If Betas, Amazon's newest web series about startup life, were a startup itself, it'd be time for a pivot. It just hasn't caught on. But even if it's not always good, it's important show—and, since it's streaming on-demand on Amazon, you ought to give it a try.

Popular culture may have turned its gaze westward, toward the mirage of wunderkind coders, open floor plans studded with perks, and suddenly ubiquitous apps that make their makers insta-millionaires. But the competition to get Silicon Valley right has been flaccid. I was burned by Bravo, bored by Bloomberg, and avoided The Internship like a sticker pack. However Betas, Amazon's original series about social awkward 20-somethings building a social app called "brb," gets some details surprisingly right.

Confused drunk people make great beta testers, apparently. If you really want to know if your app requires too much "cognitive overhead," just try getting this chick to play around with it.

We had really high hopes for Bravo's Silicon Valley reality show—vivid dreams of coders and VCs going topless in hot tubs, turning over tables, and getting arrested on airplanes. Instead, it was just vaguely annoying and mostly boring.