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Silicon Valley
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Stream It Or Skip It: 'The Believers' On Netflix, Where Three Entrepreneurs Try To Make Money By Running Their Own Buddhist Temple
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Stream It Or Skip It: 'BlackBerry' On AMC, A Comedic Look At The Rise And Fall Of The Smartphone Pioneer
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Stream It Or Skip It: 'Super Pumped: The Battle For Uber' On Netflix, A Scripted Account Of Uber's Early Days
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Stream It Or Skip It: 'Jimmy O. Yang: Guess How Much?' On Prime Video, Wherein This 'Silicon Valley' Comedian's Dating A Real-Life Venture Capitalist
HBO’s Silicon Valley doesn’t tend to deal with real companies or current events very directly within the universe of their show. Sure, fictional companies like “Hooli” can sometimes seem like stand-ins for Google or Facebook, and the tech antics play like heightened versions of the ridiculousness that the real Silicon Valley gets into. But nothing follows too closely to real life. Any little bit of commentary on the tech world the show does get into is carried out, every now and then, through the opening credits.
The Silicon Valley opening credits are a brief, animated fly-by over the landscape of the tech corridor. It’s a LEGO-esque animation where the Silicon Valley landscape is continually being built and re-built with the various tech brands we’re all dealing with in real life. On Sunday night’s season premiere, with the season 5 version of the credits unveiled, eagle-eyed viewers caught a pretty significant jab at Facebook, as the credits animated their sign to briefly get translated into Russian and back.
Facebook and its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, have been under fire for over a year after it was found that Russian trolls and hackers were able to populate Facebook’s news feeds with hundreds of fake news stories meant to take down the Hillary Clinton campaign. Zuckerberg continues to have to answer questions about what role Facebook played in any kind of effort on the part of the Russians to sway the 2016 presidential election results in the United States.
Taking a jab at Facebook was probably to be expected given the tendency of the Silicon Valley credits to keep a close eye on the tech world. Following the evolution of the credits across the now five seasons of the show has been a treat. The tech world moves notoriously fast, but it’s amazing to look only five seasons back and still see logos for things like Blogger. Through the years we’ve seen logos come and go, along with certain updates that reflected changing business arrangements. Google became Alphabet; the Yahoo logo was papered over by the Alibaba Group; the Uber and Lyft hot-air balloons jostled for position. This new Facebook gag might be the most overt knock on a tech company’s headlines so far, but it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s watched Silicon Valley, a show which lives to skewer tech culture.
