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Plot Twist newsletter: Silicon Valley is taking over your screen
Alexandra Suich Bass, our culture editor, examines whether tech’s bad boys make for good viewing
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There’s a tech boom—and not just in financial markets. On screens Silicon Valley is everywhere. “The Social Reckoning”, a much-anticipated sequel to “The Social Network”, arrived in cinemas on October 9th, one day after “Cupertino”, a legal drama about big tech, premiered on TV. “You Can See Everything”, a documentary about Theranos’s disgraced founder Elizabeth Holmes (filmed in the lead-up to the start of her prison sentence), is being released this month, as is a documentary about Elon Musk. Also coming soon are a series about the fall of Sam Bankman-Fried and the crypto firm FTX and a film about Sam Altman at OpenAI.
Why is Hollywood so obsessed with Silicon Valley? Scriptwriters have always liked to dramatise wealth and power. In the 1970s-80s they captured the moral lows of high finance (in “Wall Street”) and the unctuousness of big oil (in “Dallas”). With Silicon Valley’s excesses, clout and news-generating misconduct, techies make for easy targets.
The question, then, is whether these bad boys (and, with the exception of Ms Holmes, they are mostly male) make for good series and films. Too often the answer is no. Scriptwriters often struggle to dramatise the invisible and sometimes boring work of Silicon Valley firms (coding, product-building, fundraising) and the singularly work-obsessed people who are building them. Characters end up as hubristic caricatures, as my colleague Tom Wainwright observes in his review of “The Social Reckoning”. Since “Silicon Valley”, a HBO show, ruthlessly—and so accurately—mocked the Valley’s oddities in the 2010s, every joke has been made. So if you tuned in to “The Audacity”, a satire about a data-mining CEO, earlier this year, as I did, you had an unwelcome sense of déjà vu. A sector that thrives on breakthrough ideas has inspired unimaginative takes on screen.
A welcome exception is “Cupertino”, which I watched and enjoyed ahead of its release. The series is focused on two people fired by their tech firm who fight back, forming a law firm to battle big tech. “Cupertino” skewers the Valley’s monoculture and insularity. There are some familiar types (a sexually harassing tech founder and a wealthy divorcée seeking revenge on her techie husband). But the reason this show succeeds is that it is not focused on engineers and entrepreneurs. Instead the protagonists are outsiders who see the problems with tech, as audiences do in real life, and want justice. Some original conceits—including an AGI that tries to bring a lawsuit against the tech firm that created it—also help differentiate the show. If you feel like logging on to tech land, “Cupertino” is one of the shows our team recommends this week.
What are your favourite takes on Silicon Valley, and what do they get wrong or right? What is an idea that feels more original that has yet to be explored? Write to us at plottwist@economist.com. Thanks for telling us about the best and worst literary adaptations. William Husson from New York recommends the television version from 1982 of John le Carré’s “Smiley’s People”, noting “Alec Guinness is magnificent as George Smiley.” Ludi Joseph from Washington writes that “A Tale of Two Cities” on MGM+ is “one of the worst adaptations”: “this production abandons Dickens’s sharpest insights and diminishes the story down to a conventional love triangle.” Alain Stangroome from London votes the mini-series of “War & Peace” from 2016 as the best adaptation and the film version of “Anna Karenina” from 2012 as the worst.
