100 Favorite Shows: #64 — Silicon Valley
“I don’t fully understand it, but I want to invest.”
[T.J. Miller, who starred as Erlich Bachman on Silicon Valley, was accused in December of 2017 of sexual assault against a woman, as reported by The Daily Beast. Miller’s deplorable behavior did not stop there, however. He was also accused of sexual harassment and of sending a transphobic email to a movie critic, as reported by Vulture. His departure from the series ahead of its fifth season was announced mutually by HBO and Miller in May of 2017.]
On April 6, 2014, Mike Judge returned to television with his fourth creator credit. This time, he’d taken his talents to HBO to satirize a culture that became a major part of American culture over the preceding half-century: Silicon Valley. Taking its name from the hub of the tech industry, Silicon Valley ran for six acclaimed (albeit frustrating) seasons as it focused on app developer Richard Hendricks (Thomas Middleditch) and his merry band of marketers and engineers who would stop at nothing to make their 21st century ambitions a reality. Even if they deluded themselves into thinking their apps were actually capable of bringing about world peace.
(Spoilers for Silicon Valley are in store, if you can parse through the jargon.)
I’m not a very smart person. And I only started to become somewhat interested in trying to be smarter back when I entered high school. Not smart about something like math, though (that ship left Italy long before 1492). I wanted to educate myself on pop culture and the history of my favorite storytelling mediums. This decision was part of the road that led me to this project, in which I rank my 100 favorite television shows. It was also part of what led me to Grantland, the lightning-in-a-bottle sports/pop culture podcast network and online written commentary website. I knew it was cutting edge because I believed in Bill Simmons. But I also knew that because of this tweet:
Mindy Kaling is effortlessly hip (this adjective has now precluded me from ever being hip) and she is as much a devotee to the best rom-coms (Four Weddings and a Funeral) and sketch comedy shows (The Ben Stiller Show) as she is to modern cultural touchstones that resonate for the hip and smart community (of which, again, I am not a part). Because of this, Mindy was the one who gave me the first sign that Silicon Valley had resonated with the culture at large.
Silicon Valley was still a television newborn when she made this post about Gavin Belson (Matt Ross) and Hoolicon, but still, it sealed the deal. Gavin Belson was now a part of the lexicon and, with him, the rest of Silicon Valley. It was a sleek HBO comedy that attracted the loyal fanhood of Mindy Kaling. I trust her as much as I trust Simmons. After watching the first season of the show and feeling generally bemused if not slightly off-put by the high jargon, my energy felt renewed. But with her post, I relished in the shared understanding of who Gavin Belson was. Yes, it means I’m a dumb-dumb mush brain boy who likes things more when his comedy heroes likes them. But let me just say that even when Kaling’s posts stopped, I stuck with the show. It once spent two years on the family DVR and even then, my father and sister and I returned to it! We were loyal to the Valley through recurring story lines and cast shake-ups. Eventually, Silicon Valley became a veteran, rather than the hip new show to reference on Instagram. It only made us love it all the more.
Even though I was generally confused by the show’s first season (I’d not seen anything so dry and so unafraid to alienate the average viewer since The Office’s “Diversity Day”), I still had suspicions that there was a brilliance beneath all of the computer-based mumbo jumbo. Mindy only helped me affirm this sentiment that came about when watching the season one episode, “Optimal Tip-to-Tip Efficiency.”
Even still, I believe this is the best episode the show ever produced. One could look at this as a negative: that the show peaked early. Or it could be seen more optimistically: that it had such an insanely incredible moment. Who cares if it couldn’t be topped? Isn’t the goal to make something untoppable?
That’s exactly what “Tip-to-Tip” was. In this episode, the gang (comprised of Middleditch, Miller, Kumail Nanjiani as Dinesh Chugtai, Martin Starr as Bertram Gilfoyle, and Zach Woods as Jared Dunn) takes to Hoolicon to unveil the capabilities of their app, Pied Piper.
(A quick aside here, for a moment. One of the most brilliant aspects of the show was the writers’ abilities to come up with names that didn’t feel completely manufactured. Something like Hooli or Pied Piper sounds right at home in the ceaseless world of tech start-ups and conglomerates. It’s much better than the dumb YouSearch-esque names that shows employ when they don’t have access to Google. Even Gavin Belson’s name just rolled off the Instagram captions perfectly.)
When the novelty of their app is matched, however, it forces them to go back to the coding board in an attempt to re-up the competition once again. Everyone seems to be at a loss as to how they will revitalize Pied Piper. Dinesh offers no feasible ideas. Erlich is completely useless. Jared can only muster the idea of pivoting away from their original goals as a company (like how Chatroulette became “a playground for the sexually monstrous”). Instead, the drawing board becomes embroiled in a different problem.
