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[GorillaJu]

It was funny and sincere in the way Mike Judge's projects usually are. The part where Elrich says to Richard "Everyone in the music industry steals from each other. They're dicks. Even Radiohead" and Richard's response... Cracked me up.

Love the characters. The satire comes on a bit strong, but that's what Mike Judge does, it's what I expect and it makes it a bit lighter hearted.

 

[lenos16]

So is this show less stereotypie than TBBT? I'm generally interested in shows with a tech or science premise, but all the caricatures in TBBT soured me on it after a few seasons.

 

[Vyer]

Liked it. Good as a pilot, I expect Judge to really get the show to grow from here (if it lasts). Don't care about how 'realistic' the breakthrough is.

I wonder how they are planning on dealing with Christopher Evan Welch's death.

Good first ep.

Didn't even know that. Damn shame.

 

[Chairhome]

So is this show less stereotypie than TBBT? I'm generally interested in shows with a tech or science premise, but all the caricatures in TBBT soured me on it after a few seasons.

In my opinion, yes. They are still a little exagerrated, but nowhere near BBT, from what I know.

 

[Cornballer]

- NY Mag: Christopher Evan Welch Died 4 Months Before His Breakout Role in Silicon Valley: A Look at His Career

It's a good retrospective that's worth a quick look.

 

[Coppanuva]

So is this show less stereotypie than TBBT? I'm generally interested in shows with a tech or science premise, but all the caricatures in TBBT soured me on it after a few seasons.

A lot of the humor is derived from stereotypes and how people act, but it's more of a caricature sense. It feels more sincere and like actual people, where humor doesn't feel like it's laughing at the people exactly, but rather at situations they are in and the whole culture in the area if that makes sense.

 

[Cornballer]

Kumail Nanjiani will be on Conan tonight talking about Silicon Valley.

 

[ClivePwned]

I watched the first ep last night. I thought it was great. Waaaay better than Betas (which, considering how awful that was, might be considered disingenuous to Silicon Valley).

I'll definitely keep watching.

 

[Nerokis]

So is this show less stereotypie than TBBT? I'm generally interested in shows with a tech or science premise, but all the caricatures in TBBT soured me on it after a few seasons.

In that sense, I'd say it's much closer to Veep than TBBT.

 

[Tenks]

coming up with a revolutionary compression algorithm while coding a music search site is like concocting the cure for aids while cooking.

realistically, i would think that the people who come up with such algorithms barely program, if at all, and spend their time writing on white boards.

That doesn't really make sense. He wrote the compression as a means to solve an issue he had with the site. It was too slow for searching and transferring music so he had to write something to shrink the file size and make it easily searchable. As a developer I know it is easy to get lost in the forest and miss all the trees and come up with a by-product that is far, far better than the original problem you were trying to solve. Like the one guy said it is easy to not see the big picture vision when you're so focused on trying to solve an end-user problem.

 

[bodyboarder]

I think I had my expectations set a little high. Still good though.

 

[FafaFooey]

I loved it! I had set my expectations accordingly since I haven't really enjoyed anything Mike Judge has done since Office Space (the latest Beavis and Butt-Head season being the exception). Comedy shows with this kind of subtle humour are rare nowadays, so I thought it was going to be extremely over the top to make it accessible for a mainstream audience. Can't wait for the second episode!

 

[Sharp]

That doesn't really make sense. He wrote the compression as a means to solve an issue he had with the site. It was too slow for searching and transferring music so he had to write something to shrink the file size and make it easily searchable. As a developer I know it is easy to get lost in the forest and miss all the trees and come up with a by-product that is far, far better than the original problem you were trying to solve. Like the one guy said it is easy to not see the big picture vision when you're so focused on trying to solve an end-user problem.

As a developer, I would give good odds that you have never accidentally solved an active research problem without realizing it. The best solutions you can come up with without consulting existing literature are usually pretty trivial. They might be nice or work fine for your use case, but if they seem too good to be true they nearly always are (e.g. you're forgetting about potential concurrency conflicts or didn't take some classes of input into account).

 

[a Master Ninja]

The title sequence is great.

 

[Snake]

The pilot only gave me about two solid laughs, so I can't say I'm an enthusiastic fan so far. However, I did like the premise as well as most of the cast. And it's Mike Judge, so I'm more than willing to stick around to see if it comes together.

 

[DataStream]

I found this to be really disappointing. I think I laughed once during the entire show. I will give it 2 more episodes just because its Mike Judge, but I don't have much hope.

