[5.2/10] Making fun of Google and Silicon Valley-culture is fertile ground for comedy, but it all depends how you come at it, and this had the attitude of a pack of stodgy old people going “those crazy kids!” Jokes like the technology not working or everyone being super young seemed like paint-by-numbers observations, and there wasn’t really the sort of specificity you’d hope for in a proper skewering of tech startup/big business stuff.
The only real clever take in all of this was the feel-good, work is play environment giving way to cynical concerns about taxing the company, which Kent was happy to horse trade for favorable coverage of Selina/unfavorable coverage of Chung. There’s meat to that one in the way there wasn’t really in the rest of the tech company culture satirizing.
The Ben/Dan/Jonah story was likewise, just okay. I like the mastermind qualities of Ben feeding the story to Dan who feeds it to Jonah allowing the campaign to run with it whilst giving everyone plausible deniability, but the actual scenes involving it weren’t particularly funny. Dan kind of just annoys me, while Jonah is at least entertaining in his utter idiocy, so pairing or aligning them against one another doesn’t really do it for me.
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParent2017-03-31T19:18:25Z
[5.2/10] Making fun of Google and Silicon Valley-culture is fertile ground for comedy, but it all depends how you come at it, and this had the attitude of a pack of stodgy old people going “those crazy kids!” Jokes like the technology not working or everyone being super young seemed like paint-by-numbers observations, and there wasn’t really the sort of specificity you’d hope for in a proper skewering of tech startup/big business stuff.
The only real clever take in all of this was the feel-good, work is play environment giving way to cynical concerns about taxing the company, which Kent was happy to horse trade for favorable coverage of Selina/unfavorable coverage of Chung. There’s meat to that one in the way there wasn’t really in the rest of the tech company culture satirizing.
The Ben/Dan/Jonah story was likewise, just okay. I like the mastermind qualities of Ben feeding the story to Dan who feeds it to Jonah allowing the campaign to run with it whilst giving everyone plausible deniability, but the actual scenes involving it weren’t particularly funny. Dan kind of just annoys me, while Jonah is at least entertaining in his utter idiocy, so pairing or aligning them against one another doesn’t really do it for me.
Overall, definitely a weaker episode.