Pimps and Pied Pipers: Quality Television in the Age of Its Direct Delivery

Journal of American Studies, Page  of 
© Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 
doi:./S

Pimps and Pied Pipers: Quality
Television in the Age of Its Direct
Delivery
M I C H A E L SZ A L A Y

This essay examines the fascination with bodily conversion that characterizes recent HBO pro-
gramming. Dramas and comedies like True Blood, Veep, Silicon Valley, and True Detective de-
scribe human forms in various states of transformation: into a menagerie of supernatural
creatures, polling data, digital information and, even, the landscape of the American South.
These transformations anticipate and seek to rationalize the exchange of the programs in
which they appear into and out of diverse forms of Time Warner brand equity – even as
they rehearse anxieties that the network’s famed “quality” diminishes in the face of such
exchanges. Female characters bear the brunt of this reflexivity; their forcibly contorted and mon-
etized bodies figure the temporary material form assumed by otherwise liquid equity as it moves
within Time Warner and, ultimately, over Internet lines and into the viewer’s home. The net-
work’s famed misogyny is, in this respect, self-conscious and idiosyncratic, and reveals something
essential about the incoherence of HBO’s parent company at the moment that the network dis-
covers new pathways for the direct distribution of its product.

The opening credits of Veep rhyme loosely with those of Game of Thrones,
which airs the same evening on HBO’s spring lineup. In each sequence, the
camera orbits a radiant if differently figured core: in Veep, instead of a
glowing orb encircled with a solar system of clockwork lands, we find an
empty space of white, an irradiated hub that gestures to and yet occludes
what is presumably the Seal of the President of the United States (Figures 
and ). The implied center of gravity evokes the one in Game of Thrones:
Selina Meyer would sit within the Oval Office and in this way win the
game of thrones that is the subject of both productions. That solar axis is
here appropriately invisible: at HBO, the stars that really matter are corporate
offices, closed doors past which the viewer never sees. Even the planets are cor-
porate properties: though each bears the VP’s image, the astronomical bodies
that orbit the missing insignia are within the Time Warner universe: Meyer’s
image appears on the cover of Time Magazine, People Magazine, and what
seems to be a CNN news program. A bold red line tracks her stock in

Department of English, University of California, Irvine. Email: mszalay@uci.edu.

 Michael Szalay

Figure . Veep solar system.

Figure . Game of Thrones solar system.

public opinion as it rises and falls as a function of her appearance on these
outlets, all of which Time Warner owned in , when the series premiered.
   Time Warner has since sold Time and People, and the confidently rising and
then precipitously falling red line tells us a good deal about why it did. After its
 merger with AOL, the company’s stock fell  points in two years.
Faced with mountains of debt, it began to break itself apart. The banks to
which it was indebted cared less about its vision of synergy or the quality of
its programs than about the shareholder value that sold-off corporate units

Pimps and Pied Pipers 
might unlock. Henceforth, during a period defined not by mergers but by their
undoing, no unit would be safe from the possibility of a spinoff. The corre-
sponding imperative to discover new efficiencies and sustain profitability
finds voice on recent HBO programming, like Game of Thrones, for instance,
when the Iron Bank rebuffs a royal going broke in a war of succession. The
bank is not interested in the legitimacy of his claim to the throne, and sees
no reason to back a pretender when it is owed vast sums by those already in
power. It knows only bottom lines. “Across the narrow sea, your books are
filled with words like ‘usurper’ and ‘madman’ and ‘blood right,’” a banker
tells him. “Here, our books are filled with numbers. We prefer the stories
they tell. More plain” (·).
   Recent HBO comedies document a similar preference: on Veep, Meyer
battles poll-driven number-crunchers; on Enlightened, Amy Jellicoe discovers
late in her tenure with a pharmaceutical corporation that she has been input-
ting employee efficiency numbers that will justify their firing; on Ballers, the
money manager Spencer Strasmore, his body aching from years in the NFL
and his bank account now empty, realizes it is time to “monetize his friend-
ships” (·). These shows might therefore seem to lampoon what Mary
Poovey calls “the language of numbers” adopted by “a new axis of power”
running through multinational corporations, offshore tax havens, corporate
pension funds, banks, the IMF and, ultimately, “the wallets of ordinary
investors.” If HBO becomes exercised over quantitative thinking, it does so
largely to defend managerial autonomy during an era of downsizing. That
defense typically invokes long-standing claims about aesthetic autonomy.
The network protests that it produces something more than plain stories –
not industrially managed entertainment but serious art (“It’s Not TV, It’s
HBO”). It cares little for quantitative measures of viewership, above all; we
are “not determining success on the basis of numbers,” avers CEO Richard
Plepler. “We’re determining success on the basis of quality and we believe
the numbers will follow.” Many similar statements position HBO as our fore-
most practitioner of autonomous corporate art. Being committed to “quality,”
these statements declare, means rising on the wings of aesthetic integrity above
the short-sighted calculus, so preoccupied with immediate gain, that dominates
traditional broadcast networks, just as it means eschewing the quantitative

 
     Mary Poovey, “The Twenty-First-Century University and the Market: What Price
     Economic Viability?” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, ,  (), –
     , ; and Poovey, “Can Numbers Ensure Honesty? Unrealistic Expectations and the
     U. S. Accounting Scandal,” Notices of the American Mathematical Society, ,  (),
     –, –.
 
     HitFix,  July , at www.hitfix.com/blogs/the-fien-print/posts/press-tour--live-blog-
     hbo-executive-session.

