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It still serves as a great antidote for the Kool-Aid-drinking startup crowd in desperate need of some self-awareness.
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'Silicon Valley' is embracing the tech industry's absurdity more than ever before
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Now, Silicon Valley the series isn’t so much making fun of the real Silicon Valley as it is basking in how fictional (and laughable) the reality can look to outsiders. It’s a perfect encapsulation of the show’s humor - virtual facial hair is funny, sure but it's even funnier because someone out there is likely working on it right this very minute (and they probably work for Snapchat.)Īs the not-so-unrealistic show enters its third season, it’s embracing the tech industry’s absurdity more so than ever before. The recruiters from the tech startup - which is called Flutterbeam - want him for a secret project focused on 3D-holographic facial hair you can don during live-video chats. Silicon Valley may truly be the satire for our times.In the season three premiere of HBO’s Silicon Valley, former Pied Piper CEO Richard Hendricks finds himself courted by a mustache app. It’s predominantly male and still adjusting to having power, influence and bike meetings (meetings on a multi-seat pushbike which, again, are real) – but not necessarily a girlfriend. It’s Jobs, obviously, which leads Richard to snivel: “Jobs was a poser, he didn’t even write code.” With such insider wit, Silicon Valley both reflects and distorts the hermetically sealed cult of tech. When Erlich refers, in casual conversation, to “Steve”, Richard asks, “Jobs or Wozniak?” Erlich is incensed that Richard would even ask. When season one climaxes at a startup conference called TechCrunch Disrupt, I assumed it to be a lampoon, but it exists. The dialogue delivers not zingers but complex bundles of words, references and ideas, refracting real jargon (“third party insourcing”, “cap tables” “runaway devaluation”, “cloud-based integration modules”) through the prism of snigger. Where, say, 30 Rock crams every nook of its 23-minute running time with gags, the same-length Silicon Valley gives the satire time to percolate. Judge, who created Silicon Valley with King of the Hill cohorts John Altschuler and Dave Krinsky, gets a lot of comic capital from this topical glimpse into corporate campus life. But we can be the Vikings of our day.” Although long-faced Middleditch looks more horse than Norse, his attempts to man up are a constant source of mirth. In an atypically pumped speech, Richard proclaims: “For thousands of years, guys like us have got the shit kicked out of us. Season one rests on the ping-ponging choice between a $200,000 hands-off investment from an eccentric billionaire and a $10m total Hooli buyout, which becomes a matter of self-empowering honour. Unlike their closest sitcom cousins, the science dorks on The Big Bang Theory, Silicon Valley’s social inadequates are quiet, thoughtful and easier to love. His heavyset surfer physique and bullish manner (“Your muffins smell like shit”) stands in contrast to the other techno-wimps under his wing: Martin Starr’s deadpan satanist, Kumail Nanjiani’s sexual ingénu and Zach Woods as a Bambi-eyed corporate refugee. Middleditch is Laurel to TJ Miller’s Hardy, a tech veteran called Erlich who cashed in his microchips to invest in the next generation of programmers. On paper, it’s not exactly the stuff of high drama or thigh-slapping comedy, but it’s amazing how quickly you side with Richard and his fellow freaks and geeks as they negotiate the shark-infested waters of venture capital. He develops a dull music copyright app, whose “killer” compression algorithm starts a bidding war.
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He’s an accidental genius who quits an insufferable Google-type company called Hooli, where he’s bullied at the jelly-bean dispenser, to code it alone. It’s already into its 10-episode second season on Sky here are the first eight.Ī show that toggles between revenge-of-the-nerds soap opera and knife-sharp spoof, Silicon Valley’s unlikely hero is Richard, played by the goofily nasal Thomas Middleditch. But the startup-themed Silicon Valley, his first flesh-and-blood sitcom for HBO, is easily his warmest and subtlest work. Mike Judge, the sly cultural observer who skewered a generation with Beavis and Butt-head and made a smalltown Texas conservative sympathetic in the long-running King of the Hill, has struggled to match his cartoon peaks in the live-action arena (although his flavourings-factory comedy film, Extract, was better than it sounds).