‘Big Iron Bits’ Season 2 Marks Return of ‘Mainframe Bizarro World’
Chaz and friends are back as Broadcom MSD’s mockumentary ventures deeper into the world of mainframe
About a year ago, the new CIO of Techutex Technologies was threatening to pull the plug on the mainframe. Within a matter of months, the wild-eyed tech boss was attending his first SHARE conference as the mainframe’s biggest cheerleader.
“This is the place for mainframe superheroes, and I want to be one of them,” he declared outside the expo hall, decked out head-to-toe in vendor swag, complete with a purple cape and pointy birthday hat that made him look like a COBOL-conjuring sorcerer.
But despite his outlandish appearance, he had his mainframe talking points locked in: “It’s reliable, it’s secure, and we’re innovating with it every day.”
Chaz had seen the light, but he was just getting started. The mononymous executive’s journey of mainframe discovery is chronicled in Season 1 of “Big Iron Bits.” After logging 57 million video views across an initial 12-episode run, Broadcom Mainframe Software’s mockumentary series will be back for a second season in mid-November.
This time, no one needs to be convinced of the mainframe’s essential role in enterprise computing. With Chaz buying in, that foundation has already been set, allowing for a deeper dive into the concepts and technologies that are part of any modern mainframe discussion—like modernization, automation, frontier AI and quantum safety.
Serious Messages, Comedic Packaging
Season 1 of “Big Iron Bits” was about exploring the modern mainframe and dispelling myths . The aim was to entertain veterans of the platform while also introducing it to the uninitiated. With that groundwork laid, the lessons are about to become more nuanced.
“With Season 2, we start to get a little bit more granular and you see more glimpses into the technical side of the mainframe world, whereas Season 1 was a little bit more surface level,” Keelia Estrada Moeller, marketing content specialist at Broadcom MSD, tells TechChannel.
As Chaz and his band of devoted mainframers—Larry, Alice and Ravi—contend with the intricacies of the mainframe ecosystem, they are joined by a new leader, Joan, who comes from a cutting-edge, Silicon Valley-style tech background. But unlike Chaz when he first joined Techutex, Joan already appreciates the mainframe as a vital component of the modern IT landscape.
“She comes in as a believer and is proud of what the team has done, and wants to encourage them to go further,” says John Kaplan, head of brand, events, content and communications at Broadcom MSD.
No Lectures, Just Bits
As the team behind “Big Iron Bits” builds out new characters and colors in their mainframe universe, they contend with the challenge of being technically accurate and funny at the same time. That imperative lands at the feet of writer Josh O’Dell, who’s tasked with spinning Broadcom’s technical messaging into comedy gold.
“We don’t want to end up with episodes where somebody comes into a room and just delivers a lecture. That gets old very quickly,” O’Dell says.
In Season 1, those mainframe messages were dispensed through comedic vehicles like “The Ghost of Lift-and-Shift Future” who pays Chaz a visit during a time of soul searching for the boss, or, during another moment of crisis, the song-and-dance routine (“There’s no mainframe skills crisis”) the gang performs to cheer up their leader as he stress-eats ice cream straight out of the carton. These are the kinds of narrative wrappers that help make the show’s mainframe message more accessible.
“I think that’s kind of the fun dance of it all,” O’Dell says. “How do we resist the urge to just have somebody come in and just spit out some information and find either a crazy context or a reason why they have to say that, or have them reveal that information in a way that is in itself kind of funny or different?”
In the mainframe community, and even in IT at large, that kind of marketing approach could be considered experimental, Estrada Moeller observes. Although they were venturing into that unexplored territory, they had a good idea the approach would land with their audience.
“After we saw the first couple scripts, we did table reads internally to feel them out and gain some buy-in, and it felt really good pretty quickly,” Kaplan says.
Living in ‘Mainframe Bizarro World’
In search of the right comedic tone for their serious messages, the Broadcom team gave O’Dell a long leash as he built out an alternate universe where the principles of business and technology apply as normal, but where Chaz’s eccentric behavior elicits gentle correction instead of an appointment with HR.
“We live in bizarro world, mainframe bizarro world,” O’Dell says.
To make that work, the writer had to bring the audience along slowly, introducing Chaz as merely eccentric before the stress of the job causes him to take the extreme measures portrayed later in the season. For instance, Chaz didn’t move to the woods to become a hermit—stuck in a nihilistic stupor after learning about the scale of global data growth—until episode 10 of Season 1. By that point, the audience was primed to accept such misadventures as Chaz being Chaz.
“If you can believe that a character would do something, then it doesn’t matter what they’re doing,” O’Dell explains.
So what will Chaz do next? How will he react when he learns about the startling capabilities of frontier AI models? Or when he ponders the security implications of quantum computing?
Now that we know what Chaz is capable of, all bets are off in Season 2.
“Maybe if people have been watching, they don’t have to suspend their disbelief quite as much,” O’Dell says, “because we’ve already kind of got the train rolling a little bit.”
See the full conversation with the team behind “Big Iron Bits” here (IT Social Hour link).