For most of its four seasons, HBO’s Silicon Valley has stubbornly contorted itself to prevent its heroes from ever making it over the mountaintop to the fortunes they so desperately crave. It’s been one of the funniest shows on TV for most of that time, so the constant resetting of the status quo usually isn’t that troubling (other than in the latest finale), but it’s led to an ongoing debate among critics and fans about whether an ongoing version of the show where Pied Piper has succeeded is a good idea.
AMC’s new one-hour comedy Loaded feels in many ways like it was created to help answer that question.
It wasn’t, of course — Loaded, another of AMC’s UK co-productions (it debuted on Channel 4 a few months ago, and premieres on AMC Monday at 10; I’ve seen the first two episodes), is a remake of an Israeli show, Mesudarim, that premiered a decade ago — but the overlap in terms of the world, the character types, and the success/failure ratio is hard to ignore if you’ve spent any time with Richard Hendrix and friends. Intentional or not, it plays as an English-accented Silicon Valley that begins just as the guys have all become very rich. The opening sequence is literally the four of them checking their phones while waiting for their bank balances to register the £14 million they’ve each been paid for selling their Cat Factory gaming app to an American company.
Josh (Jim Howick) is the brains of the group, and the Richard-style voice of doom and gloom. Leon (Samuel Anderson) is a showoff who’s half as cool and smooth as Erlich Bachman thinks he is. Pathologically shy and polite Ewan (Johnny Sweet) even physically resembles Jared a bit, while eccentric recovering addict Watto (Nick Helm) has elements of Erlich, Big Head, and Gilfoyle.
Now, Silicon Valley didn’t invent the archetypes it’s playing with, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the four leads of the Israeli version were similar. But they’re also so evocative of a show that was just airing new episodes a few weeks ago that comparisons become inevitable.
So if we pretend for a moment that this is actually a mirror universe Silicon where the guys make a lot of money but still get to run the company, how does it play? Likably but not hilariously, which may owe more to the different creative teams (many of the episodes were written by Jon Brown, who’s worked on Veep but mostly on UK series like Misfits) than to the financial statuses of the main characters.
Loaded is acutely aware of all the problems that a small fortune can solve, and the new ones it can create. It has fun with both, whether it’s the guys buying a house so big, they need miniature motorcycles to get around (Leon at one point has to carry his down the spiral staircase), Ewan impulsively handing out an 18 grand bonus to a coworker he wants to impress, or Leon landing his new helicopter at his old school to show up all the teachers who said he would never make something of himself.
The show’s generally more amiable than it is funny, with most of the overt laughs coming from Mary McCormack as Casey(*), sarcastic executive from the company that bought Cat Factory. (“Think of me as a sexy Darth Vader,” she tells them.) But the genuine affection the friends have for each other is charming (and in many ways a bigger deviation from Silicon Valley than the size of everyone’s bank accounts), and the better stories find a sweet spot between absurdity and sincerity. When Leon finally tracks down the teacher in whose face he most hopes to rub his new success, for instance, the old man is both retired and dying of cancer, and thus happy for the distraction Leon is providing.
(*) The one area where Loaded comes off better than its US analogue: Casey, her assistant Naomi (Lolly Adefope), and Josh’s coder ex-girlfriend Abi (Aimee-Ffion Edwards) are all much more complicated and funny characters than any of the women Silicon Valley has featured.
There’s a degree to which the guys’ ability to throw money at problems lowers the comic stakes, but Josh’s understandable fear that they’re burning through their reserves much too quickly counterbalances that. If it’s not wall-to-wall laughs, that’s probably more about the writing of individual moments than about financial circumstance. Then again, we’ve seen other great comedies about struggling characters fall apart when wealth comes into play, most infamously when Roseanne won the lottery in the final season. So maybe the genially disposable nature of Loaded — which I enjoyed watching, even as I found my thoughts then and in this review constantly turning to an unrelated show — is a cautionary tale, and a Silicon Valley where Dinesh and Gilfoyle are making like Scrooge McDuck wouldn’t work.
I’d still like to see them try at some point, though.
Alan Sepinwall may be reached at sepinwall@uproxx.com