Maybe Erlich wasn’t so useless after all, when he suggested jerking off all 800 people in attendance at Hoolicon during the ten minute allotment for Pied Piper’s presentation. This baseless joke sets off two different drawing boards: one helmed by Erlich, Dinesh, Gilfoyle, and Jared as they try to see if it’s mathematically possible to jerk off all 800 in ten minutes and one by Richard, who sees the dicks going tip-to-tip as inspiration for a way to change his entire business model on the fly. He rebuilds his entire software with “middle-out compression” (whatever the fuck that means because, again, I am no mathematical wiz) and only has enough time to test it once before the time comes to present.
This was exactly the kind of concept that Silicon Valley always executed so perfectly. At one moment in the show, viewers were simultaneously enthralled in Richard’s Hail Mary attempt to save the company with his individual genius and demolished with laughter as the rest of his team came up with a formula to determine jerk-off rates. They concoct equations and tests for the “girth effect” and the concept of D2F (dick-to-floor) ratios. And it all brilliantly coalesces when Richard stands out on the stage and asks the Hoolicon attendees, “How many datas could one guy manipulate at once?” We all know which nouns could be substituted in place of “datas.”
(Another side note on the exceptional writing of the show here. While the guys are in the throes of devising their phallic algorithms, they suddenly realize that Richard has locked himself in the bedroom. He’s coding, but they think he’s offed himself, so Erlich uses his weight to slam the door off its hinges. They realize Richard is fine, but in the zone, and so they leave him to it. But Erlich doesn’t replace the door; he just props it up. This visual gag would have been enough on its own, but the next morning, Richard ventures out of his den only to yell, “Jesus fuck!” and jump out of the way of the door that is falling down upon him. He has no context for why the door would betray him in a scene that didn’t need to exist. It just showed that the Silicon Valley writing staff was always willing to go the extra step. And with a writing staff that included names like Alec Berg and Carrie Kemper, this should have been obvious.)
The episode (and arguably the show) climaxes (pun intended) when Richard demonstrates that he has a compression rate of 3.8 on Pied Piper. It’s a number that’s unheard of by the panel at Hoolicon (including Andy Buckley in a fun guest spot) and they demand proof. They provide Richard with a file to compress: a 3D video file (the one Achilles heel of Pied Piper is their inability to compress 3D files). His new software takes to the file, but only seems to compress half of it. Richard’s ready to admit defeat when the file starts playing and reveals that it was compressed at a rate of 5.2!
It was a jaw-dropping, goosebumps-inducing moment that made me want to jump off my couch like I did when Malcolm Butler picked off Russell Wilson at the goal line. And I had no idea what any of it meant!
That was the miracle of Silicon Valley. I never had any idea what any single character was spewing at a given moment. A compression rate of 5.2, compared to 3.8, seems like meaningless nonsense to me. The most in-depth techies almost definitely flipped for this sort of story, but I felt like I was way out of my depth. I understood Erlich’s tip-to-tip conceptions way better than I understood Richard’s. Because of this barrier to understanding, a lot was required of the emotional side of Silicon Valley to convey to viewers what was actually going on.
The music was a crucial aspect of the show when it came to understanding the gravity of certain moments. Cuing fans into the tension of a scene, it helped to underscore the performances, which were equally as vital. Middleditch’s refusal to allow Hendricks to ever make eye contact with another person was key, but his ability to produce different kinds of shocked faces was even more so. All of the performers felt the show resting on them because, without their reactions, the dialogue would be meaningless. We trust their engineering wizardry so if they’re flabbergasted by a technology-based moment, then it must be truly earth-shattering.
These moments were incredibly rare, though. Most of the time, Pied Piper was failing and when they did reach unprecedented heights, they never lasted long. Just a few episodes after “Tip-to-Tip,” in the second season, they were right back in the cellar, fighting for a way to keep their app development dreams alive. In a way, I felt this desperate ache to see them succeed and actually hold onto their achievements. But I suppose there wouldn’t have been a show if they were just rich perfectionists in Silicon Valley. They had to be laughable fuck-ups who occasionally fell backwards into astonishment.
This also allowed for the performers to be more than just shocked when they emoted.
Josh Brener, who played Big Head, got to subvert a Mark Zuckerberg/Eduardo Saverin relationship with Richard by illustrating that any Judas-based actions were completely accidental.
Amanda Crew, portraying Monica, was able to bring a soothsayer quality to the show by always warning the Valley newcomers of the stakes they faced every day.
Woods could maintain his reputation as one of the funniest actors on the television circuit.
Starr could show off a side completely different to the ones that comedy fans were familiar with on Freaks and Geeks (only Gilfoyle would threaten his friend with “ball chortling.” Bill would’ve never said such a thing to Sam or Neal).
Nanjiani’s role grew so much that he eventually became the breakout star of the show, in the same way that John Krasinski, Chris Pratt, and Donald Glover all exploded in the mainstream after their respective comedies came to an end. (Kumail’s been tapped for The Eternals, one of the upcoming forays of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.)
