10 TV Shows That Get Tech Right
If you work in tech, you probably try to skip shows that touch on the subject, for fear of apoplectic rage. These will keep your blood pressure down.
Movies are notorious for getting tech wrong — they don’t have time to cater to accuracy. Those two hours are all about spectacle and letting actors flex their creative muscles.
TV is a different beast. With anywhere from six to 22 episodes per season, which typically run for 22 to 60-plus minutes each, TV shows have hours to fill, so they can and should get it right. Of course, most don’t. Just watch any CSI-type show in which a conventionally attractive “nerd” is asked to “enhance” an image in two seconds flat. You’ll wonder why your copy of Photoshop doesn’t have that tool. Oh, right: because it doesn’t exist!
Thankfully, there’ve been a few shows over the years that have mostly depicted computing just right. It’s not always positive — but after the year technology has been having, that’s no big shock. Here are our top 10 picks for the TV shows you can watch without cringing behind your laptop or tablet.
Scorpion
I’m not afraid to disparage the use of computers on CBS shows — the various CSIs and NCISes make it all look like magic with fewer rules than Harry Potter stories— but Scorpion, now in its fourth season, does a good job of at least depicting white-hat hackers somewhat accurately. It helps that it’s inspired by the work of Walter O’Brien (also the show’s consultant and producer), who hacked NASA at age 13 and got a visit from the NSA and Interpol soon after. He then created his own risk management company called, yes, Scorpion.
Sherlock
This isn’t so much about using tech right as it’s about depicting tech in a way that is visual engaging and doesn’t pull a person out of a story, the way suddenly cutting to a phone or computer screen can. The BBC’s Sherlock, starring Benedict “Doctor Strange” Cumberbatch as a modern-day Holmes, was among the first to start representing texts on the screen, floating above or around the characters, in a way that made it clear who was sending or receiving. It looks great and timeless — better than showing a fake smartphone screen in a laughable large font or mocking up some kind of “interface” for the floating text. The first half of the video above from Every Frame a Painting shows just how Sherlock got the ball rolling in a way that is now commonplace in shows and films.
Modern Family
This sitcom about blended families shows technology the way all families use it: It’s annoying, it’s a tool for ignoring what you don’t want to see or do, and it’s the ultimate in communications. There have been episodes about parents who are hurt when their kids avoid their Facebook friend requests. One of the most realistic — and yet so obviously product-placed — was about Phil Dunphy’s rabid desire for the original iPad back in 2010 and the hoops his family jumped through to get him one, including standing in line at the Apple Store (remember when that was a thing?). In 2015, they shot an episode entirely on iPhones and iPads, putting FaceTime through its paces.
Person of Interest
Over five seasons, this cop show turned sci-fi show spooled out a tale of two men trying to make things better for people. One of them created a sentient super-computer AI called “The Machine,” which aggregated all the data it could to pinpoint not only terrorist acts but also people who would soon be victims (or perpetrators) of crimes. This is the NSA’s dream machine, a Minority Report PC waiting to happen — and considering the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica scandal, it seems all too credible (minus the self-awareness part…for now). Our sister site, IGN, named Person of Interest the Best Action Series of both 2015 and 2016.
The League
This FX/FXX sitcom ran for seven seasons, ending in 2015. It might sound like it’s about superheroes, but it’s about a group of friends who play in a fantasy football league and plot to win their annual trophy, no matter what it takes. The show starred Mark Duplas, Nick Kroll, Paul Scheer, and YouTube-famed Jon Lajoie as Taco. Early seasons didn’t do much to depict the computer-side of this fantasy league setup — the show isn’t really about football as much as it is how they all interact with each other about it — but toward the end, it picked up some product-placement and support from DraftKings. Some viewers found it off-putting, others realistic.
Black Mirror
The problem with Black Mirror — Charlie Booker’s Twilight Zone-esque series, now on Netflix, that skews heavily toward future-tech dystopian tales — isn’t the computing. Not many would look at what’s depicted and say, “That could never happen!” The problem is, we all know it could. Certainly some stories seem more plausible than others. But toss together a Handmaid’s Tale future regime with dating apps, and you can easily see something like “Hang the DJ” (depicted in the trailer above) coming true. Recording your entire history through contact lenses, uploading your consciousness to a VR simulation, robots that mimic dead loved ones, having your self-worth determined by social media ratings…these are all things that at least feel like they could be around the corner. (Extra kudos to the production design team for making the computing interfaces we do see on the show look plausible and theatrical at the same time.) If you’re not sure where to start, check out PCMag’s ranking of all the episodes, from best to worst.
The IT Crowd
If you haven’t power-cycled your PC (or any other device) when there’s a problem — “Have you tried turning it off and on again?” — you don’t know the basic tenet of information technology (IT) departments everywhere. That goes double for the IT department at Reynholm Industries, as depicted by Chris O’Dowd and Richard Ayoade in this British sitcom, which ran from 2006 to 2010 and wrapped up with a special in 2013. In all, there are 27 episodes waiting for you to binge on Netflix.
Mr. Robot
Mr. Robot goes out of its way to use real-life hacking tools including Kali Linux and a lot of legit command-prompt action. Technology producer Kor Adana, a cybersecurity specialist in his previous life, works with hackers to ensure everything on screen is plausible, from the IP addresses to the Raspberry Pis. He knows that tech-savvy viewers are freezing every frame to see what’s happening. The writers have consulting technologists in the room as they untangle the story of Eliot Alderson and his attempts to save the world from Evil Corp. You probably can’t find a more real-looking world of deep computing on TV; just hope the nefarious plans Eliot and F-Society are fighting (or enacting) remain fictional.
Silicon Valley
Silicon Valley is the brainchild of Mike Judge — the same guy who created not only Beavis & Butthead, but also Office Space and Idiocracy. So the pedigree is pure. Focusing on internet startup culture, the show expertly depicts the ups and downs and ups (and future downs) of a company called Pied Piper, run by some seriously smart but totally inept software engineers. Judge knows all about it , since he once worked at an internet startup. But behind the scenes are top-rate production design and pitch-perfect product placement. They’ve used products like Varidesk standing desks and the show even has enough pull that they had their fictional compression rate metric turned into a real thing by professors at Stanford upon request. They also did a scene about calculating a very adult past-time that was mathematically correct.
Halt & Catch Fire
This series should have done for computing what Mad Men did for advertising, smoking, and drinking. Looking back on the launch of the computing revolution, circa 1983 up to about 1994, Halt & Catch Fire follows five major characters as they meet at a Texas-based electronics company that tries its hand in the PC business, and eventually moves to California as everyone starts getting their feet wet with online services and then the World Wide Web. This show is a love letter to those halcyon days of text-based games, loud screeching modems, and big ideas no one had ever thought of before — like giving away software and graphical user interfaces. It’s all wrapped up in a compelling drama of people falling in and out of love and trying to keep their lives together while struggling to remain relevant as the internet comes steamrolling into their lives. You can and should watch all four seasons right now on Netflix.
Read More: “6 Video Games You’ll Want to Buy in June”
Originally published at www.pcmag.com.
