Here’s the definition of a geek entourage, straight from the mouth of one of the characters on Mike Judge’s new HBO comedy, “Silicon Valley:” “It’s weird. They always travel in groups of five, these programmers. There’s always a tall skinny white guy, short skinny Asian guy, fat guy with the ponytail, some guy with crazy facial hair and then an east Indian guy. It’s like they trade guys until they all have the right group.”
Many will compare the new comedy to the dearly departed but being made into a major motion picture “Entourage,” which also dealt with a group of guys either hustling to make it and/or dealing with their success.
And just as “Entourage” skewered the Hollywood establishment, its rituals and its hometown turf of Los Angeles, “Silicon Valley” sends up the high tech industry, its “visionary” leaders and the working stiffs who do most of the heavy lifting in Palo Alto and environs.
Creator Mike Judge (“Office Space,” “Beavis & Butt-head,” “King of the Hill”) collaborated with Alec Berg (“Seinfeld,” “Curb Your Enthusiasm”) to bring his irreverent brand of humor to this series, which was partially inspired by Judge’s own experiences as a high-tech engineer in the late 1980s.
The series begins at a splashy launch party with Kid Rock playing to an almost all-male crowd where the main characters Richard (Thomas Middleditch), Big Head (Josh Brener) Dinesh (Kumail Nanjiani) and Gilfoyle (Martin Starr) feel like outsiders in a crowd of nerds – nerds who are worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
The guys live in an incubator, a communal house run by a charismatic former programmer Erlich, charmingly played by T.J. Miller, who stakes his claim to 10% of anything and everything they invent under his roof. Meanwhile, the crew all work at a company called Hooli, a Google-like entity which wants to make the world a better place, with all the aggrandizement that entails.
When it becomes clear that Richard has developed what could be a groundbreaking compression algorithm for an otherwise lame music website called Pied Piper, he becomes the target of an intense bidding war between his boss at Hooli, Gavin Belson (Matt Ross) and a brutal investor, Peter Gregory. (Sadly, Christopher Evan Welch, who played Gregory, died while the eight-part series was in production.)
Richard, who looks like a version of Mark Zuckerberg but is portrayed with much more humanity and emotion than Zuck was in “The Social Network,” is urged repeatedly by Erlich to “be an asshole.” Hilarity and more parody ensues. And not many women are part of the “money changes everything” storyline, with the exception of Amanda Crew, who plays Gregory’s right-hand woman, doing his bidding.
But women are a big subject of interest, including a subplot with a stripper who provides more than paid lap dances.
“I didn’t even shake a woman’s hand until I was 17 years old,” Dinesh says when Erlich brings the stripper into the house. “The idea of getting an erection around man I live and work with is just not something I can handle.”
The night before the Los Angeles premiere, Judge and Berg and the cast were in Silicon Valley screening the first two episodes at the Fox Theatre before a high-tech crowd that included Elon Musk, Craig Newmark and Zynga founder Mark Pincus, anxious about its reception.
But the crowd laughed more than they did in Hollywood.
The first episode of “Silicon Valley” gets what amounts to the post Super Bowl slot on HBO, Sunday night at 10 p.m. after the premiere of “Game of Thrones.”
–Hillary Atkin