 Michael Szalay
metrics used by Netflix, for instance, which is reported to have developed
“, micro genres” for tracking audience responses to programming.
   Still, the numerical conversions on HBO do more than register a threatened
aesthetic autonomy. Even as it beats its chest about the virtues of “quality,” the
network’s programming quietly theorizes, as Barbara Cassin says Google does
in relation to its search engine, how “quantity becomes in and of itself a
quality.” The difference is that HBO’s version tends to move in the opposite
direction: its “quality” programming self-consciously anticipates its exchange
into the quantitative. That fascination with numerical measure does more
than reflect the imperative to increase profit: it explores the possibility
conditions of corporate synergy. Proprietary media, so the theory goes, orbit
the same corporate headquarters, and should thus be convertible into and
out of equivalent measures of “brand equity”; HBO’s language of
numbers is in this respect a language of exchange, an effort to think
through how one measure of “quality” might be rendered commensurate
with another. Corporations are internalized markets, and unimpeded
exchange between the brand equity represented by media within a single cor-
porate unit, like HBO, or between the equity represented by media produced
by different units, like HBO and Warner Bros., was to be one of the
benefits of the mergers that defined the industry at the start of the twentieth
century. But on the whole, synergy’s benefits did not materialize; the Time
Warner solar system began to break apart soon after the AOL merger.
Faced with the attendant sale of Time Warner Cable, HBO began to
explore the possibility of producing direct delivery platforms that might dis-
tribute the network’s programming over the Internet. As we will see, True
Detective registers this coming undone of the parent company, and a subse-
quent autonomization of distribution, even as it struggles to imagine a
general equivalent that might unite an otherwise diverse library of Time
Warner properties.
   That struggle takes an unmistakably gendered form in the programs treated
below. The tension between “quality” and quantity, no less than the effort to
imagine the integral corporate form that is Time Warner, takes its toll on the
bodies of HBO’s women, especially. Criticisms of the network’s misogyny are
too numerous to cite, and are typically well deserved. But that misogyny tends
to follow an idiosyncratic logic. For close to a century, critics have noted the
emblematically capitalist manner in which modern media discipline women’s

 
     See www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive///how-netflix-reverse-engineered-holly-
     wood/.
 
     Barbara Cassin, Sophistical Practice: Toward a Consistent Relativism (New York: Fordham
     University Press, ), .

Pimps and Pied Pipers 
bodies. The mechanical orchestration of the Tiller Girls – replicated by the
Warner Bros. Gold Digger musicals – captured for Siegfried Kracauer how
cabarets, shop windows, and newsreels employed, in the words of Miriam
Hansen, the “Taylorist principle of breaking down human labor into calcul-
able units.” Intent to describe a “diffuse, flexible, [and] precarious” post-
Fordism decades later, and thus track how media representations of women
“follow symmetrically the evolutions of the capitalist mode of production,”
the Tiqqun collective generated a theory of “the Young Girl,” a media
figure endowed with “the magical ability to convert the most heterogeneous
‘qualities’ . . . into a single ‘social value.’” For Tiqqun, media images of
young women become a “[l]iving currency [that] has taken the place of
money as a general equivalent.” In what follows, I draw on insights like
these, but apply them to a more specific corporate context. On recent HBO
comedy and drama, women figure the means traditionally requisite to a
brand’s propagation; they are living currency, their bodies vehicles for the ex-
change of brand equity and even its delivery into the home. But that program-
ming also stages the superannuation of women’s bodies, and a range of
dangerous domestic entanglements, by direct delivery platforms that transform
the “home box office” that the network first pioneered. Once associated with
the heteronormative living room and its television set, HBO would now shatter
that domestic sanctum on behalf of a personalized viewing experience that takes
place everywhere and nowhere. Such flexibility and ambiguity no doubt re-
present for media companies the possibility of still more absolute forms of me-
diation: even as phone and tablet screens shrink the television interface, their
portability radically enhances the implicitly male viewer’s separation not
simply from the family, but from any particular viewing location at all.
   In True Blood and Veep, the problem of converting people into brands
figures the problem of converting the television program into fungible
equity; on Silicon Valley and True Detective, these problems become indistin-
guishable from the problem of converting the television program into stream-
ing data. The contradictory nature of these nested projects manifests with
particular clarity on the bodies of HBO’s female actors, those stars and less
exalted media workers who embody both use and exchange – who are, in
the words of Richard Dryer, “both labor, and the thing that labor
produces.” In these shows, women concretize “quality” even as their bodies
often remain, scarified and branded, abject residua, left in the wake of

 
     Miriam Hansen, Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor
     Adorno (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), ; Tiqqun, Raw Material for a
     Theory of the Young Girl (Paris: Editions mille et une nuits, ), , , .
 
     Richard Dryer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society (New York: Routledge, ), .

 Michael Szalay
“quality’s” conversions into more liquid forms. Male bodies disappear more
readily – into data, brand equity, or even money – but nevertheless register
signal problems now animating the death and rebirth of television. The contra-
dictions at hand are themselves palimpsests of different fault lines: where from
one perspective tensions between quality and quantity will seem to mirror a
Marxian account of the commodity’s double body, torn between use and ex-
change, from another, those same tensions will rehearse a more specific formal
dynamic, in which diegetic spaces and narratives anticipate not simply changes
within the implied television interface and its viewing context, but changes
within the corporate forms attendant upon that transformed viewing experi-
ence. The corporate form confronts us as most visibly changed in True
Detective, a drama in which the network’s quality will appear as exhausted
and hollowed out as the implied body of Time Warner, whose broken frag-
ments it projects upon the ruined landscape of Louisiana. In True Detective,
violence against women is inextricable from the violence required to break
apart a parent company.

