Betas Tries Review With Girls Type Humor

In the second episode of Amazon's Betas, the main character makes a tongue-in-cheek launch video for the hookup app he's developing. It's to poke fun at the cliched life a blogger accused him of living in a harsh takedown post, but instead it highlights the show's weaknesses: The character, and the show, try very, very hard to be cool.

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Betas is Amazon Studios' second original series, which launched Nov. 22, just one week after the political comedy Alpha House from Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau. While Alpha House didn't have quite enough clever punchlines, Betas has too many.

The half-hour comedy follows a group of four Silicon Valley dudes working on a startup social networking app tailored toward "dating." Joe Dinicol is twenty-something CEO Trey, the ideas man who persuaded his nerdy hacker engineer BFF Nash (Karan Soni) to drop out of Stanford and start their hookup app. Charlie Saxton is programmer Mitchell, and Jon Daly is odd-man-out 35-year-old slacker security chief Hobbes.
The show's main problem is that the dialogue is so clever and stylized, but none of the characters seem to believe what they're saying.

Betas is sort of like a cruder, tech-centric version of the Dawson's Creek dilemma: Do teens really talk like that? No. They don't.

Betas is sort of like a cruder, tech-centric version of the Dawson's Creek dilemma: Do teens really talk like that? No. They don't. But in this case, it's, "Are these people really this clever all the time?" The answer is also no. They're definitely not, but the writers would like them to be.

"We took a few trips to the Bay Area and spent time at accelerators and startups, and we did a lot of phone interviews with venture capitalists, angel investors and tech CEOs," Betas co-creator Evan Endicott told Mashable. "It turned out that the culture and our perceptions of the startup space turned out to be accurate — just from us being people who use apps, read sites like Circles Tech

Circles Tech

or go to movies like The Social Network."
Want to create a drinking game? Take a shot every time someone on Betas name-drops an app (real or fake), a meme or some sort of Silicon Valley tech-speak nonsense. (Drinking games based on Amazon original series are totally the future.)

Basically, this show is packed with a Diablo Cody-level of cute pop culture references, but most of the time it just doesn't feel natural coming from the actors' mouths.

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