HBO's 'Silicon Valley' takes on tech
Source: Marco della Cava
You'll recognize sketches of tech giants from Steve Jobs to Larry Ellison in HBO's show.
If HBO's Entourage skewered the thrilling and vacuous world of Hollywood, the cable channel's latest comedy series hopes to do the same to this hotbed of cutting-edge technology, titanic egos and precious visions.
Silicon Valley (Sunday, 10 p.m. ET/PT) is the quick-witted tale of a programmer and his posse as they ride the start-up monster with a Web-shattering compression algorithm.
Think The Social Network but with more down-to-earth nerds, genuine affection and savage humor �C like the episode where, a la the real Facebook, the guys hire a graffiti artist to paint their company logo, only to get a garage door sprayed with the Statue of Liberty in an extremely compromised position.
"I'd be friends with these guys, because ultimately they're taking a chance and trying to do something meaningful with their lives," says creator Mike Judge, who manages to borrow from his earlier projects Beavis and Butt-Head (in the way it captures the ethos of like-minded souls) and King of the Hill (in its spot-on feel for a place ― in this case the Bay Area's tech hub, although the show is shot in Los Angeles).
"Guys sitting in front of their computers typing doesn't exactly provide you with the dramatic setting of a medical drama, but the challenge of it yielded some good stuff," says Judge, who adds that his inspiration for the show was his own late-'80s stint as a Valley engineer. "It's changed, but the personalities are the same."
Even those with just a cursory knowledge of Silicon Valley and its major players will recognize familiar personalities and themes as refracted through Judge's cracked lens.
Richard (Thomas Middleditch) works as a programmer at tech giant Hooli (a ringer for Google). When his compression software starts a bidding war, he opts to take seed funding from a Steve Jobs-meets-Bill Gates savant venture capitalist, Peter Gregory (Christopher Evan Welch).
Although Middleditch seems to be mirroring Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg with this hair and hoodie, the actor says he deliberately avoided doing an impression of Jesse Eisenberg, who played Zuckerberg in The Social Network, "because that's too untouchable."
Instead, he just flashed back to the "LAN (local area network) parties of my youth, where friends and I would get together and connect our computers to play games," he says, laughing. "I was with definite weirdos, and I'm a fan of that culture."
For Amanda Crew, who plays the Gregory character's grounded assistant Monica, everything she needed to know was on the page.
Producers "researched the (heck) of this," she says. "For my part, I was just thrilled to find women like (Yahoo boss) Marissa Mayer to work off of, women who seemed articulate, humorous and liked football. Monica really is a mother to these boys."
The main challenge faced by the show's writers was making sure that reality didn't eclipse an episode's premise or jokes.
"Sometimes we'd be set to shoot, and then realize that what we'd written already felt old," given the fast-moving pace of the tech world, says executive producer Alec Berg.
A case in point: References to one of the Silicon Valley hacker gang's goofy apps, Nip Alert (which is exactly what you think it is), was already filmed when producers attended San Francisco's TechCrunch Disrupt start-up confab, where they saw a joke app called TitStare.com.
"You can't make this up," Bergsays.
In fact, watching episodes of HBO's new show reveals that there isn't much that escapes their sharp satirical eye, from grandiose revenge-of-the-nerds pronouncements (after years of abuse, "now we get to be the Vikings of our day"), to grandiose company proclamations (Hooli's founder, the Larry Ellison-like Gavin, played by Matt Ross, pompously intones, "If we can make your audio files smaller, we can make cancer smaller!")
"This is a world in dire need of mockery, and who better than Mike Judge," says Kara Swisher, longtime Valley watcher and co-founder of Re/code, a tech news and conference company.
Swisher makes a cameo in Silicon Valley ("I play an obnoxious tech reporter named Kara Swisher"), as does Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt, who appears for a microsecond in the first episode at a decidedly downbeat company party hosted by an unimpressed Kid Rock.
"Silicon Valley is a world of contradiction. There's an arrogance, a do-gooderness and a complete lack of self-awareness, but there's also tremendous innovation out of a place that genuinely leads the world," Swisher says. "I'm just waiting to see if the people here laugh. They're not known for their sense of humor."
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