                     THE BRAND’S DOUBLE BODY
HBO’s fascination with physically branding human bodies, and turning
people into media brands, has a history. The opening sequence of Oz – the
male prison drama that premiered in  and with The Sopranos ushered
in the golden age of the network’s quality programming – tracks a needle tat-
tooing the logo of the show onto human flesh. The pilot makes plain what’s at
stake in this embodied inscription. “Like my tattoos?” an Aryan Brother asks
his new cellmate. “I’m gonna brand you myself.” The terrified cellmate says,
“Livestock gets branded,” to which the Aryan replies, “That’s what you are.
My livestock. Because now, Tobias, your ass belongs to me.” The cellmate
belongs to the Aryan as the characters belong to the network. These characters
are as disciplined by corporate power as they are by state power. They are held
within the imaginary space of Time Warner, their collective spokesman a disabled
black man who will die in Season  and yet remain the narrator of the series.
   True Blood elaborated a version of that logic. It was the network’s first hit
after The Sopranos, and followed on the heels of other critically acclaimed fare
like Deadwood, The Wire, and Six Feet Under. Though it would continue to
trumpet its commitment to “quality,” HBO redressed the passing of these
shows mainly with innovative branding, which begins to account for the per-
vasive worry over network “quality” detailed below. A network that had
achieved fame because of the freedoms it gave its creators would now carefully
curate its programming with in-house marketing executives. HBO had already
sold branded goods to the fans of its popular series. But True Blood witnessed
the sale of an unprecedented array of show-related paraphernalia and served as

Pimps and Pied Pipers 
the basis for a partnership with at least six different creative agencies. Above all,
HBO’s new branding dispensation was at its most campy and self-conscious in
the sale of a beverage named after True Blood and the synthetic blood drunk by
vampires on the show: “Tru Blood.”
    A curious drink, this “slightly tart, lightly sweet blood orange drink,” is
redolent of both blood and money. Vampires have long modeled the capital-
ist’s extraction of value: “Capital is dead labor which, vampire-like, lives only
by sucking living labor,” Marx writes. David McNally understands metaphors
like these as crucial to Marx’s account of abstract labor, which is “effectively
disembodied, detached from the persons who perform it,” the better to be
exchanged. Where the blood traditionally sucked by vampires might represent
stolen labor rendered abstract and transformed into value, the synthetic blood
in True Blood – developed by Yakonomo, a fictional Japanese corporation –
might represent the technological advances that allow capitalists to replace
workers with machines and that lead to lower wages, unemployment, and,
Marx thought, crisis. But if Tru Blood recalls to us abstract labor, it also satir-
ically rehearses network anxieties over the loss of once defining “qualities”:
what does it mean, the series asks, to turn so soon on the heels of HBO’s crit-
ically acclaimed dramas toward Gothic romance? The synthetic blood is “tru,”
which is to say both true and not true, both really like but not actually real
blood. In this way, the blood combines cure (it allows vampires to go main-
stream, by providing them with something other than humans to drink)
and poison (it consigns them to something far less exciting than the human
blood they crave). Taking its name from the synthetic blood, the series is as
analogous an amalgam, at war with its commitment to transform a once
edgy underground brand into something more mainstream. This allegory
allows the brutal but so-much-more-interesting vampires who abjure Tru
Blood to announce on behalf of HBO a principled repudiation of the synthet-
ic: here are real gore and guts, the network declares, the very stuff of “quality,”
if only because forbidden by the FCC on broadcast television. At the same
time, a vampire like Bill Compton will argue, in his defense of the drink
and of mainstreaming, on behalf of a more capacious, if banal, HBO brand.
    Carnal in the extreme, True Blood trades in erotic physicality. Pointedly so:
the show’s vampires often stand in for an LGBT community struggling for
civil rights in the South. “God hates Fangs,” reads a telltale road sign: evange-
licals terrorize fangs as they already do fags. But this allegory sits atop another,
in which physical transformations code the vacillation between materialization
and abstraction essential to brand management. “Where is your southern
accent?” a character asks the vampire Steve Newlin, who has changed his

 
     David McNally, Monsters of the Market (New York: Historical Materialism, ), .

 Michael Szalay
accent even as he has come out of the closet as gay. “It’s such a part of who you
are, of your brand!” she exclaims. “Yes, but sometimes I like to keep the brand
evolving,” he replies (·). Corporate brands always evolve; never identical to
the material form of any particular product, the brand assumes a constantly
changing body (first this shoe, then that one; first this program, then
another). It is not surprising that the female body should, on a network as mis-
ogynist as HBO, serve as the most malleable site for those incarnations.
Associated at least since Aristotle with materiality – Elizabeth Grosz reminds
us that patriarchal culture has long cast women as “somehow more biological,
more corporeal, and more natural than men” – women’s bodies have also, since
the early nineteenth century, figured the desire integral to consumer markets.
True Blood complicates but does not abandon these assumptions when conjur-
ing its vampires, witches, werewolves, shape-shifters, and faeries, all of which
represent diverse technologies for giving the slip to an original and limiting
body. The point is not that True Blood’s human bodies are implicitly
female and its supernatural bodies implicitly male, but rather that the show
genders the movement between these bodies in often familiar ways. In “
Crimes” (·), for example, Debbie Pelt undergoes an initiation into a
mostly male werewolf pack, which requires her to get branded on the shoulder
with the pack’s insignia (Figure ). In their first instances, brands were mark-
ings that burned the skin, the better to concretize the brand and transform the
skin into property. Here, the marking of Debbie’s human “pelt” signals the
pack’s collective ownership of her and, at a second remove, the pack’s tran-
scendence of their human skins: the branding so excites those present that
they transform into werewolves. Then, as if to suggest the degrees of attach-
ment that this brand might command, the leader of the pack, now trans-
formed, approaches Debbie, and begins feverishly to lick her singed skin.
The brand binds the pack together, as blood does the vampire community,
which descends from an original goddess named Lilith whose physical form
emerges from a pool of blood in the fifth season (Figure ). Vampires
evolve from and return to a primordial liquidity, and as with vampire
bodies, so too with media bodies: Tru Blood produces an object of attachment
by transcending the barrier between the inside and the outside of the series
from which it is derived (as most tie-in products do). That object of attach-
ment – ultimately, the network brand – emerges in an act of liquefaction
that volatilizes the “true” body of True Blood. As a vampire drains his
victim, while keeping him alive, the drink extracts liquid from the series, the
better to extract the equity lurking in its form.

 
     Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism (London: Routledge, ),
     .

