Veep and Silicon Valley: HBO's perfect pair bring satire to Sunday nights

http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2015/apr/12/veep-silicon-valley-hbo-satire

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HBO does an excellent job pairing up its comedies. Both Girls and Looking recently finished up their respective seasons and, though entirely different, they were both auteur-driven shows about groups of urbanites searching for love and identity, and occasionally doing something funny.

This Sunday the potent partnership of Veep and Silicon Valley premieres, and again the tenor of the two is very similar. Both shows are about displaying the poisonous culture in two American cities that are ruled by one industry. Both are filled with characters who are very powerful in their own spheres but whose ego and incompetence keep them from achieving something truly great. Both are also funny as hell.

We return to Veep as Selina Meyer (three-time Emmy winner Julia Louis-Dreyfus) has been newly installed as president after her old boss stepped down. Now she and her bumbling staff will get to screw up from the Oval Office, never missing the chance to turn an opportunity into a blunder and let a gaffe somehow manifest itself into a saving grace. Selina is concurrently campaigning to keep her job, so there is dual pressure.

Season two of the underappreciated Silicon Valley follows up Pied Piper’s success at TechCrunch Disrupt with the nerds trying to find themselves a round of series A funding. Much like Veep mines humor from the incomprehensible procedure of Senate hearings and bill proposals, Silicon Valley does the same with impenetrable computer science and complicated business plans. Chris Diamantopoulos joins the cast as Russ Hanneman, a money man modeled after tech investor (and Shark Tank co-star) Mark Cuban.

What is really interesting about these satires, however, is what they tell us about the institutions they’re lambasting.

They come at these institutions from different directions. Selina is nothing but a product of Washington DC’s culture. She’s a striving egomaniac who surrounds herself with fools because she doesn’t know any better. As the show takes pains to point out, everyone who has reached that peak of power either is after it for the wrong reasons or essentially makes themselves incompetent. Even worse, they have no real desire to make the world a better place. Selina doesn’t care about her green jobs bill because she wants to save the environment; instead, she thinks it will get her additional clout.

Everyone in Veep is cynical and working to save themselves. They’ll tank a bill just because someone pissed them off or they are holding a grudge. It’s sort of like the actual Congress.

Silicon Valley is the opposite, because Richard Hendricks (Thomas Middleditch) doesn’t have the heart of the typical tech nerd. Yes, he’s more comfortable chugging Red Bull in a den full of coders wearing hoodies than he is interacting with other human beings (especially the ones with two X chromosomes), but the taint of excess of the industry hasn’t touched him yet. Maybe it’s because he isn’t rich and his company is still striving for success.

The show does a great job of parodying the Bay Area scene with its luxe “campuses” full of standing desks and billionaires who have self- driving cars that will take you to their floating fortresses in the sea, but Richard, unlike Selina, is trying to dismantle the culture around him. He’d rather keep his best friend – who is a little bit incompetent – in his company because of a shared sense of loyalty than ditch him and keep the resulting profits. (Ask Snapchat how that usually goes.)

Silicon Valley – the place, not the show – is notorious for trying to make each of its innovations look like it’s trying to save the world, even if it’s just a new app for having dry cleaning delivered. Silicon Valley – the show, not the place – does a great job of dissembling that myth. Richard knows his product, basically a compression algorithm, will change the way computers work, but he isn’t under any illusions about what it will do for the world. He sees his behavior as a way to write the wrongs of an industry run amok.

Selina has no such delusions. She wants to be elected president because she wants to be powerful and beloved. She wants to win. She doesn’t care about the planks of her platform as much as she does standing on it so everyone can check out her new haircut. Richard, on the other hand, is the foil to Silicon Valley’s success at any cost ethos, which is patched over with a gloss of transparency. These are two shows that are doing very much the same thing, but coming at the problem from different directions. That’s what makes them the perfect pair.