HBO’s Silicon Valley: women are strippers and devs are idiots

“Have you seen Silicon Valley? Isn’t it just awesome and such an apt representation of our space?”

These are the conversation starters that have ruled many startup events over the past month. It’s possibly the new “have you read the Steve Jobs biography?” in the tech startup space. Much has been written about this show, how HBO threw out what has been done before and decided to look at the revered tech scene with a humorous lens. It was cool, until it wasn’t.

I thought HBO would give us a crew of swashbuckling startups, sailing the terrain of the popular startup ecosystem. What we got was a long way from that.

It has been some weeks since the show ended and, now that I have had time to catch up, it’s fairly obvious that a few things turned what could have been a great satirical experience into a cringe-resisting-scene-skipping fest.

I began the show with high expectations — the characters all seemed to have potential to get interesting and the story had so many possibilities. I eagerly waited for episode two and watched these characters reveal more of themselves, and saw the story weave in some more complexities and ultimately, begin unravelling. By episode three… nothing. In fact things were getting worse.

There are those who profess that this show has aptly captured the world of Silicon Valley and given us characters to rally behind, but really it hasn’t.

Women are social media mangers, strippers and personal assistants

There was an alarmingly obvious lack of women in this show. It wasn’t just that the women were relegated to secondary roles, and it was that they largely weren’t there, it was also that when women were shown, it was strangely handled.

All the women in the show’s first scene don’t speak, they just stand there at a party just milling about. Then when we met a speaking woman in the first episode, she’s the assistant to an eccentric billionaire (coincidentally the show’s only interesting character). Amanda Crew plays the only “real” female character, Monica, who seems quite brilliant but we’re never given the chance to find out more about her. All she does is manage the insane genius Peter Gregory, played by the late Christopher Evan Welch.

As if the show couldn’t offend any more in the gender space, the first introduction of a female of colour is a black stripper, who is meant to show our lead character, the frankly unimpressive Richard Hendriks (who behaves more like a petulant child than a grown up let alone an entrepreneur), how to relax.

The season’s finale takes us on one of the most talked about startup pitch events of the planet, TechCrunch Disrupt, where we meet two more speaking female characters (if you count Kara Swisher playing herself for 20 seconds). Our now third speaking female turns out to be a social media manager (a little disappointing after she gets the audience’s hopes up by asking a question about Java).

HBO’s approach to characterisation on Silicon Valley is quite telling of what the media expects the world of startups to look like. In a world where the likes of Marissa Mayer, Ginny Rometty, Anne Wojcicki and Meg Whitman are household names, one would think that this wouldn’t be the case.

What I gather is that, somewhere in HBO’s brainstorming session, it thought the audience the show was aiming for, namely geeks, would likely enjoy watching something closer to the truth than the stereotype-feast that is Big Bang Theory. It’s not though. Silicon Valley, the place, has tons of women building, creating and developing some amazing products that we see in some of the top tech companies in the world. So why aren’t they in the show?

Startups, developers are both idiots and geniuses

Back to the bumbling hero of our show, Richard Hendriks. In the first episode, he gives a copy of his brilliant compression algorithm to two engineers, and it’s plain to the audience that they are out to just tease him. Granted this error leads to the bidding war that gets our story started, but what the heck people? When have you ever heard of a developer just giving his or her code to some randoms that aren’t very nice to them, when a Google-like company could just reverse-engineer the product (which Hooli, fake Google, does)? Seriously? Never.

No one ever talks about the real issue of how Richard’s IP is now being taken apart by this big company, there is no attempt at fighting it and the new investor doesn’t even bring the possibly of patenting the damn thing. Clearly the show’s writers haven’t actually done much work in the tech space.

The show’s team seems to be working on good faith and a hope for the best attitude. Who are these crazy people and how the heck did this crazy Erlich Bachman (who runs an incubator, where they all live) run any successful business to acquisition?

When they team needs to rise to the challenge of taking back the show — when Hooli launches its version of its product — it doesn’t. The team doesn’t rally and come up with a miracle, instead bumbling Richard beautiful minds the whole thing. And guess what? It wins TechCrunch Disrupt. Kill me now. What was the point of the last annoying 20 minutes? Richard is not a team player, and the whole season failed to actually touch on those that issue.

I just cannot deal with it all.

For the rest of the show, Richard and his cast of misfits that all developers and engineers probably look at and go “WTF”, bumble about and do I don’t know what. Richard throws up a lot and goes to see a doctor that also has a tech startup he is working on after hours. Because everybody’s obviously got a startup.

Eventually I threw in the towel and decided that this show is not a comedy but a really badly-executed mockumentary. In the end, what Silicon Valley does is lend itself to a slew of tired comedic tropes, forgetting what the show was actually supposed to be about. It appeals to the lowest common denominator and is completely out of character for HBO. This is, after all, the network that has produced some of the best shows to ever hit our screens.

When the show was done, everyone I know that watched asked a collective question: “WTF?”