Pimps and Pied Pipers 

Figure . Human branding in True Blood.

Figure . Extreme liquidity in True Blood.

   HBO’s female characters reveal the bruising nature of that extraction with
special lucidity. The network’s hallmark “quality” tends to admix male porno-
graphic fantasy with appropriately serious social themes. But as television
critics have not failed to note, that “quality” springs from overarching narra-
tive trajectories popularized by daytime soaps. HBO derived one measure of

 
     See Jane Feuer, “HBO and the Concept of Quality TV,” in Janet McCabe and Kim Akass,
     eds., Quality TV: Contemporary American Television and Beyond (New York: I. B. Tauris,
     ), –, . Also see McCabe and Akass, “It’s Not TV, it’s HBO’s Original

 Michael Szalay
its “quality,” in other words, from serial formats long associated with gendered
domestic labor – labor that the network seems intent to disown. The net-
work’s foray into serial programming involved a gendered distancing that
was, moreover, explicitly monetary. HBO insisted that its offerings were not
television at all, but film, and that insistence went hand-in-hand with its am-
bition to transform the home into a box office. Men would be the agents of
that transformation: the macho leads who headlined shows like Oz, The
Sopranos, The Wire, and Deadwood would take serial television and the domes-
tic sphere back from the women who had once defined it – the characters’ mis-
ogyny always a kind of crypto-financial discipline that stood in for the
network’s as it dreamt a world in which the only women were hookers, mon-
etized vessels of male desire.
    The network has tended to cast its relatively few female leads in comedies,
typically as authors and actresses (Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City, Valerie
Cherish in The Comeback, Hannah Horvath in Girls). Rarely, until Veep, have
those leads been either mothers or managers (distraught that she never had a
child, Enlightened’s Amy Jelicoe is an executive before suffering a nervous
breakdown). These leads are sometimes sexually humiliated (Cherish is
forced to fellate a man on film) and sometimes confused with prostitutes
(Bradshaw is mistaken for a sex worker; Horvath takes money for sex).
Meanwhile, HBO’s men have overseen radical expansions of the domestic
economy with often unquestioned power. The Sopranos scaled “the family”
business ever larger. Big Love transformed the household into a corporation,
in which all workers were women, subject to the rule of one patriarch. Six
Feet Under cast the home as a funeral business; here, two brothers run the
concern after their father’s death. More recent programming understands
women’s bodies as Six Feet Under understood its corpses: as valuable objects
it must curate. HBO returns compulsively, if half-knowingly, to that curation,
whether in its allegedly gratuitous sex or its notorious fascination with
prostitution. Throughout, the network seems both to acknowledge and to
repress the manner in which, as feminists from Gayle Rubin to Leopoldina
Fortunati and Maria Mies point out in the context of sex work, it converts
women’s bodies into money.
    David Milch’s prostitutes are in this respect the most revealing. Much of
Deadwood transpires within a saloon, the Gem, whose name evokes Jewel,

     Programming,” in Mark Leverette, Brian L. Ott, and Cara Louise Buckley, eds., It’s Not TV:
     Watching HBO in the Post-television Era (Routledge, ), –; and Avi Santo, “Para-
     television and Discourses of Distinction: The Culture of Production at HBO,” in ibid., –
     .

     See Dean J. DeFino, The HBO Effect (New York: Bloomsbury, ), –.

     See Mary McNamara, “HBO, You’re Busted,” LA Times,  July .

Pimps and Pied Pipers 
the disabled sex worker who maintains the property, and whom Al Swearengen
keeps around, he jokes, in case a potential client “only has  cents.” The pros-
titutes working the Gem, and its in-town rivals, are natural resources, akin to
the Dakota hills surrounding the eponymous mining town. They are mined for
gold and used up in the process (one of many on this show to beat women,
George Hearst’s gold-hunting geologist will cut into prostitutes, he thinks,
just as his employer cuts into the earth). That gold, the money extracted
from their bodies, is the only offspring they are allowed (Alma Garret is the
single woman possessed of both gold and child, but the child is adopted).
The Tiqqun collective dubs its Young Girl “true gold, the absolute numer-
aire,” and its related claim that this figure has become a post-Fordist
“general equivalent” draws implicitly on Luce Irigaray’s account of prostitu-
tion, which account builds on Marx in arguing that sex workers embody
both use- and exchange-value, and as such are “two things at once,” endowed
by men with “a physical or natural form, and a value form.” Assuming that
“woman has value on the market by virtue of one single quality: that of being
a product of man’s labor,” Irigaray argues, “Women-as-commodities are thus
subject to a schism that divides them into the categories of usefulness and ex-
change value; into matter-body and an envelope that is precious but impene-
trable.” On Deadwood, gold-generating women contain that precious but
impenetrable envelope, and in this way figure what Slavoj Žižek, building
on Alfred Sohn-Rethel, calls “the body within the body” of money – the
“sublime material” of money, “that ‘indestructible and immutable’ body
which persists beyond the corruption of the body physical.” To elaborate
by way of a song from Gold Diggers of , women are not simply “in the
money,” but embodiments of it (Gold Diggers nods to Eric Von Stroheim’s
Greed, an early version of Frank Norris’s McTeague that famously depicts a
woman rolling on a bed covered in money; Milch’s HBO drama Luck reshoots
that scene (Figures  and )). Within the terms of Marx’s actual analysis, the
laboring body cannot be currency and still possessed of labor power. And
Irigaray’s terms are less rigorous in their Marxism than, say, those of
Fortunati, whose paradigm-shifting analyses of housework and sex work
reveal how women’s “indirectly waged labor” allows capital “to reproduce indi-
viduals as labor power.” For Fortunati, “the body within the body” of the sex
worker contains something other than the sublime material of money; as she
insists, “there is a commodity contained within the individual: that labor


     Luce Irigaray, The Sex Which Is Not One (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ), –.
     For a rebuttal of Irigary that reads the prostitute as self-empowered see Shannon Bell,
     Reading, Writing, and Rewriting the Prostitute Body (Bloomington: Indiana University
     Press), –.

