Silicon Valley - HBO - season 1 (1 Viewer)

Not sure it'll make it past its 8-episode initial season, but "Silicon Valley" is somewhat entertaining, with a slow setup pilot episode earlier this month, but the 3rd episode has it gaining some traction for me.

Mike Judge is at the helm of this show about nerds living in Silicon Valley, and the lead character, Richard, creates an app, and in it, buried deep, is the code that offers lossless compression for large files sent over the internet, basically PKZip/WinZip/etc. on steroids.

So the show is about Richard stumbling around to build a business around this new lossless file compression code, and how it impacts his programmer friends/nerds "home" life, and his road to create something big from his idea. Success will be all about the execution...

No sure I like the casting of Matt Ross (Albie from "Big Love", just because his portrayal of Ablie just colors most of his work since "Big Love", so I would have hoped for another actor playing the antagonist for this show.

The guy playing Richard reminds me a little too much of Seth Meyers (formerly SNL), but the rest of the "home" life cast is solid for the nerds they are portraying.

"I mean, Mass Effect 3?? That's harsh."

As someone who knows and went to school with many people now working in the Bay Area in tech-related industries, I'm thinking Kumail Nanjiani was born for this shit. Ignoring his considerable comedic skills, he looks/sounds like at least 20 people I know.

I recognize IT/developer-types so much in this series that it's painful. Judge totally nailed the culture, even through caricature.

Elon Musk. GitHub. TED-talks. All that shit.

Hopefully Judge will be the reverse-Apatow, in the sense that his sensibilities will be better appreciated on the small screen than they were on the big screen. And I still like Extract. It's not as strong or as obscenely-quotable as Office Space or Idiocracy, but there's really good stuff in there.

Also, I wonder how they're going to handle Christopher Evan Welch dying. I think he died after the fourth episode was shot? If they have him die on the show as well, what could that mean for the group, who were supposed to receive further development-guidance from his character?

Since I have almost no interest in computers, I knew I was going to have some trouble immediately getting into the show, its characters and their situations but each week, Mike Judge wins me over more and more.

joshEH said:

Also, I wonder how they're going to handle Christopher Evan Welch dying. I think he died after the fourth episode was shot? If they have him die on the show as well, what could that mean for the group, who were supposed to receive further development-guidance from his character?

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Five and a half episodes, according to Mike Judge.I haven't had a chance to watch the show yet, but by all accounts he's a pretty bizarre character. Could they have him go all Howard Hughes and deliver all messages through an intermediary?

Anyone who spotted Ben Feldman (Ginsberg on Mad Men) as the ying yang/enema lawyer in last week's episode should pat themselves on the back. He drops the Brooklyn accent and that dude is another guy completely.

I'm sorry to hear that Chris Welch died and we won't see him past episode 5 or 6. I thought the Burger King running joke was friggin' hilarious. I hope they find an equally odd replacement.

Though, the show feels like it's moving more and more away from odd and uncomfortable to tried and true sitcom schtick.

Just caught up with this one. Why has Mike Judge never done a live-action TV comedy before? This show has more laugh-out-loud moments per episode than just about any other show on the air right now.Martin Starr and Kumail Nanjiani have terrific chemistry as frenemy coders Gilfoyle and Dinesh. T.J. Miller and Zach Woods are playing variations on their previous roles, but here it feels like they've finally found the right outlet for their specific talents. Erlich is a major laugh generator for me, and Jared/Donald strikes the right note in a way that Gabe on "The Office" never quite did. Thomas Middleditch is our protagonist and window into this world, and he's just right as the audience's surrogate. As they've toned down the slight Asperger's-y colors with his character, I think it's worked a lot better.And Josh Brener is great as the normal person's reaction to the insanity that is this world.

Quentin said:

I'm sorry to hear that Chris Welch died and we won't see him past episode 5 or 6. I thought the Burger King running joke was friggin' hilarious. I hope they find an equally odd replacement.

