Silicon Valley and Betas

One of the first Amazon Prime shows produced was Betas, about a Silicon Valley startup, four young males with a big software idea. It was in the first batch of pilots that were made available for viewers to pick, and was selected (along with Alpha House) to have a full run of 11 episodes.

It was not picked up for a second season, however, even though another show with much the same premise was launched by HBO that year:  Silicon Valley, which follows a Silicon Valley startup with a ... yeah, big software idea. Starting with a team of four, yeah, guys, trying to work within the...well, take a look at both and it's clear how much they share in basic premise.

They are very different shows, however. A fundamental difference between the two can be seen as:

• Silicon Valley is about Generation X 
• Betas is about Millennials

But it can take some looking to understand why.

If you haven't been here before, please take a look at the Introduction to Generations, the Generational Attributes and the Four Stories in order to get up to speed on how all this works, and the terms being used.

First, let's check the Setting: It's the modern era, after the dot-com bubble, in the era of social media including Twitter and Facebook. The current Crisis/Fourth Turning is not much in evidence - no war, although everything about both of them is about major changes happening all around. Silicon Valley is about big choices every second - who to trust, how to avoid getting crushed. The more minor dating app in Betas, called BRB, isn't the focus of quite as much durm und strang, although most of the team does see it as their big chance.  Let's accept Crisis for now, in either case.

Both teams are primarily Millennial, although the people in Silicon Valley's are mostly older, with several on the 81/82 boundary between Gen X and Millennial.

How about Story? As television series, the episodes are self-contained stories that are likely to be different from how the series proceeds as a whole. Silicon Valley is still ongoing, so the ultimate Story could change.  Betas we can see as a more Heroic story, primarily because we see to an ending point: The team works together and succeeds in the end through sacrifice - agreeing, without even needing to go through it, to forfeit the easy and definite payday of acquisition in service to greater values.

Silicon Valley focuses on Richard Hendricks, the developer of a compression algorithm that could change the Internet. One of the running jokes of the series is the way that EVERYone thinks their business will Make the World a Better Place, no matter how obscure or narrowly focused their actual product. That this sort of idealism is mocked says a lot to start about the attitudes of the show’s creators.  Early on, Richard is offered millions of dollars to sell his company - consisting of himself and three other male developers - to an enormous Google like company for an enormous immediate payday. Instead he decides to pivot his company to focus on his software. Since he's a developer, though, his ability as a CEO is limited -  a frequent source of conflict in the series. 

That conflict is often over the other members of the team deriding, disrespecting, and over-riding Richard’s decisions - often with good reason, truth be told, but in multiple cases they seem to do so simply to be jerks or push their own agendas and goals. The members of the team, that is, are not interested in the good of all, and so their success is not a result of teamwork. They figure out an improvement in their algorithm, get a lucky break in an Intellectual Property lawsuit, and manage to survive what should have been a major breach of contract because of a fortuitous hack on a "smart" refrigerator.

And there’s nothing wrong, from a narrative point of view, with these. They are more indicative of a Redemptive story, rather than a Heroic one. As such, it's a story usually populated by a Nomad archetype - like Gen X - rather than a Hero archetype - like the Millennials. 

Well, then, what does Betas look like?

In Betas, like Silicon Valley, the developer team - including Mikki, a young lady who joins the team later - are mostly Millennials by habit and age. The exception is Hobbes, who is about to “age out” of the startup culture at age 35 - making him a late GenXer at the time of the series - and who is often  treated as a pariah. The software being developed is a dating app called BRB, and one frequently contentious issue is how much it is -not- going to change the world. The team’s mentor is played by Boomer Ed Begley Jr. as George Murchinson, usually known as Murch, a successful company  founder who now runs an incubator. In true Prophet archetype fashion, he sends the BRB team on a team-building exercise -slash- vision quest, one intended to show them what they could become.  

With Betas  - which ended in 2103 - we have the additional advantage of knowing the overall arc of the series. The team bonds early on over a prank on a local hipster bro - which is to say they pull together as a team in order to attack someone deserving outside of it. At the end, facing an acquisition by a friendly but malign software giant, the team pulls together, faces it down, giving up their million dollar paydays in defense of what they see to be right.

And with this we can see how Betas deserves to be called truly a Millennial story. The BRB team is much more of a team than the Pied Piper developers, who work at cross purposes, have fundamental moral flaws, and frequently attack each other. Even though  Pied Piper’s team are Millennials by age bracket or birth cohort, they act more like members of Generation X. That might be because Mike Judge, born 1962, is Generation X - although the creators of Betas, Evan Endicott and Josh Stoddard, appear to be Gen X as well, if closer to the 1981 end of the cohort.

Ultimately,  BRB works together more like Millennials are expected to - and they take part in a story that matches with what everyone expects Heroes to do.