     Slavov Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, ), , original emphasis.

 Michael Szalay

Figure . The gender of money, in Greed.

power which as capacity for production has exchange value.” But Irigaray and
Žižek both allow us nevertheless to register how HBO’s women capture what is
most contradictory in the network’s desire to convert people into exchangeable
quantity. Their physical bodies are in constant tension with the ostensibly
sublime material they are imagined to bear.

                       HOLOCAUSTS AND CARNIVALS
The sublime material long at stake on HBO – the indestructible body within
the body most important to its industrial reflexivity – has never been gold
itself, but brand equity. Since Deadwood, network programming has become
increasingly explicit about that fact. “Rebranded!” announces Selina Meyer
in Veep, as she walks into a room with a new haircut (·). Like Julia Louis-
Dreyfus, Meyer is the brand at the center of a media circus. And brands
must be managed, as Kent Davidson makes clear when he sits down the
vice president’s daughter to talk with her about her unfavorable “likeability
index” (·): “This is about the brand image of Catherine Meyer™,” he mono-
tones. It matters, of course, that Catherine is Selina’s progeny. As on Mildred
Pierce so too on Veep: when working mothers do appear on HBO, they raise
not simply children, but surrogate media brands.


     London: Leopoldina Fortunati, The Arcane of Reproduction (London: Autonomedia, ),
     –, original emphasis.

Pimps and Pied Pipers 

Figure . In the money, in Gold Diggers of .

   Meyer’s person figures the quasi-monetary conversion of network brand
equity, and men wishing to control that process beset her. The personal
trainer Ray would condition her body as a kind of money management. A
workout guru, Ray aims for a less abject and more exchangeable body.
Doing so requires a theory of money and value, the show suggests. “Money
is just a concept,” the American Ray informs a representative of the Bank
of England: “we believe in it because we’re too scared not to. There’s no in-
trinsic value to it, you know, like muscles in your arms” (·). Silicon Valley
offers a rejoinder to this claim during an argument over the relation
between money and value. “I’m selling [my house],” one character says.
“That’s just money,” the other replies, “it has no real value.” The decisive
rebuke: “It literally defines value” (·). Ray, on the other hand, thinks
there is nothing intrinsically valuable – no sublime material – within
money’s physical form; this distinguishes it from arm muscle, whose value
derives from its capacity to exert force, in this case on Meyer. Ray’s muscular
arms work the VP during their training sessions, and he would extend his dis-
cipline to other areas of her life. He offers to “normalfy” a florid speech she
rehearses as he vigorously kneads her shoulders; he will happily replace the lit-
erary language with something “more plain,” to recall the Iron Banker from
Game of Thrones, something more like the numbers that banker contrasts to
traditional storytelling. The very lowbrow Ray is a sign of both the material
regrounding of quality and its consequent undoing. He is simultaneously a
spokesman for concrete embodiment and a harbinger of the incipiently quan-
titative thinking that HBO casts as the death of refinement. Likewise, Meyer’s
body is tantamount to the plain story that is Veep, available for so many nu-
merical conversions.

 Michael Szalay
   At the apex of the show’s quantitative thinking, the President governs by
the numbers, and it makes sense, given HBO’s commitment to “quality,”
that Veep should heap contempt on his style of rule; the strategic distancing
recalls the viewer to HBO’s ostensible indifference to figure-driven program-
ming. “It’s insane over here,” whispers Mike McLintock, Meyer’s communi-
cations director. “It’s like a math prison: they rape you with numbers” (·).
He’s been assigned to Davidson, (the “Pol Pot of Pie Charts”), a strategist who
works for the President and is so devoted to quantitative methods that the
White House Chief of Staff tells him, “I bet when you take a crap, it actually
comes out as a number two” (·). Throughout, the President seems like
nothing so much as the Time Warner CEO, admonishing HBO through
intermediaries to more effectively cross-market parent-company brands.
Having it both ways, Veep will lampoon that imperative and fulfill it all the
same. During the second season opener, the VP learns from White House sta-
tisticians that her campaign appearances generate a · percent bump in ap-
proval, “a consistent integer,” for whichever candidate she shows up to
support. She is a walking numerical phenomenon; “You’re like Neo,” an
awe-filled statistician tells her. The reference to The Matrix clarifies how she
functions on behalf of HBO: just as Neo moves in and out of code at will,
Meyer’s statistically magical person constitutes a reflexive locus of conversion,
the ground upon which Veep exchanges itself into and out of otherwise hetero-
geneous forms of Time Warner brand equity, like The Matrix. In this spirit,
the comedy will feature an extended conversation about Harry Potter, and
this gesture to another proprietary brand: “Are you familiar with the Eye of
Sauron, the fire-rimmed, all-seeing eye from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings?”
Davidson asks McLintock. “The Eye of Sauron is the near perfect analog
for the modern media,” he tells him, insofar as it can be tricked into fixing
on the wrong object. The gaze of the media, he adds, must be distracted
from “what’s going on here” (·). The phrase reveals an essential confusion.
What is going on, and where exactly is “here”? If Veep acknowledges the
primacy of numerical thinking in official politics, it acknowledges the same
primacy in media products designed to rationalize their conversion into and
out of other brands. More basically, Davidson’s language suggests our own
confusion over the means and ends of television itself: viewers do not know,
he implies, what television is and what it does.
   Witness, for example, the arcane registers activated when Veep places its star
before the eye of the modern media. Meyer tasks Gary, her body man, with
securing the lipstick recommended by her stylist, “Miami Sunburst.” It is
Congressional election night, and the President has assigned her to the
morning talk shows (he has noticed her · percent bump). She wants the lip-
stick, she says, “So when it hits  a.m., my eyes will say Holocaust and my
mouth will say carnival.” Meyer’s outrageous metaphor likens her