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Peter Gregory's run-in with Gavin Belson at the restaurant in last night's episode was a perfect example of his genius. On the page, that would have seemed like a perfectly normal conversation. But the way Welch plays it, Peter Gregory's extreme distaste and unease is practically dripping from his pores with every word.And I really liked the pairing between Welch and Amanda Crew, who I've admired as a comedic actress since Sex Drive. Much like Jere Burns on "Justified", she's terrific at reaction shots. And yet you get the impression that she's totally at ease with Peter Gregory's eccentricities when they're not making her job much, much harder.The show's consciously avoided revealing Monica's last name so far, so I'm kind of wondering if she's Peter Gregory's daughter who's working for the family business. If so, she might inherit if they kill Peter Gregory off.

"Why would you kill a plumber?"

Just rewatched Sunday's episode. The five main actors are all so funny; even T.J. Miller (who I initially thought was the odd one out) is fast growing on me. That car he drives around that's plastered all over with his old company's stupid name is a great, true-to-life gag.

Mark it down. tonight's episode is when this series hit its stride. Laugh out loud funny for once....

Great episode for Kumail. "I see that you're confused by this, but for different reasons than I am."

But I think we may have the line of the year with, "YOU JUST BROUGHT PISS TO THE SHIT FIGHT!!"

There are not many shows that can have asshole kids being deservedly beaten. I appreciate that we have one right now.

I probably laughed less with last night's episode than an episode so far... and still laughed out loud more than I do with just about any other show.Everything with "Jared" trapped in the automated dystopian nightmare was brilliant. So was Dinesh going down a spiral of obsessive over-analysis over a half-assed gag Guilfoyle thought up while high.But I'm with Josh: The apex of the episode was Erlich running outside in his bathrobe after Richard tattled to him and positively owning that group of asshole little kids.

Sam Posten said:

Mark it down. tonight's episode is when this series hit its stride.

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Last week's episode was when everything started to click for me but I'd say that this week's was probably the best episode so far.

"...No, those pills are from an underage child I invited into my house."

Hey, other TV shows! That's how geek-humor is done. By translating handjobs into lossless-compression algorithms.

"What if you hot-swapped dicks so you wouldn't waste any strokes?"

"Guys? Does girth-similarity affect Erlich's ability to jerk different dicks simultaneously?" "Shit. Yeah. I think it would."


And the final punchline of, "How long would it take you to jerk off every guy in this room? Because I know how long it'd take me. And I can prove it."

The fact that it seemed like they worked long into the night on the jerk-off equation and had to get a second white board was the icing on the cake.

Glorious. After Game of Thrones, I really, REALLY needed this. I may just leave this on the DVR for the next two weeks, just in case.

Yeah, even when I only have a general understanding of the tech concepts being discussed, the humor translates pretty universally.Just a great first season. I haven't laughed out loud this much at the first season of a show since "Party Down."The cast is pretty much a well-oiled machine at this point. I just hope they can integrate Monica into the show better without the character being pigeonholed as Richard's love interest. I also hope they find a worthy replacement for Peter Gregory.To HBO, it must have seemed like simple arithmetic to put the creative force behind "Office Space" and his team together with one of the top writers from "Seinfeld". So far, it's paid dividends.Season 1 was described as a barebones blueprint for how to take a business from idea to product. It'll be interesting to see what the start and end points will be for season 2.

"Hey, guys? I just had a thought. Okay...so this is it, right? A lot of successful startups launched with a different business-model, and when they ran into trouble, they pivoted to something new, right? Like, Instagram, which was a location-based check-in service when it started, and then they pivoted. Or, Chatroulette, okay? That was social media, and then they pivoted to become a playground for the sexually-monstrous."

This is the funniest show I have seen in a long, long time.

Josh, are you just going to post a non-stop stream of Jared quotes in this thread?Because I would be more than okay with that.

I loved the season finale and was happy with the way it ended.
I'll be anxiously awaiting season 2.

I loved the whole "jerking guys off" mathmatical therom they were coming up with.