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TV Review: Silicon Valley 1×1, “Minimum Viable Product”

Jose Cordova

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HBO has become known for high quality dramatic fare in recent years, most notably Game of Thrones. On the comedy front HBO has struggled to find the same type of critical and popular success. Its most high profile comedy at the moment is Veep with Julia Louis-Dreyfus but HBO has difficulty establishing comedies other than Veep since Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm ended in 2011. Silicon Valley is their latest attempt at bringing a successful comedy into the HBO family. On paper it has a lot of strengths on its side. The show is from creator Mike Judge who gave us, among other things, Office Space, and has gifted comedians like T.J. Miller and Martin Starr in the cast. Is this finally the show that will add some more comedy cred to HBO’s line-up? I sure hope it is.

From the opening scene of Silicon Valley you can feel Mike Judge behind it. His irreverent sense of humor is ingrained in the DNA of this show, and I love it. Silicon Valley (the actual place) has become known as the land of innovation and the tech capital of the west coast, if not the entire country. It’s an easy argument to make with companies like Google, Apple, and Facebook calling Silicon Valley their home. Now the area has also become the place to be for every software developer with dreams of being just like Steve Jobs (or Wozniak if you don’t want to be a poser). The problem is that not everyone can be Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg and not every app is going to change the world.

Judge and the Silicon Valley team take swing at the inflated sense of importance that infects many of the tech and software companies of today. The party that Richard (Thomas Middleditch) and the rest of the guys living in Erlich’s (T.J. Miller) incubator attend at the start of the episode is teeters on the edge of believability but ultimately you accept it as at least plausible. I had no problem believing that a bunch of newly wealthy tech geniuses would hire Kid Rock to celebrate the sale of their software. Although I’ve never been to this type of party myself, I’ve watched enough shows like CES or E3 online to know the type of shenanigans that often occur at events like this. Silicon Valley also criticizes the corporate culture of companies like Google with the portrayal of the fictional Hooli and its pompous CEO Gavin Belson.

 

The Hooli campus is an obvious parallel to the Googleplex and Judge points out just how ridiculous a place like that can feel and how antagonistic the people working there can be. Richard is meek and soft spoken. Watching his interactions with the “brogrammers” it’s easy to see why he wouldn’t want to be a “lifer.” Things aren’t much better for Richard at home. Erlich, his sponsor of sorts and supposed mentor, dismisses his website Pied Piper just as quickly as his coworkers at Hooli do. It’s not until people realize that buried in his website is a revolutionary compression algorithm that anyone cares about Richard. Suddenly everybody wants something from him, whether it’s his entire website or just a piece.

This is where Silicon Valley really got interesting for me because Judge and the writers recognize that you can’t have completely cynical view on life. Things get pretty hairy for Richard when he becomes the center of a bidding war and the weight of the decision literally makes him sick. His decision to take Peter Gregory’s offer and build his own company is rooted in the desire we all have to create something. I never really thought Richard would “sell out” because clearly the premise of the show is predicated on his decision to strike it out on their own and it sets the stage to explore how and why people become egomaniacs like Gavin Belson or strange pseudo-successes like Erlich. Silicon Valley understands that the “brogrammer” attitude isn’t just people being jerks for no reason. The tech industry is full of people that more than likely were marginalized and ridiculed for their interests growing up. Now that their skills and interests are valuable and such a large part of modern society the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction. This is pretty much what Richard says in his viking speech at the end of the episode.

As much as some of these guys are full of themselves, they’re just chasing the american dream like everybody else. Just look at Erlich. He initially comes off as kind of an idiot even though he clearly has money and must have some technical know-how since he made a successful piece of software. It seems like all he cares about now is finding another idea to sell and make more cash but the advice he gives to Richard reveals someone who regrets letting go of something he created and who might have actual insight to share with Richard. We don’t get to learn much other than surface details about the rest of the guys in the incubator but the cast sells the sense of camaraderie that’s built up. When Richard invites them to be a part of his company at the end I can see why he’d want them around. Whether this is a good decision or not remains to be seen.

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