Through these bits of dynamic interplay with the characters, the moments of sweet victory felt thoroughly earned, even if not a bit too sparse. (Seriously, there were many times when I just wanted to scream at Richard and slap him in his long face. It sometimes seemed that he was actively working against his own interests with his decision-making and it was truly frustrating.) Silicon Valley did have a tendency to wallow in failure perhaps a bit too long before the next spark of inspiration struck. For as much as they learned about engineering, they seemed to learn nothing about business and it could become easily infuriating.
Granted, they didn’t have the best role models on how to run a business. The exceptional Peter Gregory character was written out as having died when the real life actor, Christopher Evan Welch, passed away in 2013. The figures of business never got more helpful than he was. Laurie Bream (Suzanne Cryer) maybe came the closest, but she had a sinister bend to her calculating persona. She could lull the guys into thinking she could be manipulated and then snipe them before they even had a chance to realize she had turned.
The most memorable Peter Gregory variation was unquestionably Russ Hanneman (Chris Diamantopoulos), who sped into the show in an expensive, douchebaggy car as a bluster of hair gel, rhetorical conversation starters, and off-color collars (and jokes). In “Bad Money,” he invests a shit ton of money into Pied Piper and tells the group he’s going to be completely hands-off. Of course, it’s too sweet a deal to be valid and Russ almost immediately goes back on his word. Before he does, his brash persona completely explodes the thus far subdued vibes of the Valley.
When Russ meets Richard, he’s quick to deride Silicon Valley as being filled with lemmings before he has a micro panic attack about his pants and a scratch on his car. Before Richard can even process any of this, though, Russ is onto the next subject. One of the first questions he asks Richard is, “Have you ever had beef?” Before we know it, we’re out to lunch with the two of them where Russ is laughing off his three nannies who are suing them (though, only one is doing it for “no reason”) and getting Richard to agree to a deal that clearly has strings attached. Russ is practically the lovechild of Gepetto and Dom Toretto, after all.
When Russ meets the rest of Pied Piper, his behavior somehow unlocks another level of acidity. (The only one he’s not impressed with is Erlich, who, in turn, begins to crave Russ’ approval.) Russ feels the need to break the tension with Dinesh (who hilariously responds, “There was tension?”), demands to hear about Gilfoyle’s “fucked up childhood,” and then spots Jared and exclaims assertively, “This guy fucks!” It became such a meme that it’s hard to forget how breathlessly hilarious the moment was at first. Upon my rewatch of the episode, I found myself pausing the episode to laugh, as I was unable to keep up with the assault of one-liners Diamantopoulos was rattling off. It’s a true heat check performance.
The character of Russ sticks around for the bulk of the show and was a much-needed jolt of energy into a show that was 100% dry humor. Now, it only needed to be, like, 85% dry humor. Even when T.J. Miller eventually left the show, we still had Russ as the outsider who couldn’t be trusted to fill the void. Erlich looked like Woz and thought like Jobs, but Russ looked like Entourage, thought like Entourage, and acted like Entourage. I bet there are a lot of CEOs in the tech world who saw Russ as a hero, rather than a target of derision.
But ultimately, the veteran figure who influenced the Pied Piper crew the most was, of course, Gavin Belson himself. He didn’t influence them for good (any time it seemed like he might be teaming up with Richard, fans might have needed Parks and Rec’s Dennis Feinstein to pop up and yell, “Psych!”), but rather he always brought out the best work from Richard, Dinesh, and Gilfoyle. Kind of like how Universal Orlando bringing The Wizarding World of Harry Potter to life has only inspired Walt Disney World to keep improving their own parks.
Gavin was an eternal, all-time great television villain who always found his way back into the thick of the Pied Piper arcs. He was truly the equivalent of Voldemort on Silicon Valley in that he could not ever be killed. Maybe Hooli was a horcrux because even if all you did was think about Gavin Belson, you were underestimating him. He was not a cloud of manufactured testosterone like Russ or an impenetrable wall like Laurie. Instead, he was a perfect antagonist of the show, developed right from the beginning. In one of the rarest of instances, Silicon Valley not only started strong, but it started in so perfect of a way that the core concept remained consistent for six years and weathered the second lead’s departure. (Has any character this side of Mark Brendanawicz been less missed than Erlich?) That’s how perfectly realized Gavin Belson was and, on a larger scale, how perfectly realized the show was.
From the outset, Silicon Valley was a show about nerds done right. Their intellect was inspiring rather than mocked. (There were plenty of attributes to mock instead.) And it called for us to be smarter, too. To embrace the elements of the puzzle to see if we could figure out how Richard would maneuver away from death before he could. It was a puzzle show, like National Treasure but for computer software instead of historical artifacts.
The comedy went further than satirizing Silicon Valley. It came up with insurmountable problems for the developers and marketers and then told them: “Here. Solve that one.” Often times, the problems came down to what Richard wanted to do versus what he should have done. Often times, the solutions were more convoluted than they needed to be. But every time, the answer was never something that would have occurred to us. That’s why we’re not the ones sitting in a Los Altos garage inventing the future. Or, in this case, the next great compression app. (Whatever that means.)
