture capitalist instead of selling his code to another company for millions of dollars. She is the audience’s lens from an intelligent, open-minded women’s perspective of eccentric techie geniuses.
It’s always great to see a successful mid-20s female character with a brain and some perspective who exists outside of an incessant obsession over a man’s affections or imperfections. Still, in a show like Valley that is so generous in its inclusion of eccentricities to each of its male characters, there is something amiss that there isn’t a brainy female programmer with a few quirks of their own.
Whether Monica will become a major autonomous financial player, or even more intriguing, has a hidden computer geek resting behind her business sheik attire and jaunty comportment is yet to be seen. But even if so, why do we have to wait much longer? Why not a programming maven from the get-go?
Then again, dudes ask themselves this all the time in their 20s when they are rampantly pursuing their billion dollar dreams with ample break time for video games, take-out, and potty humor. What makes Silicon so endearing is that the crew at Pied Piper’s decision to lead this life leads to exactly that; a bounty of treasures aren’t falling on their laps anytime soon nor are dates knocking at the door.
As the members at Piper choose to mature as men, so may the maturity of their company and the diversity of their social lives. But let’s just hope that the crew at Pied Piper won’t become yet another Entourage of Men, because it’s 2014 and that storyline has gone tired.