Tag Archives: mike judge

Review: Silicon Valley – the birthplace of the dot.com

Silicon Valley premiered on HBO this weekend past. It’s about 6 programmers who live in, you guessed it, Silicon Valley. For those of you who don’t know, that’s located in the south portion of the San Francisco Bay area. Those 6 programmers try to make it big in the wake of start up companies that are now staples of modern culture; Facebook, Google, Yahoo, eBay, Netflix and Apple Inc.

Thomas Middleditch plays Richard, who comes up with a compression algorithm that the big wigs want. When Richard’s faced with the decision of; to sell to a big corporation, or to go with a tech guru? He’s got to step out of his comfort zone and be the center of attention. And suprise, surprise… Richard’s an introvert.
Silicon Valley deals with the high tech bubble of the tech world, where people who are qualified for the most success, can’t deal with it.

This show is brought to us by Mike Judge, we’ve all been looking forward for his next project, and this one does not disappoint. It points out and makes fun of the “innovative” things that corporations do to stand out, and make them appear to be un-corporations…

Having experience in the industry before, we can see Mike Judge is still in tune with much of the obnoxious behavior still prevalent in the tech world. As with his other works (think Idiocracy), Judge plants these details in our peripheral vision as gifts for us to laugh at with him. Such bits include questionable practices like meetings on bikes, cafeterias offering excessive free food, CEOs with narrow eco-friendly cars, spiritual advisor-consulting executives wearing finger shoes, and brogramers… despicable brogramers.

Richard’s journey is what I’m looking forward to the most, this quiet like-able guy has to make some tough decisions, I’ll be watching to see how he emerges out of season 1.

There are only 8 episodes this season, I can’t wait to see where we’re going.