Hopefully some of the viewers stuck around for Veep, that show deserves serious success.

 

[Battersea Power Station]

I think my favorite bit was the cold open with the Vic Gundotra-type guy awkwardly talking about Barack Obama, calling Kid Rock his "good friend," and celebrating making the world a better place... through constructing elegant hierarchies for maximum code reuse and extensibility.

It was so accurate that I don't know if it qualifies for parody.

 

[Tom_Cody]

I think my favorite bit was the cold open with the Vic Gundotra-type guy awkwardly talking about Barack Obama, calling Kid Rock his "good friend," and celebrating making the world a better place... through constructing elegant hierarchies for maximum code reuse and extensibility.

It was so accurate that I don't know if it qualifies for parody.

What a great scene. Exactly the right tone. Just the right amount of dryness.

 

[Cornballer]

- Alyssa Rosenberg: What ‘Silicon Valley’ gets right as comedy, and as economics

 

[Bread]

crazy that so many of you didn't find it funny, me and my friends were laughing the whole time through and we were all hooked from the start (kid rock performing in front of the small crowd)

 

[sixteen-bit]

crazy that so many of you didn't find it funny, me and my friends were laughing the whole time through and we were all hooked from the start (kid rock performing in front of the small crowd)

are you and your friends in the tech industry?

 

[EmeraldSwords]

So is this HBO's answer to The Big Bang Theory?

Spoiler

If so,I welcome it.

 

[nomster]

are you and your friends in the tech industry?

I'm not and I loved it.

 

[Blackhead]

Slate : Let me count all the ways I hate Silicon Valley

One of the few negative reviews. He's watched the most (or all?) of the season and that article contains spoilers.

 

[dorkimoe]

loved it, i hope it stays around

 

[Cornballer]

One of the few negative reviews. He's watched the most (or all?) of the season and that article contains spoilers.

Critics received 4 or 5 episodes, iirc.

 

[Makabe]

I watched this after watching Betas (by Amazon, I think), and I found this to be far superior - it didn't rely on cheap "I'm such a nerd" jokes and the humour felt more...real.

 

[Dany]

The exaggerated nature of setting and all the jokes about it aren't funny.

Besides that it was a pretty solid premiere, definitely gonna watch the second episode.

 

[Cornballer]

Slate : Let me count all the ways I hate Silicon Valley

One of the few negative reviews. He's watched the most (or all?) of the season and that article contains spoilers.

Rebuttal to that from IndieWire: Please Kill the Expert Review: A Modest Proposal

One of the best things about watching movies and television for a living is that you get to inhabit other worlds on a regular basis, osmotically soaking in the details. But while details taken from the real world can inform and enrich those worlds, it's the story that allows us to inhabit them, and when the two are in conflict, story should win. Maybe "The Good Wife" isn't scrupulously accurate about every last aspect of the law; maybe "The Wolf of Wall Street" doesn't cover the full extent of Jordan Belson's crimes. But in purposefully told stories, those omissions and even distortions are sometimes not only necessary but beneficial. Drama is life with the distractions pared away.

 

[HP_Wuvcraft]

Holy crud, that was one of the best things I've seen from HBO.

Love the portrayal of multiple Aspie characters.

 

[Tom_Cody]

I love this line from this Gawker review:
http://valleywag.gawker.com/silicon-valley-deserves-silicon-valley-1557004909

Other than maybe The Social Network, no film or TV series has really accurately portrayed these new monsters, our mercenary Asperger's overclass.

I can't wait for the next episode. This is a show I would have loved to have binge-watched.

 

[chris121580]

The pilot was great. The line about Grinders had me in tears laughing

 

[Ionian]

After seeing people asking for comparisons with TBBT I didn't expect much (cannot stand that show) and I have to say I was pleasantly surprised. It's a far superior beast, can't wait for the next episode.

 

[Autumn Wind]

I switched from watching Wrestlemania to watching this show to see what it was all about. As someone who follows tech blogs and such, I feel almost it used a lot of inside lingo and I wonder if that will translate over to ratings?

Imagine for example if they made a funny show about wrestling news writers and used terms like blading, face, heel, shoot, work, etc. would that translate over to someone who is looking for humor?

I'll still watch because it's HBO and therefore I'm not to be flooded with advertisements telling me to catch an episode of their sitcom unless I'm watching HBO.

 

[Deku Tree]

The first episode was funny.

