Idiot billionaires, stupid apps, and genius-level swearing: 10 reasons why Silicon Valley is the funniest show on TV
Mike Judge's tech start-up sitcom Silicon Valley is one of the most underrated shows on TV and the best HBO import you've probably never seen. Now it’s back for its eagerly awaited fourth series (10.10pm Mondays on Sky Atlantic). Here’s 10 reasons why it’s the sharpest comedy around…
1. It’s created by comedy hero Mike Judge
Mike Judge was the king of 1990s cult cartoons, creating both Beavis & Butt-head and King Of The Hill, before moving into movies like the criminally underrated Office Space and Idiocracy.
The pilot for Silicon Valley was inspired by Judge’s own experiences as a software engineer in the late 80s, updated for the 21st century to portray a fictional data compression start-up called Pied Piper. One of Judge’s earliest ideas for it was that "The people most qualified to succeed are the least capable of handling success”. Translation: visionary geniuses tend to also be socially inept geeks.
2. Erlich is the sweariest character on the small screen
Beardy buffoon Erlich Bachmann (played with scenery-chomping glee by TJ Miller) is the show’s breakout anti-hero. Once a successful entrepreneur with his own “airline booking aggregator” Aviato, Erlich partied through most of his millions and now runs an “incubator” - basically a sweatshop for nerds. Pied Piper started life there and the loveably grotesque Erlich has gradually become a key part of the team - providing business nous, corporate contacts and elaborate bongs.
His main job, though, is swearing. The sort of colourful insults and baroque cursing at which The Thick Of It’s Malcolm Tucker used to specialise. When Erlich took on a tricky teenager, he threatened to “Kill your mother and rape your father”, telling him “You just bought p___ to a s___ fight!”
He preaches confidence (“Walk in there with three-foot c____s covered in Elvis dust”), casually disses colleagues (“You look like a ferret that gave up on himself six months ago”, “What I’m seeing is the human equivalent of a flaccid penis”) and relishes back-to-back meetings (“Line 'em up, nuts to butts”).
Erlich’s deliberately hostile negotiation technique involves him insulting the complimentary pastries (“Your muffins smell like s___ and so do your ideas”), before putting his testicles on the boardroom table. Even his T-shirts are funny (“I know HTML - how to meet ladies”).
3. It’s the perfect blend of workplace and buddy comedy
Silicon Valley has it all. It skewers male friendship like Entourage or The Trip, mixed with workplace satires like The Office or Veep - liberally seasoned with a sprinkling of nerd-coms like The Big Bang Theory and The IT Crowd. Yet it’s also very much its own thing. And it’s a great thing.
4. It pokes fun at the obscene amounts of money sloshing around
There’s lots of cash flying about in Silicon Valley. Products are launched with ostentatious but pointless multimillion dollar parties. Sales presentations happen on the pitching mound at the San Francisco Giants stadium. CEOs drive cars with doors that open in daft ways or build their own “automated private island”.
One monstrous character, “douche-bro” Russ Hanneman (Chris Diamantopoulos) - who bears many similarities to real-life fat cat Mark Cuban - prides himself on being a member of the “three comma club” and despairs when his worth dips below a billion. He likes to yell “Synergy, bitches!” and at one point boasts: “I’ve got three nannies suing me right now, one of them for no reason.”
5. The programmers form a classic love/hate double act
Programmers Dinesh (Kumail Nanjiani) and Gilfoyle (Martin Starr) are the show's bickering Greek chorus. A start-up Statler and Waldorf, forever feuding or playing elaborate pranks on each other. Whether it’s who writes faster code, who has the bigger monitor or who’s less of a loser with women, everything’s a competition.
“My servers could handle 10 times the traffic if they weren't busy apologizing for your s___ codebase,” drawled Gilfyole in one typical exchange. Dinesh’s response: “Oh, yeah? Well, my codebase could handle this traffic, f___ your mother, make a video of it, upload it and that video would not even buffer.”
