Will Viewers Miss 'Start-ups: Silicon Valley'? Probably Not
Bravo doesn't have a plan for a second season of its start-up reality show. And plenty of folks are happy about that.
Everett Collection
A still from the first season of Start-Ups: Silicon Valley.
After eight episodes of catfights and caffeine highs, Bravo's 'Start-ups: Silicon Valley,' widely derided as 'Jersey Shore' meets 'The Social Network,' is finally getting laid to rest.
If you've been following the show at all, this shouldn't come as much of a surprise. This was no Ken Burns documentary, and there were critics from the start. And not just the 'two thumbs down,' type of criticism, either. The show inspired everything from the requisite sarcasm to all-out, hyperbolic rage. Consider this this one-two punch takedown from Sarah Lacy, the author and founder of PandoDaily, a site that chronicles the Silicon Valley start-up scene.
"It was an awful, vapid, and inauthentic representation of 'entrepreneurship,'" Lacy wrote in a blog post last week. "People in the Valley pretty universally hated it. Critics almost universally hated it too."
My colleague Scott Gerber summed up the show's failings, noting that it suffered, basically, from "inaccurate expectations about entrepreneurship--especially with the notion that 'the life' is more important than the work required to achieve it."
And Mike Cassidy writing for SiliconBeat.com, says "It was a circus, a joke, a stage for some start-up wannabes to strut upon. I can't imagine the cast even took itself seriously."
Well, the strutting is over. According to Nielson data, the show's viewership dropped about 25 percent in the last few episodes, settling around 500,000 viewers. By contrast, the Real Housewives of Atlanta has more than 3.5 million viewers.
Not surprisingly, plenty of "fans" took to social media to express their feelings about the show--and now its cancellation. Here are a few choice selections from Twitter.
