Any young lady who grows up in that region of northern California known as Silicon Valley gets a whole lotta mileage out of “Valley Girl” puns. To the best of my knowledge, though, Jesse Draper — daughter of venture capitalist Tim Draper of Draper Fisher Jurvetson — is the first one to get a web series out of it.
The Valley Girl Show is a smart pitch — a Legally Blonde-eque brunette uses her Valley connections to take on the Bay Area tech scene on her own, extraordinarily pink turf. In each episode, Draper, a graduate of UCLA’s school of Theater, Film and Television who previously appeared in Nickelodeon’s The Naked Brothers Band, plays up the Valley bit of her moniker as she chats with various players in the region’s tech industry, all of whom are really good sports about the hard-core gimmickry involved.
Draper is a decent interviewer (albeit a total softballer), and her first two subjects — Tesla/PayPal co-founder Elon Musk and former 49er-turned-venture capitalist Ronnie Lott — are well-spoken about their topics of interest. The production values are relatively professional as well: Interviews are conducted on what looks to be an actual soundstage that tastefully incorporates pink into its decor, and the site is hosted on a very clean, well-designed site. Effort is made to give the show the veneer of amateur-ness — specifically, animation overlaid on the video that draws no shortage of inspiration from the classic Nickelodeon series Clarissa Explains It All — but the more chunky plastic jewelry Draper wears, the more obvious it is that she’s very much playing a role here.
It’s interesting to compare this current iteration of The Valley Girl against Draper’s initial stab at the series, which ran for nine episodes in 2008, for what the 2008 version lacked in sophistication or production values, it made up for in quirk and spontaneity. One almost Pee Wee’s Playhouse touch was that each episode opened with the guest being ferried up to the den of the Valley Girl by her best friend Coco (Sharon Lee) in a golf cart bedecked with pink gauze. There were also pink feather boas, visits to other offices and a lack of coherent editing. But while the series then felt much more like a vanity project, it also felt more authentically true to the persona being put on display.
The bigger issue, though, is that it’s hard to get a handle on who the audience for this show is. Serious Silicon Valley folk, after all, might have a hard time engaging with the series’ goofy tone, while the young girls who own both the first Legally Blonde and its sequel on DVD might not be super interested in the show’s strong focus on business. The concept of the show is a decent joke — but how many times can you hear it repeated?
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