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Silicon Valley - a new Mike Judge comedy series - HBO Sundays (S2 full trailer is up)

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C

Cornballer

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- Chicago Sun Times: Capsule reviews for upcoming shows
“SILICON VALLEY” (9 p.m. Sunday, HBO): A trio of Chicago-trained comics — Thomas Middleditch (“The Office”), T.J. Miller (“Mash Up”) and Kumail Nanjiani (“Portlandia”) — are part of the talented ensemble in this droll look at high-tech heroes and zeroes fighting to become the next Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg. These socially awkward code monkeys live and work together in a start-up incubator as they try to turn their game-changing compression algorithm into gold. Not only is it funny, it has an air of authenticity thanks to co-creator Mike Judge (“Beavis & Butt-head,” “Office Space”), who mines his previous experience as a Silicon Valley engineer for laughs. Rating: 3.5 out of 4 stars
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C

Cornballer

Member
- Vanity Fair on Silicon Valley and Veep
On those merits, the show works. It’s a pleasant and funny parody of ego and the pitfalls of success, though I do sometimes wish its wit was a little more biting, its satire more acute. The humor often trends toward the raucous and the fratty, which is fine. It’s goofy and amiable. But there’s a more malevolent side to this industry that only gets lightly swiped at as the guys bumble on by.
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C

Cornballer

Member
- Onion A|V Club review
In the grand tradition of Mike Judge projects, HBO’s new comedy, Silicon Valley, is a bit messy, a bit shambling, and often very funny. It’s also at once a critique and embrace of the idea of corporate culture, examining how scruffy groups of dudes (because this show is almost all dudes) are gradually homogenized and turned into the sorts of tech geniuses that are easier to sell to the press. It feels weirdly like a tech-world Entourage—and that’s meant as more of a compliment than it seems. Grade: B
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C

Cornballer

Member
- Maureen Ryan: 'Silicon Valley' on HBO: Tech Culture Gets The Comedy It Deserves
"Silicon Valley" works as a well-crafted ensemble comedy about a particularly eccentric workplace (we'd expect no less from Mike Judge, the creator of "Office Space"). It made me belly laugh more than once. As a fan of "Louie" and "Enlightened" and the like, I'm the last person to take a swipe at the more cerebral or experimental half-hour offerings on TV, but if you've longed for an HBO comedy that would actually make you laugh out loud, there's a good chance this show is it.
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C

Cornballer

Member
- Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti on Silicon Valley:
Ultimately, I highly recommend Silicon Valley and was thoroughly entertained watching the first five episodes in one sitting. But I recommend it for the comedy, not the startup ethnography. The show will not elucidate what Silicon Valley is “really like,” except in a highly fictionalized, exaggerated, absurdist form. But the show delivers real laughs, not just chuckles, and that is almost as rare these days as starting a company that becomes the next Dropbox.
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D

dead souls

Member
Tucah said:
GoT, Silicon Valley and Veep is going to be one hell of a two hour block. I can't wait.
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I'm even more excited for April 27th when John Oliver's show premieres. I can take or leave GoT, but a (hopefully great) Silicon Valley into Veep into John Oliver? That's ninety minutes I can get behind.
 
C

Cornballer

Member
- The Verge: 'Silicon Valley' review
It’s a great mix — a little bit insider, a little bit broad appeal, all filtered through the kind of workplace dynamics and relationships that people from all walks of life can relate to. With such a broad setup there are plenty of places the show can go from here, but in many ways Silicon Valley has already passed the most important threshold of all. It’s the first show about the startup scene that’s actually good.
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C

Cornballer

Member
The cast at the premiere:

cyYAx5j.jpg
 
C

Cornballer

Member
- Sepinwall: HBO's 'Silicon Valley' highlights the best of Mike Judge
And yet in the middle of all the technobabble and social satire, "Silicon Valley" is also a show from the man who gave us "Beavis & Butt-Head," and like so many of Judge's later works, it deftly blends the highbrow with the lowbrow. The show features drug humor and fairly crude (if usually clever) sex jokes, and almost all of it flows in neatly with the headier stuff going on. And there are elaborate comic set pieces about the ways in which technology that's supposed to make life simpler instead makes it more aggravating that function as both satire and slapstick at once. It's really impressive, and definitely the closest Judge has ever come to simply making "Office Space: The Series," in tone if not in specific target.
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C

Cornballer

Member
- Poniewozik's review for Time
Silicon Valley is the funniest out-of-the-box pay cable comedy in a good while. (Veep, which returns the same night for its third season, is in the same league, but it took a good year to get there.) But its real strength is that it’s built on an idea that, however crude, is universal. Do you need to be an asshole to make it in this business? And if so: which kind?
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P

PassiveObserver

Member
I should watch this, but I get really annoyed at techies (San Franciscan here) so I'm not sure I'll even get pleasure from laughing at them.
 
C

Cornballer

Member
- Andy Greenwald for Grantland: HBO Finally Launches a Great New Comedy to Pair With ‘Veep’
The vibe is light, the pace is engaging. Silicon Valley is uproariously funny at times but it’s also consistently fascinating in a way many bro-y, aspirational cable half-hours are not. (With the equally terrific Veep preceding it, HBO suddenly has the best hour of comedy on TV.) This is because, at heart, Judge is no Turtle. One of the hallmarks of his work is the way he imparts a stubborn dignity to all of his protagonists, animated and otherwise. Hidden among the dick jokes and mushroom trips is an entrepreneurial enthusiasm for the underdog that is downright infectious.
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S

SyNapSe

Member
Can't wait for this Sunday. GoT, Veep, and now Silicon Valley. Why is everything on Sunday nights!? My DVR can barely keep up
 
T

TheOddOne

Member
- Variety: TV Review: ‘Silicon Valley’
After a string of half-hours seemingly designed for niche tastes that sporadically merit the label “comedy,” HBO has its most fully realized and potentially commercial player within that genre in some time thanks to “Silicon Valley.” Co-created by Mike Judge (with the dryness of “King of the Hill” and tone of “Office Space”), it’s a savvy look at the birthing pains of a tech startup, filled with unforced humor and a serialized plot, in which the sad-sack characters find themselves caught between feuding billionaires. Similar but superior to Amazon’s “Betas,” it’s inordinately user-friendly compared to many recent pay-cable offerings.
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L

levious

That throwing stick stunt of yours has boomeranged on us.
Is that guy with the beard the guy from those phone commercials where he's the old outdated phone?
 
C

Cornballer

Member
- Slate.com review
Mike Judge’s sharp, very funny new HBO comedy Silicon Valley, about the absurdities of startup culture, feels like a satire. But as Judge, the man who made Beavis and Butt-head and Office Space, put it in a recent interview, “You can’t call it satire when you are showing it like it is.” Rarely has a show had to do so little to find so much to mock.
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C

Cornballer

Member
- Newsday review
Judge has a keen eye for the absurdities of human behavior and speech, but he's not the kind of guy to waste that on subtle inside jokes or wordplay. He's not someone to waste it on farce, either: Silicon Valley also happens to be sly and smart.
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D

demon

I don't mean to alarm you but you have dogs on your face
Jesus I'm psyched for this. Too bad all I have is HBO Go and it probably won't be available for another 1 or 2 days.
 
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