Indie Spotlight: ‘Tech Boom!’ Takes On Preposterous Bay Area Techies

We receive a ton of tips every day from independent creators, unaffiliated with any major motion picture studios, television networks, new media studios, or other well-funded online video entities. The Indie Spotlight is where we’ll write about and shout out to a select few of them and bring you up to speed on the great (and sometimes not-so-great) attention-grabbing series you probably haven’t heard about until now.  Read previous installments here. 

This week, we discussed the return of Everything But The News, a smart web series that makes fun of West Coast tech trends. At the same time, there’s another web comedy that also has its eye on Silicon Valley. That series is called Tech Boom!, and the seven episodes it has released so far take on self-satisfied tech-heads.

It is easy to compare Tech Boom! to Silicon Valley, Mike Judge’s satirical look at all the hot air blowing around the Bay Area. Sure enough, Jack Birmingham, Loren Risker, and Hector Escarramán‘s web series does share some things in common with the HBO sitcom; for example, they both execute similar self-driving car gags.

At the same time, Tech Boom! has more of an interest in the sheer insanity of the Silicon Valley tech scene. “There’s been such a constant flow of bizarre, frustrating, and shameless behavior on display to draw from,” Birmingham told SF Weekly. “Some of it, like the Sarah Slocum “tech hate crime” stuff or the Dropbox guys

, is just so weird (disastrously weird, even) that it already feels like an absurd comedy skit.”

Billingham’s philosophy is put on display in Tech Boom!‘s strongest episodes. Take, for example, the most recent installment, which applies jargon-y buzzwords to a marriage. It’s a ridiculous concept, but how far does it actually stray from the already-ridiculous reality the series is based on? In that sense, Portlandia–not Silicon Valley–is the TV show Tech Boom! resembles most.

All of Tech Boom!‘s episodes can be watched from the series’ YouTube channel.

OTHER UNDER-THE-RADAR SERIES TO CHECK OUT

• The Things You Learn On Wikipedia. Esoteric subjects take center stage in this web series, which uses kinetic typography to discuss topics like toilet paper orientation.
• Re-Election. Groundhog Day comes to a political campaign in this web series about a staffer who keeps reliving an election over and over.
• The Return Of Saturn. This web series about adulthood takes its title from the 29.4 years it takes Saturn to return to the same spot in the sky.
• Green Vespers. This murder mystery uses a GoPro camera to pull off a first-person point of view.

Got a series you’d like to see featured in the Indie Spotlight? Be sure to contact us here. For best coverage, please include a full episode in your e-mail.