By: Brandon Wolfe
For the majority of television series, the first season is often something of a rough experimental phase, a series of trials and errors necessary to figure out what the show will ultimately become once the kinks are worked out, usually by the second season. Some of the greatest TV shows of all time have first seasons where you can see everyone trying to gain their sea legs. This is especially true of comedies, where cast chemistry, character personalities and veins of humor need to be calibrated before the right formula is discovered. Even ‘Seinfeld’, arguably television’s finest comedy, proved a bit wobbly in the first go-round. What is unique about HBO’s ‘Silicon Valley’ is how thoroughly it bucks this trend. The series came out of the gate fully formed, its cast, characters, story and writing all interlocked into an immediately consistent groove. ‘Silicon Valley’ is the best comedy currently on television and it didn’t need to be granted any leeway to get there.
The series centers on a group of programmers working under the roof of a startup business incubator run by low-level entrepreneur Erlich Bachman (the fantastic T.J. Miller), a shady, self-serving loudmouth whose extreme extraversion and shamelessness are simultaneously his greatest strength and weakness. One of the programmers, a timid fellow named Richard Hendriks (Thomas Middleditch) has created a music app called Pied Piper that isn’t anything special in and of itself, but the data compression algorithm he’s built in the service of the app turns out to be revolutionary. The algorithm brings Richard to the attention of two rival tech moguls, oily Hooli CEO Gavin Belson (Matt Ross) and awkwardly eccentric venture-capitalist Peter Gregory (the late Christopher Evan Welch). Belson offers Richard $10 million to buy the app outright, while Gregory instead offers him the opportunity to build a business wherein Richard will have an ownership stake. Richard chooses the latter option, only to quickly realize that he has neither any business acumen nor grand plan, and that the fickle, capricious Gregory isn’t the benevolent nurturer he initially seemed.
Richard ends up rounding up his housemates and fellow programmers to be his business partners, and to help him try to make sense of this extraordinary turn of events. They include the caustic Gilfoyle (Martin Starr), his sarcastic adversary Dinesh (Kumail Nanjiani), and insecure Hooli separatist Jared (Zach Woods, Gabe from ‘The Office’). Richard’s best friend, Big Head (Josh Grenier) is deemed useless to the cause and excluded from the business, which kicks off a string of events where he ends up working for Hooli in an concerted effort to reverse-engineer Richard’s algorithm before he can go to market. Richard also has the support of Monica (Amanda Crew), Peter Gregory’s kindly assistant and the lone female role in a very male-dominated world.
The cast of ‘Silicon Valley’ is impeccable and gels together straight from the pilot. Middleditch acts as the show’s put-upon straight man, hemming, hawing and hyperventilating his way through a series of events he isn’t remotely equipped to handle while everyone around him, who are ostensibly supposed to be helping him, proceed to make matters worse. One of the more prominent of the show’s character dynamics is between Gilfoyle and Dinesh, each of whom will put their work aside at any moment’s notice to one-up the other, and their constant bickering and petty battles are a constant source of big laughs. Jared, an outsider to the group who joined Pied Piper because of a naïve belief in Richard, is sharp, but so painfully uncomfortable in his own skin that he can’t help but render himself ineffectual at all turns. The best of them all is Erlich, a true force of nature whose big mouth and brash attitude are a constant source of aggravation to Richard until it becomes clear that he’s the only person in this extremely mild-mannered group with the chutzpah to deal with the people side of the business.
The series also created a wonderfully unique character in oddball genius Peter Gregory, a man whose business sense is so keen that it overrides how little he seems to understand basic human behavior. Christopher Evan Welch passed away very suddenly late last year, forcing the Gregory character to go unseen for the last three episodes of the season. Welch’s performance didn’t get much of the spotlight, but in the space of just a few short episodes, he created a truly memorable character. Because Peter Gregory is such a prominent character in this world (and the season finale actually promises that he will have a more prominent role in the future, even though that isn’t possible), it remains to be seen how ‘Silicon Valley’ will deal with this loss going forward.
‘Silicon Valley’ was created by Mike Judge and possesses his very specific voice for humor and satire. Fans of ‘Office Space’ in particular will find much common ground here, albeit in a larger, more specific context. Judge loves to mine laughs out of human absurdity and finds a great deal in this world of awkward boys chasing millions and the desperation inherent to that pursuit. The series also employs Judge’s signature brand of melding smart with dumb humor, as with last night’s argument among the Pied Piper group about how Erlich could best go about his claim to manually stimulate every male member of an audience in the most mathematically effective way possible. That debate, of all things, is what pushes Richard toward a major technological breakthrough, and sows the seeds for a second season where these guys will taste a bit of the success they’ve spent their first season working toward, as well as the new set of problems that will inevitably come along with it. It can’t get here fast enough.
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