 

[Battersea Power Station]

The pilot was great. The line about Grinders had me in tears laughing

Grindr

It's a real service.

 

[see5harp]

I watched the first ep last night. I thought it was great. Waaaay better than Betas (which, considering how awful that was, might be considered disingenuous to Silicon Valley).

I'll definitely keep watching.

To be honest these shows, seem nearly identical from the first episode. Some of the script is less groanworthy and it's obviously more clever (i.e. The Radiohead joke and the Steve Jobs stuff) but honestly I found myself shocked at how much from the tech party with the concert, the "demo day", the money stuff was basically set up exactly the same.

 

[Infinite]

hmm first episode barely held my interest

 

[inm8num2]

I think this show has a chance to be pretty special. Judge is really skilled at working various social commentaries into his work, and I'm very curious to see what he has to say about SV, the tech industry, etc.

 

[Slo]

While watching it I thought it was pretty dead-on technically, but afterwards I got to thinking about the actual premise and it's kind of absurd. Significantly improved (2x or more) lossless compression that works on all sorts of different media types at high speeds? I could maybe buy that there could be such an algorithm for music specifically, but at the end he says,"right now it just does audio but I'm thinking of ways to compress images, video...." Really? That's basically starting from scratch, unlikely to be possible, and if it is it's going to require advanced mathematics and tons of data points to get there, not just guessing right with a hash function. Unless the rest of the series is about him failing spectacularly at actually getting it to work, which would be kind of fun but probably not work for a multiseries television show.

(Sorry, hate to be that guy, but someone has to).

This bothered me too. It's absurd that the guy "accidentally" invented the world's greatest encryption algorithm. That's like if I was just messing around with my car's engine and just sort of backed into inventing cold fusion.

 

[AstroLad]

The show is a lot more fun if you don't at all try to make it believable. I mean it's like questioning the feasibility of the Office-Space heist.

Some of the comedy is a bit too broad is my only complaint, but that's very common even for good shows' first few episodes and I have faith in Judge.

 

[Slo]

Probably what was unrealistic was that a non-academic, working part-time on the problem, could make a major advance.

But the general idea that there could be a major advance in lossless compression, that also has an impact on search, is sound. Compression as a field is still undergoing huge advances because it is closely related to machine learning. The most recent algorithms are related to figure out the "context" around a section of data and picking the correct approach to representing it. Given that machine learning is also evolving very quickly - It could be possible, in the show's universe, that the character built on other people's advances and applied them to compression....

I'd buy that if they guy was even trying to focus his work on that area. The pilot made it seem like he'd slapping together parts haphazardly and magic happened.

 

[cwmartin]

The show wouldn't even work if they tried to think of a service/tech that wasn't already invented, and made it seem plausible, because it would already exist in the first place. They're creating entertainment, not technology.

 

[Blackhead]

The show wouldn't even work if they tried to think of a service/tech that wasn't already invented, and made it seem plausible, because it would already exist in the first place. They're creating entertainment, not technology.

It would be funnier, and better biting satire, if they were working on the typical mobile startup app/game.

 

[Coppanuva]

It would be funnier, and better biting satire, if they were working on the typical mobile startup app/game.

Would it really change your opinion if piedpiper were an app instead? I mean the problem with the game thing is then you can't get bought out as easily. They gave a reason people were willing to throw money at them and I assume they need one for where it will go. Is it believable to have come up with that so easily? Maybe not, but I think it's more believable than a venture capitalist throwing him a couple hundred thousand because "Oh that new angry birds clone you're working on has some potential".

 

[120v]

as a huge mike judge fan i was a little meh on a silicon valley satire but the first episode hit all the right notes. the only thing that seems a bit off is the casting of the main character. doesn't quite seem the relatable everyman judge does so well. but the supporting cast makes up for it

either way it's good to have mike judge back. i hope this sticks around for awhile, assuming the beavis and butthead revival is dead and there aren't any movies in the pipeline

 

[sprsk]

Every time I hear aviato spoken with an accent it gets funnier and funnier.

 

[Cornballer]

2 sneak peek scenes from Sunday's episode:

- #1
- #2

Please spoiler tag any discussion.

 

[Cornballer]

New episode tonight:

The Cap Table

Spoiler

Richard and Erlich discover that they must deliver a viable business plan; Gilfoyle and Dinesh prove to be essential to the company.

 

[Cornballer]

- THR: HBO's 'Silicon Valley' Tech Advisor on Realism, Possible Elon Musk Cameo