Too Big To Fail (On Television)
TV’s structure was perfect for tech’s failure narratives—but as Silicon Valley embraces a post-failure mindset, will audiences still tune in?
Towards the end of the second season of HBO’s Silicon Valley, Gavin Belson, the CEO of fictional tech giant Hooli, addresses his company’s board while standing beside a screen that offers a single-word question: “FAILURE?”
“What is failure?” Belson asks the board (“gentlemen…and lady”). He’s screwed up a major initiative in his quest to defeat the show’s protagonists and their startup, Pied Piper; attempting to spin a narrative in his favor, he delivers a pitch-perfect rendition of the classic tech titan’s paean to failure. “The point being,” he concludes, “what those in dying business sectors call failure, we in tech know to be pre-greatness.”
When Silicon Valley premiered in 2014, people in tech—especially those in the literal Silicon Valley—often remarked on how uncomfortably sharp the show’s parodies were. This was the era of Big Tech’s great ascendance, emerging triumphant from the post-Dot Com crash wilderness of the 2000s in the ultimate failure-resurrection arc. Giants like Google, Apple, and Amazon were getting infinitely giant-er. Uber and Netflix were disrupting the hell out of their respective industries. Facebook, as they so often liked to remind us in that period, was changing the world.
2014 also saw the premiere of another significant show about tech: Halt and Catch Fire. Where Silicon Valley was sometimes painfully of-the-moment, the AMC drama looked at the industry with several decades of perspective—its first season was set in Dallas in 1984, and its fourth season concluded in the mid-’90s Bay Area. As a period piece, it didn’t directly comment on the contemporary tech world, but it certainly showed many of the foundations upon which it was built.
Both Silicon Valley and Halt and Catch Fire were critical darlings in the mid-2010s, but tonally, these two tech shows were vastly different. The former was a sharply funny Mike Judge comedy; the latter was a character-driven drama that overlapped on AMC with the final season of Mad Men (it was even initially positioned as a sort of Mad Men for the computer age). On the surface, their similarities stem from the subject matter: characters building software and hardware, some of whom clearly understand machines better than people, and plots driven by alliances and betrayals at the rapid pace of tech, entangled in the messiness of working with your close friends and romantic partners.
What these shows share at their heart, however, is a fixation on failure—not Gavin Belson’s lip-servicey “pre-greatness,” but genuine, often monumental setbacks that strike the protagonists down when they’re on the cusp of success. These failures spring from the characters’ own hubris, or double-crossing due to the aforementioned messily going into business with the people you love, or just plain bad luck. In tech, timing is everything; in tech on TV, the writers can make sure the timing never quite works out.