6. It pricks the dot.com bubble
You can enjoy Silicon Valley as a pure sitcom but it’s also a knowing satire on the vagaries of the technology industry. Most of the Pied Piper team met at giant conglomerate Hooli (a thinly disguised Google), staffed by “brogrammers” and run by ruthless CEO Gavin Belson (Matt Ross) - an egomaniacal man-baby prone to pronouncements like: “I don’t want to live in a world where someone makes the world a better place better than we do.”
This is a megabucks bubble where everyone’s greedily suing each other, stealing ideas, poaching staff and competing for venture capital - while dressing it up in quasi-philosophical guff about improving the world. As Mike Judge recalls about his own Silicon Valley days: “I had one meeting that was like a gathering of acolytes around a cult leader. 'Has he met Bill?' 'Oh, I'm the VP and I only get to see Bill once a month for 10 minutes.’ ‘But the 10 minutes is amazing!’"
7. There’s a bromance to give it heart
Pied Piper’s brainiac-but-inept-at-busness CEO is Richard Hendricks (played with neurotic nerdiness by Thomas Middleditch), creator of the killer compression algorithm. His endearingly twitchy acolyte is business development gimp Jared Dunn (Zach Woods) - another cult character, partly down to his habit of being overly literal about everything.
When Richard tells potential investors “We love the name Pied Piper. It's a classic fairytale”, Jared can’t help adding: “It's about a predatory flautist who murders children in a cave.” And when Diniesh refers to “Justin Bieber, the Hitler of music”, Jared chimes in: “Hitler actually played the bassoon. So technically, Hitler was the Hitler of music.”
It turns out that workaholic Jared’s been sleeping in the garage all along, which Erlich discovers when he chances across him “like a sad bag of potting soil”. “Sorry if I scared you,” says Jared. “I do have somewhat ghost-like features. My uncle used to say, ‘You look like someone starved a virgin to death.’”
8. It draws on tech industry lore
In series three, Richard found himself outsted as chief exec of Pied Piper. Being kicked out of one’s own company has happened to some of the sector’s most celebrated figures, including Steve Jobs at Apple, Elon Musk at PayPal and Jack Dorsey at Twitter.
9. There are in-jokes for tech fiends
From driverless cars to the Winklevoss twins (“Do you know how much Bitcoin those two genetically enhanced Ken dolls are worth”)?, Silicon Valley scripts are stuffed with knowing references.
People tout lame single-gimmick apps, like one that lets you don a virtual moustache during live-video chats (Snapchat, anyone?) or Bro - “a messaging app that lets you send the word ‘bro’ to everyone else who has the app.”
“So it’s exactly like the Yo app?”
“Exactly, but less original”.
Hooli attempt to pre-empt Pied Piper with their own reverse-engineered equivalent, Nucleus. When it proves a failure, Gavin Belson asks his team: “Is this Windows Vista bad? It’s not iPhone 4 bad, is it? F___. Don’t tell me this is Zune bad.”
“Sir, it’s Apple Maps bad.”
10. It’s the perfect blend of highbrow and profane
Silicon Valley is fearsomely smart - from the authentic science behind its fictional algorithms, to the casual deployment of SWOT analysis and discussions of Schrödinger's cat. Even its episode titles contain clever cultural references: see Two Days Of The Condor, Meinertzhagen's Haversack or Bachman’s Earnings Over-Ride.
One of its most notorious scenes came in the series one finale, set at the TechCrunch Disrupt competition for start-ups, where Erlich vowed: “We are going to win, even if I have to go into the auditorium and personally jerk off every guy in the audience.”
The Pied Piper team promptly calculated the most efficient way of giving handjobs to a roomful of men - a process which involved terms like “mean jerk duration, divided by four dicks at a time” and “pre-sorting guys by height so their dicks line up, for optimal tip-to-tip efficiency”. In turn, this inspired Richard to entirely rebuild Pied Piper’s data compression technique.
Following the finale, Mike Judge tweeted a link to a 12-page paper, complete with charts, scientifically explaining the joke. Now that’s comedy commitment. The episode was duly Emmy-nominated for Outstanding Writing.
50 best TV shows on Netflix UK
