I honestly went into the new National Geographic series Valley of the Boom thinking I wasn’t going to like it. I wasn’t ever really impressed with the promotions of the show that felt a bit too over-the-top to me and I only watched the first episode because a) I checkout a lot of new stuff and b) I’m interested in computers and technology from the 1990s. I figured I’d watch about 15 minutes of Valley of the Boom before giving up on it, but honestly within 15 minutes I was totally hooked on this new show.
Taking place in the 1990s and following three companies that were gigantic at that time but are gone and a footnote today; Netscape, The Globe and Pixelon, essentially The Valley of the Boom is a historical series where interviews with the real-life people from those companies are interspersed with reenactments of what was going on 20+ years ago. Except these aren’t your ordinary reenactments starring a bunch of no-name actors, no, these reenactments star people like Bradley Whitford and Steve Zahn and rather than taking away from the interviews are in many ways more interesting than them.
I think what really sold me on the show is what happened a few minutes into Valley of the Boom where the real-life interviews somehow got intermingled into the reenactments, where the actor playing Marc Andreessen from Netscape in the 1990 begins giving comments to the camera as if he’s the real Andreessen, then someone off screen tells him to knock it off, and he then talks about how he’s really an actor named John Karna and that while he’s not the real Andreessen he’s saying things that Andreessen really said or probably said in the similar situation, so please don’t sue us.
And this kind’a stuff happens all throughout the show. At one point the character Zahn plays reads a note he wrote when breaking up with his third wife which is scored to an interpretive dance and at another point two stockbrokers are speaking to two other stockbrokers at another agency, except the pair are played by the same dudes.
It’s all very interesting and while I think I know where all this is going — it was the best of times before it became the worst of times — I think that if the series continues to have these little, interesting break-outs it’s something I’ll keep watching.
If you’re really interested in what was happening on the technology front in the 1990 you should checkout the PBS series Nerds 2.0.1: A Brief History of the Internet and Coderush.