Pimps and Pied Pipers 
performance before the camera to the forced labor and mass liquidation of
Jews in Nazi camps – just as Oz likens its own logo to the Nazi swastika.
The parent company’s corporate brand is a death camp; it imprisons and dis-
ciplines bodies before liquidating them. The red and potentially skin-burning
“Miami Sunburst” invokes the cover of Time magazine framed upon the walls
of the vice president’s office (the same cover that appears in the opening se-
quence), which pictures the telltale banner of the longtime Time Warner
property printed in red across her forehead. Meyer’s branded forehead in
turn echoes her daughter’s: the VP discovers a photo of Catherine with the
word “Glue” printed upon her forehead. The word refers to Catherine’s ima-
gined ability to bring Meyer and her estranged husband together before the
cameras. The word thus also recalls, by virtue of its placement, the brand
equity into which Veep would convert Meyers: that equity binds the otherwise
incommensurate, as a kind of glue. But glue is no sublime material, and taken
together, the two foreheads make reference to still another Time Warner film
property: Batman, the Warner Bros. picture in which the Joker – whose face
screams Holocaust and carnival – applies cosmetics, derived from the same
acid brew that once disfigured his leering face, to female models before
placing them before news cameras. In that film, argues Jerry Christensen,
Vicki Vale represents Time Inc., which Batman must rescue from a hostile
takeover bid on behalf of Warner Bros., the film studio that aimed itself to
merge with Time. Nobody rescues Meyer, manipulated as she is by Time
Warner’s quantitative imperatives. Her face branded with the insignia of
the “quality” that Christensen says Warner Bros. purchased when merging
with Time, she evokes the Joker’s victims. Placed before the camera, she
becomes one of the abject bodies that Time Warner would melt, into some-
thing other than air.

                              HBO’S SNACK DICK
Becoming less dependent on cable companies means entering into more direct
competition with companies like Google, and so it is not surprising that HBO
should begin to engage and, more often than not, lampoon those companies.
In the third season of Veep, Meyer brings her staff to Silicon Valley to meet the
CEO of a thinly disguised Google. The autistic CEO will not defer to Meyer,
or the political power she represents. Internet giants are arrogant and in need
of federal restraint, the episode makes plain. Silicon Valley also satirizes Google,
in the form of Hooli, a tech giant that employs Richard Hendrix, a


     See Jerry Christensen, American’s Corporate Art: The Studio Authorship of Hollywood
     Motion Pictures (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, ), –.

 Michael Szalay
programmer who in his free time codes a lossless compression algorithm that
serves as the basis for a corporation he endeavors to fund over the course of the
first season.
   That algorithm extends the network’s language of numbers in a very
obvious way: it promises to revolutionize the information and entertainment
industries by rendering content smaller and thus available for more efficient
transport. The algorithm on Silicon Valley is so elegantly written that it
renders highly compressed data both immune to loss and searchable. Where
Veep and, below, True Detective testify to fraught conversions, and therefore
to (data) bodies that will not melt away, Silicon Valley fantasizes a tidier dis-
solution. An instrument of abstraction and dematerialization, the Hendrix al-
gorithm promises to halve the physical form of data (thus halving the size of
ugly server farms, Hendrix brags to a small-businessman in the Central Valley).
The algorithm extends the fantasy at the heart of the digital industries: look,
we can disappear your bodies and the physical world, only to conjure them
anew in fresher and more immortal form. The algorithm might also be said,
more broadly, to elaborate the capitalist fantasy that muscle, or concrete
human labor, might somehow survive its conversion into money: putatively
“lossless” algorithms like Hendrix’s don’t sacrifice quality to quantity; they
do no violence to their inputs, which, impossibly, they both preserve and
exchange.
   Silicon Valley works through these fantasies in its twinned fascination with
converting bodies to brands on the one hand and digital signals on the other. It
is useful to think of the show’s opening title sequence as an analog to its com-
pression algorithm: the cartooned sequence shows new companies squeezing
themselves into both the crowded space of the “true” Silicon Valley and the
crowded brandscape generated from within that geographical locale.
Likewise, Hendrix’s algorithm compresses data into a shortened annotation
so that they require fewer bits; it makes room where before there was none.
In fact, the algorithm eliminates redundancy in a manner loosely analogous
to the way the two interlaced lowercase letters that ultimately form the corpor-
ate logo of Pied Piper excise unnecessary letters (Figure ). The marketing cam-
paign that advertises Silicon Valley describes the desire of those working in
Silicon Valley to become thus compressed; at once real and virtual, Silicon
Valley/Silicon Valley is a place “Where Everybody Wants to be an Icon.”
Understood in relation to Figure , the tagline describes those who wish to
become knockoffs of Steve Jobs; understood in terms of the Promethean am-
bition of Jobs himself, the language suggests an aspiration to disappear not
simply into pictograms of the kind used in the graphical user interface, but
into a brand logo so widely recognized that it becomes naturalized, a universal
but nonetheless propertied cultural touchstone.

Pimps and Pied Pipers 

Figure . Silicon Valley, brand compression.

Figure . Silicon Valley, brand compression.

