For those of you who don’t watch it, HBO’s Silicon Valley follows the struggle of a Bay Area based start-up – Pied Piper – trying to thrive “doing it better” than Google-ish corporations. During last night’s episode one of the main character bullied a San Francisco cliched character – a man in a wheelchair who raises ferrets – with these words:
“You’re always going on and on about how this is such a good neighborhood. Do you know why it’s such a good neighborhood? Do you know why your shitty house is worth 20 times what you paid for it in the 1970s? Cause of people like us moving in and starting illegal businesses in our garages. All the best companies… Apple, Google, Hewlett-Packard […] all of them were started in un-zoned garages.
That is why Silicon Valley is one of the hottest neighborhoods in the world. Because of people like us, not because of people like you.”
Erlich Bachmann, Silicon Valley – HBO
I wanna be clear, the show is funny, clever, well directed, and that vent sounded lighter in the context of the episode. But, still… it bugged me – a lot. Let’s see why.
For network television, San Francisco is a cliche. Even the most recent productions are not too far from the horribly stereotyped Dharma & Greg [1997-2002]. Ground Floor and the once-you-watch-it-can’t-be-unwatched Young & Hungry – the newer ones, both cancelled – still joke around about the same device, a sort of principle of the excluded middle. In San Francisco you can be rich, or you can be a long-haired pot-smoking, ferret-breeder, tree-hugger. The cliche has been inoculated with Asian and Latino characters, but stands steady. There’s even a fake physical image of the city with people running from Golden Gate park to be busted a few minutes later at the Berkeley marina, people taking nonsense routes through the hills – all the time – or downtown offices with the Golden Gate right outside the window. If network television treated Manhattan in the same way, we’d be drowning in social network snarkiness.
Silicon Valley, and Looking – another HBO’s show based in San Francisco – had the chance to change this view. We have beautiful precedents – Treme for New Orleans, The Wire for Baltimore, even Girls for Brooklyn on some level – but the first one is failing, the latter, sadly, has been canceled. The main issue is that to reduce, again, what’s going on in the Bay Area to such a dichotomy is superficial and lazy.
If hundreds of healthy-food-related businesses are thriving, it’s because that ferret-breeder back in the nineties was organizing community gardens, advocating for farmer markets, campaigning for a cleaner world – all in all – creating the right context for the food industry to thrive. If we live in an area in which tens of bike stores are making a living selling thousand dollar brakeless bikes, it’s thanks to the work of the Bicycle Coalition and the Critical Mass [whose inventor, Chris Carlsson, is fighting displacement right now]. They contributed to change the mind-set of a generation, and the market within.
Nerd geniuses have ideas, but the sharing economy is the Summer of Love with paid apps. Or, using another pop vulture reference, “Fun hipster shit is just poor Latino shit from ten years ago.” [You’re the Wrost – FX].
And, please, don’t tell me that it is just a television show. TV shows allow us to pretend to know that Tulsa is boring, Baltimore is violent and New Orleans vibrant – even if we’ve never been there. San Francisco deserve better than just funny and manificently acted.
This has absolutely nothing to do with San Francisco.
The character you’re talking about – the neighbor in wheelchair – was focused his claim that his neighborhood in Palo Alto is only for families and people with pets – strictly not for anything else. He decided to complain to the city of Palo Alto (not San Francisco) that the main characters of the show were running a business from their house, a minor infraction of law, and it turned out that the neighbor was breeding ferrets [spoiler!], also a minor infraction of law.
The character you’re quoting – Erlich Bachmann – is a jackass with good intentions but bad diplomacy and horrible tact. That’s his entire purpose. You can’t explain humor, I guess.
The show is an example of good comedic writing, well executed. Mike Judge is one of the best mainstream producers who consistently puts out good material in this vein – the kind of cutting social commentary I enjoyed from San Francisco while growing up. Why are you trying to twist it into something else? The point of the entire neighbor character is more of a peninsula NIMBY trying to get his just desserts and then getting called out for his own petty infractions.
Nobody I know in real life – even in San Francisco – puts forth the claims or cliches you’re claiming. I think you’re reading a lot into the ferret breeder neighbor and turning him into a fabled archetype.
If there are any cliches on the show, they’re about silicon valley. And the show does a fantastic job of skewering that culture.
Sorry this triggered a polarization for you. Let art be art and stand for what it needs to. Silicon Valley has a narrow and accurate scope – just slightly absurd to be silly, but rolling out a realistic foundation.
Also, HBO is not network TV.
Thanks, that’s an oversight, and I’ll fix it. But on some level it’s exactly what I’m talking about. Outside the Bay Area, San Francisco is perceived as a megalopolis with blurred borders. In the imaginary map of pop culture, the Silicon Valley overlaps San Francisco and vice versa – and the show indulges in that every time they tackle something outside of the “bubble”.
Silicon Valley is based in Palo Alto, not San Francisco.
Um … Silicon Valley’s not about San Francisco.