CBS’s Wisdom of the Crowd is at it again, this time trying to teach us about feminism and sexism while its main star faces down accusations of sexual assault. The new drama centers around a crowd-sourced crime-fighting platform called “Sophe,” created by Silicon Valley tech innovator Jeffrey Tanner (Jeremy Piven) in an attempt to find out who murdered his daughter. In the process, he ends up helping to solve other crimes with the public’s help, via their input on Sophe.
In the Sunday, November 19 episode, “Denial of Service,” the Sophe platform helps the San Francisco Police Department fight yet another crime - the murder of a tech startup founder, Ron Howland (Andy Ridings).
Tariq (Jake Matthews), an employee at Sophe, discovers a memo on the victim’s computer “criticizing diversity initiatives in the tech world.”
Tariq: I found something weird on the victim's computer. It's a memo he was writing criticizing diversity initiatives in the tech world. It looks like he was gonna send it out to the entire company.
Sara: Like that asinine Google post that said women were inferior.
Tariq: I think that's what he was responding to. "Diversity has become the tech world's third rail. We're not allowed to question it, but, as engineers, it's our duty to question everything. And hiring more women and minorities isn't actually making us more successful, just more politically correct."
Sara: Lovely. And it's your ammunition. Uber took a big hit from that sexism scandal. It lost market shares, publicity and goodwill. A start-up like Javawell could lose everything if that memo got out.
Cavanaugh: Could be a motive for murder.
So the twisting of the Google memo story is still alive and well, as we can see. The left doesn’t care if the facts don’t add up to support their claims, obviously. As long as it pushes their agenda.
There are two male suspects in the murder, Ben (Noah Weisberg) and Mason (Joel Johnstone), and one female, Faith (Natalie Dreyfuss). As Faith is being questioned, she defends Ron, the murder victim who wrote the memo, but Sara (Natalia Tena), the show’s ultra-extremist liberal, tries to get her to second-guess her opinion of Ron as they commiserate over the sexism they’ve faced:
Det. Cavanaugh: You said Mason hassled you. What about Ron?
Faith: Ron never gave me any trouble. He even helped me when I wanted to move teams to get more technical experience. He was a good boss.
Sara: When I was at university, I had this computer science T.A. who used to call me Mary Poppins. Kept asking for a spoonful of sugar.
Faith: Yeah. At my first internship, my supervisor would say, "You should just sit there and look pretty." Funny how my ideas always ended up being his ideas. Well, that's all just... Boys being boys, right?
Sara: Look, whatever happened, you can tell us. It will stay in this room.
Faith: This is not me being loyal. Ron was awkward-- so are a lot of programmers-- but he never hassled me. Not like the others.
Sara: Did you know that he was writing a memo questioning the value of women and minorities in the workplace?
Faith: No. But, then, I guess you never really know anyone, do you?
As Mason is being interviewed, he being a white male and all, he’s of course completely chauvinistic as he talks about how Faith was “wasted” when the crime took place - "girls and liquor, man."
Later, because someone from the NSA leaked information to Tanner, the FBI comes in to Sophe’s headquarters to question employees. When they get to Tariq, who is Muslim, he remarks, “Of course, it’s the brown guy’s fault.”
But Sara one-ups Tariq on the indignant liberal sarcasm when the FBI agent questions her about the hacking into Sophe’s system and asks if she’s noticed any suspicious behavior from Tariq. “What, because Tariq’s Muslim, he must be a criminal? What’s next? Are you gonna call him a terrorist? Disappear him off somewhere?”
Never mind that Tariq is a known hacker, which is why he was hired to work at Sophe in the first place. No, facts are just pesky inconveniences that get in the way of playing the victim and thrusting an agenda on viewers.
In order to get a confession as to what really happened, Sara then takes her mind games with Faith even farther and convinces her that Mason and Ben turned on her. “Of course, they turned on me,” Faith laments. “Did you expect anything different? They were always gonna do what was best for them,” Sara says convincingly.
Faith then spills about what really happened. In a flashback, she and Ron are arguing over the memo the night of the murder, as she screams, “Are you out of your mind, writing a memo like that? There's a reason that Google fired that guy. The customers won't stand for it, especially not our wealthy, liberal ones!”
Ron tells her to calm down, and that she’s overreacting, which sets her off even more. “Oh, don't patronize me,” she yells. “You know what happened with Uber. Do you want to destroy this company?”
Mason then realizes that Ron actually wrote “that stupid think piece,” and is incredulous that he would do such a thing. As the argument becomes more heated, Faith and Ron start to physically scuffle and he accidentally falls down the stairs.
“It was an accident,” Faith explains. “Ben thought if we got our stories straight, everyone would think that he just fell. The death of a founder was bad enough. This way, we could avoid the bad press about the memo. It would be a tragedy, not a scandal. I didn't mean to hurt him. (Sniffles) I just lost it. Another guy I trusted who didn't even think that I deserved to be there. If that memo got out, people were gonna think he was talking about me.”
In the end, it turns out that Mason found Ron alive when he went back to check on him and he grabbed an award off of his shelf and bashed his head in with it, then used the murder weapon to frame Faith. “Typical overcompensating male,” Sarah says to him in the interrogation room. When she accuses him of putting the DNS attack on Sophe as well, he quips back, “typical hysterical female.”
Just in case you didn’t get your fill of the overkill of the leftist agenda in this episode, we’re treated to a conversation between Sara and Prudence (Hannah Marks) who’s been hanging around Sophe’s headquarters because she has a crush on employee Josh (Blake Lee).
She tells Sara that she’s “tried working at a couple start-ups, but the ‘dudebro contingent’s’ really a drag.” Ah yes, yet another female victim subjected to evil men. Sara tells her, “Well, you shouldn’t give up on the tech world just yet. We’re not all bad. Here’s my number. If you ever want to talk.”
While sexism of course exists and should be denounced wherever it does, this story was definitely overkill. Using the misconstrued Google scandal and twisting it even further to advance an agenda is sketchy at best. But the most egregious thing of all is knowing that the star of the show, Jeremy Piven, has been accused of sexual assault by three different women.
Yet, the show’s writers are going to preach about sexism and have the most outspoken, extreme feminist character on the series working side-by-side with a possible real-life predator? Maybe this is this all just another case of, “It’s okay if he’s a liberal?”