   Silicon Valley dramatizes the birth of a corporation, an origin story that it
casts in biomorphic terms. “This is your baby,” Monica says to Hendrix,
about his new company (·). But like True Detective, Silicon Valley anato-
mizes male bonds in a world without women and children. The marketer

 Michael Szalay
Erlich Bachman runs the all-male “incubator” that houses Hendrix. Funds
from the homosocial incubator come from his sale of a start-up, Avioto,
whose name replicates the sound he makes while ejaculating. That ejaculate
fertilizes male business fantasy: “Stop being a pussy and start being an
asshole!” Bachman instructs Hendrix. The venture capitalist who has seeded
them with start-up funds, Peter Gregory, is, according to Bachman, “a billion-
aire because he knows how and when to be an asshole” (·). Gregory’s agent,
and the carrier of his seed (money), Monica might be the only character
capable of securing the future of Hendrix’s corporate child. But she is also,
in the first season, an alien female presence in a show that pushes to one
extreme HBO’s efforts to convert female into male “quality”: whereas Oz
and The Sopranos dramatized male corporeality as an antidote to women’s
bodies and spheres, Silicon Valley eliminates the female body from its own
cast in the service of a more abstract male corporate personhood. Pied
Piper’s financial officer, Jared Dunn, is said to “look like someone starved a
virgin to death” (·). That ghostly demeanor, purchased through a symbolic
crime against women, captures a fantasy of valorization in which capital repro-
duces itself without women – whose capacity for biological reproduction
figures an archaic form of brand propagation that does not accommodate
digital transcendence and sui generis corporatism. For True Detective’s
Rustin Cohle, we will see, “the honorable thing for our species to do is to
deny our programming. Stop reproducing.” Silicon Valley reprograms that pro-
gramming, such that “our species” will produce only male corporations, each
an immortal brand avatar.
   Pied Piper’s first logo expresses that male fantasy in revealing ways. “It looks
like a guy sucking a dick, and he’s got another dick tucked behind his ear for
later . . . like a snack dick,” says programmer Dinesh Chugtai. A simple joke
presents itself: servicing consumers is akin to sucking them off. The
comment anticipates the conclusion of the first season, in which Pied Piper
produces a mathematical model for determining how most efficiently to mas-
turbate the audience of mostly men before whom they are about to present
their compression algorithm (the model was later published online, with for-
mulae and graphs). Call this a perfect, if satirical, illustration of HBO’s
romance with numbers, its efforts to derive quantity from quality on behalf
of a purely male audience. At the same time, Chugtai’s joke offers another
way of understanding the anxiety about women so prevalent on HBO. If
the end of Silicon Valley’s first season suggests the orgiastic and even queer
nature of corporatization, it also clarifies the implicit feminization at risk in
the media industry’s service work. At the end of the second season, the Pied
Piper team wrestles with cables and puts out fires, media and tech work suddenly
rendered thingly and physical, more concrete than the mere manipulation of lines
of code, or the servicing of clients. But here, at the end of the first season season,

Pimps and Pied Pipers 
work emerges as it does for male leftists who invoke the female prostitute while
writing on the horrors of the service economy. The vision on offer in Silicon
Valley is more ecstatic than, say, Mark Fisher’s, which likens communications
work to bukkake – but it is in its crucial aspects otherwise identical.
   The logo scorned by Chugtai rewards further attention. To understand a
man blowing into an instrument as sucking on a dick is to reverse the flow
of inspiration, cast now as insemination. And to understand musical creation
as an influx of seed (semen) is, in this show, to describe that creation as an in-
cipiently financial borrowing. Above all, to see the Pied Piper logo as a man
sucking on a dick that also enters his head from his back side is to see that
dick not simply as a musical pipe that runs through the head, but as the
kind of pipe that delivers broadband to consumers. A version of that pipe
figures in Veep. Gary the body man, tasked with keeping her supplied with
snacks, typically stands behind Meyer and whispers into her ear whatever
she needs to know for the conversation at hand; as he puts it, “I’ve always ima-
gined myself as like a pipeline who carries a lot of necessary information and I
just feed it directly into her head” (·) (Figures  and ). A piper with a pipe
running through his head (or a vice president spouting lines whispered into her
ear) is an author or actor whose lines are not really her own, and Chugtai’s
comments key into a story about originality and piracy. But Silicon Valley is
as much about the loss of a delivery platform (and the invention of a new
one) as it is about the loss of original material. Time Warner once possessed
its own pipers (the Warner Music Group) and its own pipes (Time Warner
cable). It also had a new media distribution platform in AOL. As we have
seen, it would retreat, faced with the debt required to purchase its diverse
assets, into film and TV production alone. And yet the fantasy behind the
AOL merger, that a media company might control the digital distribution of
its own content, lived on in the rush to produce HBO.GO and HBO Now,
online platforms able to do what Time Warner hoped AOL might have
done. The opening credits to Silicon Valley depict the taking down of an
AOL sign from atop a large complex in the upper left of the screen;
Facebook signs go up in their place (Figure ). A small, if self-induced, humili-
ation for a conglomerate that hoped, at the start of the new millennium, to have
led the way in digital content distribution. But already during the first season of
Silicon Valley HBO was preparing to cut cord and offer itself directly online.
   The comedy anticipates this move – is, indeed, an instance of it. Hendrix first
imagines his algorithm in the service of musicians who would check their music


     For Mark Fisher see “Suffering with a Smile,” Occupied Times of London,  June . See
     also Carl Cederstrom and Peter Fleming, “If Only I Was Fucked and Left Alone,” Strike!
     Magazine,  June .

 Michael Szalay

Figure . Silicon Valley, pipeline.

Figure . Veep, pipeline

against vast quantities of already recorded songs, to determine if they are commit-
ting piracy when recording and selling what they hope will be considered original
material. But by the second season, Hendrix and his team are streaming video;
this is where the money is, and his algorithm holds the key to unlocking moun-
tains of it. Online content providers aim to provide optimal picture and sound
quality while taking up as little bandwidth as possible – in large part because con-
sumers face caps on their allowed bandwidth speed. Doing so requires state-of-
the-art compression algorithms, and during the making of Silicon Valley’s first
season, Netflix had the clear advantage in this technology. It turns out, in

 
      MDP-Labs.com, July , at http://mdp-labs.co/netflix-leads-with-superior-compression-
      algorithms.

Pimps and Pied Pipers 

Figure . Silicon Valley, compressed brand space.

other words, that the compression algorithm that is the subject of Silicon Valley is
the very technology that HBO.GO had not yet then successfully implemented in
its competition with Netflix. Silicon Valley dramatizes not simply the conversion
of bodies into brands, but the genesis of an algorithm that might facilitate the
program’s own more efficient dematerialization for direct delivery over the
Internet. A show that would compress a geographical locale into a thirty-
minute comedy is in this way also a striking illustration of Raymond
Williams’s claim that “Every specific art has dissolved into it, at every level of
its operations, not only specific social relationships, which in a given phase
define it . . . but also specific material means of production, on the mastery of
which its production depends.”

