Yesterday’s post started because HBO is premiering a new show, Silicon Valley. Clearly a case of Hollywood copycatting, it was obviously going to be another premium cable vanity project. Someone thought it would be cool to do a show about the tech industry, and there was no way it was going to be anywhere near as good or topical or relevant as Betas.
And then it turned out that it was being produced by Mike Judge, and all was forgiven.
Mike Judge (born 1962) is a Gen Xer, with a number of iconic productions that are representative of GenX over the last 20 years.
Beavis & Butthead began as an animated short, "Frog Baseball," showing what happened when two dimwitted teenagers used a frog as a baseball. Expanded into half-hour animated series on MTV, the titular characters were SO stupid that they required an opening screen imploring viewers not to do anything like them. (It's worth noting here that the book Generations gives "stupid" as a "word of high praise" for Gen Xers.) He followed with another animated series, King of the Hill, about Hank Hill, American, family man, and seller of propane and propane accessories. While animated, it was very realistic in tone, rarely going beyond what would have been possible in a live-action series.
Both series were long-running successes. Real fans, of course, also watched The Goode Family, about an earnestly hyper-liberal husband and wife so politically correct that they'd probably object to being described in such sexist and patriarchal terms. Because anyone who wasn't a real fan probably didn't find it that funny.
(C'mon - what's not funny about trying to adopt an African baby and ending up with a white boy from South Africa?)
He's also done several feature films with varying degrees of success. Office Space sets the bar for Generation X workplace comedies, with its cubicle-drone protagonist who becomes much more successful after being hypnotized into not caring about his job. The more ambitious Idiocracy has a similarly average guy who ends up hundreds of years in the future, where intelligence has been slowly bred out of the populace. (The early segments, showing what happens when smart people have incentives to put off child-bearing, are brilliant.) It's a national tragedy that it was given almost no theatrical release.
(Sorry, nothing to say about "The Extract" - heard it was good, haven't had a chance to see it.)
Silicon Valley is getting great reviews, and sounds like it may be his biggest hit yet. Good luck to him.
Beavis & Butthead began as an animated short, "Frog Baseball," showing what happened when two dimwitted teenagers used a frog as a baseball. Expanded into half-hour animated series on MTV, the titular characters were SO stupid that they required an opening screen imploring viewers not to do anything like them. (It's worth noting here that the book Generations gives "stupid" as a "word of high praise" for Gen Xers.) He followed with another animated series, King of the Hill, about Hank Hill, American, family man, and seller of propane and propane accessories. While animated, it was very realistic in tone, rarely going beyond what would have been possible in a live-action series.
Both series were long-running successes. Real fans, of course, also watched The Goode Family, about an earnestly hyper-liberal husband and wife so politically correct that they'd probably object to being described in such sexist and patriarchal terms. Because anyone who wasn't a real fan probably didn't find it that funny.
(C'mon - what's not funny about trying to adopt an African baby and ending up with a white boy from South Africa?)
He's also done several feature films with varying degrees of success. Office Space sets the bar for Generation X workplace comedies, with its cubicle-drone protagonist who becomes much more successful after being hypnotized into not caring about his job. The more ambitious Idiocracy has a similarly average guy who ends up hundreds of years in the future, where intelligence has been slowly bred out of the populace. (The early segments, showing what happens when smart people have incentives to put off child-bearing, are brilliant.) It's a national tragedy that it was given almost no theatrical release.
(Sorry, nothing to say about "The Extract" - heard it was good, haven't had a chance to see it.)
Silicon Valley is getting great reviews, and sounds like it may be his biggest hit yet. Good luck to him.
No comments:
Post a Comment