TV Review: Down in the valley

Mike Judge skewers startup culture in HBO’s new comedy

“We’re making the world a better place” is the cultish refrain of multiple characters throughout “Silicon Valley,” Mike Judge’s pointed new satire of the tech industry. The sentiment echoes the self-aggrandizing propaganda of companies like Apple and Google; Judge and co-creators Dave Krinsky and John Altschuler set up Palo Alto as a place where unearned wealth and bloated evaluations are justified through self-deception—Wall Street’s “Greed is good” mantra replaced with “We are good.” (The CEO of Hooli, a Google-like dotcom empire, touts his own altruism with pictures of him hanging out with starving African children.)

If these ideas sound a little dour, the show itself is not. Judge’s humor is rooted in truth, but it’s also rooted in semen jokes. The man behind “Office Space” and “Idiocracy” is always best when merging the high and low-brow, and “Valley” shows him at the top of his game, offering a hilarious, incisive rejoinder to the romantic portrayal of backstabbing tech geeks found in the 2010 film “The Social Network.” David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin elevated the petulant misgivings of Facebook’s entitled, over-privileged brats to high drama, to thrilling but dishonest effect. Judge, who worked as a programmer in Silicon Valley in the ‘80s, is more interested in the innate ridiculousness of tech culture at large, and counters Fincher’s rapt gaze with a wink and a smirk. That’s not to say that “Valley” is more “realistic” (it’s a comedy from the creator of “Beavis and Butthead”), but based on the strength of the first two episodes, it seems to have located a truth about the greed and delusional self-importance of the Bay Area’s startup goons that eluded “Network.”

The show, which premiered April 6, centers on four low-level coders desperate to develop the Next Big Thing and earn millions from it. Wealth and success literally surround them; in the episode’s opening, they wander through a house party celebrating the recent $200-million sale of “a mediocre piece of software” developed by one of their obnoxious peers. Kid Rock performs for the small, disinterested crowd, because the host can afford him. Guests drink $200 liquid shrimp This is the life they want, and they spend their days and nights writing code in the “Incubator,” the home of Erhlich (T.J. Miller), hoping to win the idea lottery.

Richard (Thomas Middleditch), the most timid and introverted of the programmers, hits that lottery in the first episode. He has unwittingly developed a compression algorithm worth millions and is soon in the middle of a bidding war between the aforementioned CEO of Hooli, Gavin Belson (Matt Ross), and billionaire venture capitalist Peter Gregory (Christopher Evan Welch). Belson offers $10 million to buy Richard’s algorithm outright; Gregory offers $200,000 for five percent ownership and a chance for Richard and his fellow coders to develop the concept into their own full-fledged company. Either way, the panic attack-prone Richard appears to be in for a hard time. 

Judge excels at developing the details: the Hooli transportation buses with flatscreens espousing the gospel of Gavin Belson; the sprawling company headquarters that feels like a college campus from the future, whimsically designed and loaded with amenities to encourage creativity; the pretentious TED Talks of billionaires. The satire is razor-sharp, but the most impressive thing about “Silicon Valley” is Judge’s clear-eyed affection for his well-drawn cast of characters. Richard and his friends are instantly likeable, and there’s a gentleness to them that balances the show’s more sardonic moments.

HBO can be hard on its comedies. A low-rated drama like “The Wire” will survive five seasons on the strength of critics’ raves, but its comedic sister “Enlightenment” will be canceled after two seasons despite loads of glowing reviews and awards. Here’s hoping “Silicon Valley” doesn’t meet the same fate.