                                 “TRUE QUALITY”
Like its cognate and predecessor True Blood, the first season of True Detective
takes place in backcountry Louisiana; the opening credits to the two dramas
rhyme visually, and while the two dramas dramatize different backwoods bar-
barisms, they share an interest in recondite knowledge and occult forms of cor-
poreal transcendence. Both shows are interested in the “true,” the branded
effect or simulated appearance of the ontologically sound, in just the way
that HBO is interested in “quality.” And of course the two dramas share
women with branded backs. True Detective begins with the discovery of a


     Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), .

 Michael Szalay
dead sex worker upon whose lifeless corpse a cryptic spiral has been branded.
The mutilated body bespeaks a misogynist violence more extreme than any
found in True Blood, Veep, or Silicon Valley.
   At first pass, the show’s ponderous cosmology seems to take the body as
proof of a universal condition. In the words of Rustin Cohle, We are “pro-
grammed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact every-
body’s nobody. I think the honorable thing for our species to do is to deny our
programming. Stop reproducing” (·). The problem would seem to be chil-
dren. “Children are a disappointment. Remain unfettered” (·), advises
one of the many hard men in the second season. That advice has long been
implicit on HBO. The network has abounded in children either separated
from their parents or killed. On The Sopranos, Ralph Cifaretto beats a preg-
nant stripper to death. The Wire offers a virtual holocaust of the young,
announced perhaps most crushingly with the death of Wallace in Season
. On Game of Thrones, the only babies we see are the harvest of incest, and
food for the undead. On Silicon Valley, Hendrix names his company after
the fairy-tale flautist who kidnaps kids. Deadwood features two children, one
of them run down by a stray horse. True Detective is similarly bereft. His
wife and daughter taken from him in a car accident (the child is named
“Sophia,” after the only child to survive Deadwood), the heartsick Cohle repre-
sents the surprising culmination of HBO’s case against children. But the argu-
ment most important to that case is not finally existential, and if from one
vantage Cohle exemplifies what it means for armchair philosophers to “have
become too self-aware” (·), from another his invocation of “programming”
suggests a pointed industrial self-awareness.
   In Veep and True Blood, the always potentially reproductive female body
functions as the brand’s form of appearance, the privileged if disciplined
carrier of HBO brand equity. True Detective and Silicon Valley, on the
other hand, chasten their men to forgo heterosexual desire and biological re-
production even as they use their few female characters to figure the outmoded
distribution networks from which HBO would free itself. Michelle Chihara
asks us, “Call to mind the show’s imagery: the river, and the way that the
crimes are bundled around that pipeline. Remember all those long loving
shots of telephone wires?” As she sees it, “The whole show is about pipelines
and technology, choice and contract.” The choice in question involves the
viewer’s decision whether or not to opt out of a long-term cable contract
for something less binding. At one point Cohle’s partner, Martin Hart,
passes on sex with a woman who appears looming out of a T-Mobile logo,
the cell-phone carrier best known for its non-binding contracts. For
Chihara, “The tampon is the visible symbol of the binding, monthly contract
that Hart has entered into with his wife. The T-Mobile prostitute represents

Pimps and Pied Pipers 
freedom from all that.” Here again, a woman’s capacity for biological repro-
duction (as opposed to casual sex) figures brand propagation and distribution
at its most traditional and therefore problematic.
   But what about Cohle’s radical freedom, his ability to choose? It cannot be
that the cut-rate T-Mobile represents a happy option, as indeed more generally
Cohle is far from happy in his freedom (the existential philosophizing provides
no final payoff, but it is not irrelevant either). Here we might turn to The Wire,
which features extended conversations about the business models of phone
companies with Stringer Bell (whose name evokes the regional companies –
each a baby – created in the wake of antitrust litigation brought against
AT&T). Obviously enough, The Wire turns on a race between the
Baltimore police and drug gangs either to secure or gain access to phone
lines, first landlines and later cell lines. But Bell is interested in the telecommu-
nications giant WorldCom because it offers strategies for selling inferior pro-
ducts in a market defined by elastic demand. In this, WorldCom is pointedly
not HBO, which later would, when launching HBO Now, almost double
the $. charged by Netflix for a monthly subscription, because of the ima-
gined demand for its product. But long before that launch, David Simon
thought that WorldCom represented precisely the disappearance of value
that his show meant to document, and, implicitly, redress. He used
WorldCom, he said, because it evoked the accounting scandals of the new mil-
lennium, which followed on the heels of Time Warner’s  merger with
AOL and the subsequent popping of the tech bubble. Enron and
WorldCom were “the first shots across our bow, economically. That people
were trading crap and calling it gold. That’s what The Wire was about. It
was about that which is – has no value, being emphasized as being meaningful.
And that which is – has genuine meaning, being given low regard.”
   Simon’s compressions offer more material than we can here unpack. How
are the urban unemployed akin to gold? What does it mean to treat human life
not as overvalued stock but as gold? More basically, what kind of “value” does
Simon have in mind? Does he use the general sense of the word invoked on
Veep and Silicon Valley, when characters debate the nature of money, or the
valorized productive labor detailed by Marx in Capital? That last question
speaks to True Detective, which, we have good reason to believe, is at least ob-
liquely in dialogue with Marx’s value. “I went liquid for this deal,” says Frank
Semyon (·). The shady entrepreneur takes his name from Semyon


     Michelle Chihara, “Kingmakers and the HBO Brand,” Los Angeles Review of Books,  June
     .

     Simon quoted in Shirin Deylami and Jonathan Havercroft, eds., The Politics of HBO’s The
     Wire: Everything Is Connected (New York: Routledge, ), .