- Network: HBO , National Geographic
- Series Premiere Date: Jan 13, 2019
Critic Reviews
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At just six one-hour episodes (two airing each Sunday for three weeks), “Valley of the Boom” runs out of gas well before its conclusion and begins to feel padded, especially in its last hour. The series also suffers from tension-free drama as the stories mostly go the way viewers will expect.
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With everyone playing to the camera, from actors who break the fourth wall to their real-life counterparts who sit for interviews, the result is system overload. Boom is entertaining yet can be exhausting as it is illuminating. [7-20 Jan 2019, p.11]
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The documentary doesn’t augment the scripted narrative so much as it doubles down to overwhelm viewers with information; to entertain at all costs, even when it means repeating facts and disconnecting the human cost from of all these technological advances.
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The portion of this hybrid scripted-nonfiction show drawn from interviews with real-world tech pioneers and scenesters (among them, recognizable faces including Mark Cuban and Arianna Huffington) is light but enlightening. By contrast, the time the show spends dramatizing the stories its talking heads explain is poorly spent, spinning a relatively thin narrative into a six-episode run through repetitious and tiring use of post-modern storytelling techniques that are as tired today as a dial-up modem.
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Valley of the Boom abounds with self-aware asides and fanciful fillips, and these are variously pandering, bizarre, and endearing. ... Where McKay’s scenes [in "The Big Short"] clarify, these tend to confuse and clutter. ... The show has no particular ambition to draw its characters as people. Rather, they are figures of Wild West lore and common cliché.
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Valley of the Boom provides a fascinating, timely history lesson in misguided, utterly off-putting fashion. Simply put, a series that spends lots of time talking about initial public offerings and raking in billions doesn't come close to making the sale.
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Valley of the Boom’s skimming voyage across the biggest moments in Silicon Valley’s late-90s scene is educational, and even a little nostalgic. But it also feels like a missed opportunity to dive deeper into what should have been learned (and wasn’t) in terms of tech growth, or to explore a different prospective other than from those who happened to ride a investment wave at exactly the right time.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 0 out of 1
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Mixed: 0 out of 1
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Negative: 1 out of 1
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Mar 9, 2019I thought it was rather boring, I feel the entire series could have been rapped up in one episode.