Silicon Valley: The Complete First Season

Mike Judge's HBO-aired tech comedy is set in a San Francisco Bay–area “incubator”: namely, a suburban home where young techies stay rent-free in return for 10 percent of the revenue from any apps they develop while living there. Thomas Middleditch stars as Richard, a technically brilliant but socially inept and cripplingly insecure programmer who creates a music app of limited appeal but with a powerful compression algorithm that is worth millions. Instead of selling to the rapacious Gavin Belson (Matt Ross), CEO of a Google-like corporation, Richard takes seed money from a rival in order to develop it himself with his roommates, and he learns firsthand just how little he knows about the business, politics, and culture of start-ups. Silicon Valley pits this small gang of eccentrics against a tech Goliath, serving up humor built on familiar portraits of computer-savvy geeks who write code while dreaming of a breakthrough that will make them the next Steve Jobs (and who have, of course, little to no contact with the opposite sex). The show lampoons all aspects of this culture, from the struggling underlings, to the successes who are driven by ego as much as profit potential, to the overwhelmingly male make-up of this insular society. Overall, they make for a likable bunch—T.J. Miller, Kumail Nanjiani, Martin Starr, Christopher Evan Welch, and Amanda Crew costar—with good chemistry. Compiling all eight episodes from the 2014 debut season, extras include three behind-the-scenes featurettes. Recommended. (S. Axmaker)