Written by Katherine Murray.
There’s no way that Silicon Valley can win this one, you guys.
Sitrep: Silicon Valley is a comedy on HBO about group of programmers who try to build their own company, only to discover that that’s really fucking hard. Despite being one of the funniest shows on television, it was roundly (and fairly) criticized in its first season for being passively sexist. The core characters are a group of five guys – Richard, the young visionary who comes up with a data compression code that could make him a billionaire; Erlich, the loud entrepreneur who owns a piece of Richard’s company; Gilfoyle and Dinesh, two programmers with an I-secretly-like-you-but-we-fight-cat-and-dog relationship; and Jared, an awkward business management/accounting guy they poached from a rival company.
Of the four supporting characters we meet, three are also guys – Gavin Belson, the head of the evil Hooli corporation; Big Head, Richard’s friend who works for Hooli; and Peter Gregory, an offbeat, socially awkward developer who sees Richard’s potential and invests in his company. That means that, out of the nine characters who regularly appear in season one, one of them is a woman, and she’s Peter Gregory’s assistant. Her name is Monica, she’s a straight man for jokes, and she really believes in Richard.
Aside from Monica, women are invisible in season one, except for a few who make appearances as strippers, professional party guests, and cupcake saleswomen who trick guys into building their aps. This is problematic partly because it’s a missed opportunity to show women working in the STEM fields, and partly because it feels weird against jokes like Big Head’s idea for an ap that points you to women who have erect nipples.
The good news is that it seems like the showrunners took this criticism seriously in season two, and at least made some attempt to show us that women also work in the tech industry. There are now female extras in the crowd shots at Hooli, female programmers and project managers, and women sitting on the company’s board of directors. Monica gets a promotion where she becomes responsible for managing her company’s interest in Richard’s start-up, and Peter Gregory (who sadly had to be replaced due to the actor’s passing) is swapped out for a socially awkward female boss named Laurie. Richard’s company, Pied Piper, even briefly hires a female coder, Carla, to work on the project.
It seems like they actually tried to do things differently. So, how did it turn out?
Not that well.
I don’t feel like Silicon Valley is hostile to women – but I feel like maybe the writers don’t have many female friends (yes, I know a couple of the episodes were actually written by women; maybe they don’t have female friends, either). Where the male characters are all really quirky and specific, the female characters are vaguely competent and bland – they fit into the comedy stereotype that says women have their shit together more than men do, and that means they have to act as a stabilizing influence, buzz-kill, or mom. It’s a stereotype that flatters women in some ways, and usually seems well-meaning, but also leaves us out of the fun.
Theoretically, Monica could have become a part of the core group of characters, through her increased participation in the board meetings. In practice, though, the board meeting comedy was driven by Erlich’s pompous, emotionally immature need to be the centre of attention, and a new character, Russ Hanneman’s need to be the biggest douche that ever was. Because she wasn’t written to have similarly loud and pronounced personality traits, Monica almost may as well not be there, and she fades father into the background as the season goes on.
The second opportunity to add a woman to the group came when Pied Piper hired Carla to help with the programming, but her primary trait was being Smurfette, and her contribution to the comedy was being a thing for the guys to react to in funny ways. She had a little bit more of an edge than Monica, but she was still portrayed as mostly competent and bland – above getting into childish fights with Gilfoyle and Dinesh, and focussed on doing her actual work. She was only in the show for a few episodes before she was written out completely.
Women aren’t really treated poorly by Silicon Valley, but it’s weird that they’re treated as being so different from the male characters on the show. Where the men have recognizable – if exaggerated – human failings, motivations, and personality tics, the women are much more inscrutable, like adults who’ve walked into the middle of a children’s game. It’s a pattern that exists outside of just this show, but it’s something that stops women from being full participants in the story even if they now, at least, exist there.
So, what should Silicon Valley do stop being a show about dudes?
Probably nothing.
From a purely pragmatic point of view, we just had a whole season that proved to us that adding women to the show – in the way that the writers are capable of adding women to the show – isn’t going to make much difference. I sincerely appreciate the effort – and it went a long way toward reassuring me that the show has good intentions, but I’m not sure a funny, juvenile, well-integrated female character is really in the cards for Silicon Valley. Melissa McCarthy can only do so many projects at once.
In order to integrate women more into the cast, there would have to be a real desire to do that and an introspective awareness of gender dynamics that hasn’t been present so far.
But, even aside from whether the show can add women, it’s not clear to me that it has to. It would be nice if it did. It would have been outstanding if, when the series was first conceived, someone had pushed it beyond the stereotypes that first come to mind when we think of the real Silicon Valley. But, we don’t have a time machine to go back and tinker with the DNA of the show when it was first created, and, in fairness to the writers, the mix of characters they did end up with works really well. That’s not to say that another mix wouldn’t have worked equally well from a comedy standpoint – just that, if we view its success partly in terms of whether or not it’s funny, Silicon Valley succeeded in being funny.
At this stage, I think that, rather than focusing on what should have been, or could still be different about Silicon Valley, this is a good opportunity to learn some lessons for next time. I think it’s okay for dude shows about dudes to exist – but it should serve as a reminder that we also need more shows about women, and shows about both men and women, together. Silicon Valley wouldn’t be such a sore spot for people if women weren’t underrepresented on TV in the first place and, while I don’t think it’s up to this series to solve that problem, it’s an example that can still play a part in the discussion. What’s striking about women’s invisibility – or women’s later responsible buzz-kill status – on Silicon Valley isn’t anything about the show itself, but the way it fits into a larger pattern.
So, let the dude show be about dudes. But let’s also have shows that aren’t about dudes – or aren’t just about dudes – to balance things out in the end.
Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies and TV on her blog.