As recently as three years ago Silicon Valley chronicler Po Bronson thought the same thing about the dramatic appeal of high tech. “The daily work was writing code,” he says. “It wasn’t time yet” for Hollywood to move in. But today entrepreneurship is more about people than bits and bytes. “That’s something you can dramatize,” Bronson says.

So, the entertainment business is looking to cash in. Eager to find a replacement for law firms, TV networks hope the start-up will be the next plot factory. The film industry, meanwhile, sees a chance to capitalize. “The Valley has the same center-of-the-universe feel to it as Wall Street in the 1980s,” says Michael Lewis, author of “The New New Thing.”

Lewis and Bronson both have film projects in the works for 20th Century Fox. But so far, two TV attempts have whiffed. ABC and Fox both took cracks at the Garry Trudeau/Robert Altman drama, “Killer App.” Fox even shot a pilot last year, but it never aired. Bronson and “ER” vet Paul Manning developed “South of Market” (named after San Francisco’s start-up district) for ABC. It ultimately passed, but the pair claim to have other big-name suitors.

Humanizing Silicon Valley won’t solve all their problems. Let’s say you want to launch a TV series. Most start-ups wouldn’t outlast the pilot, let alone the first season. And Web companies that do survive turn into regular companies awfully fast. Bronson dodges the bullet by setting “South of Market” at an incubator, basically an e-commerce assembly line. “It’s like a law firm, where everyone’s working on a different case.” (Subplots! Sex partners! Spinoffs!) And, “an incubator allows you to bring failure into the realm.” Occasional bad news is a must–otherwise we’re watching smart, beautiful kids doing their darndest to make oceans of cash. That’s why TV doctors are always in search of a heart donor for little Sally.

To compensate, writers will probably take a cue from “The Pirates of Silicon Valley,” TNT’s 1999 Steve Jobs and Bill Gates biopic about two charismatic personalities (OK, one) rather than the money they made. “You root for these people because they’re human, not because you want them to end up with $100 million,” says Russ Smith, producer of yet another Bronson project, “The IPO.” A little mud-wrestling couldn’t hurt either.