Though many may be talking about the Season 4 premiere of Game of Thrones, let's not forget that HBO also debuted Mike Judge's new live-action comedy Silicon Valley last night. The half-hour comedy has since been put online and you can enjoy it in all its hilarity and entirety.
The series introduces us to a group of young guys whose potential for greatness in the tech industry is more or less endless if they can figure out what to do with it. The series premiere introduces us to a fivesome of friends, one of whom has come up with an algorithm that he thinks can be best used to help people do music searches. Little does he realize the full potential of what he's come up with, and there are people in the industry who are more than willing to explore that, whether it means purchasing the program or else, buying into the endeavor. Do these guys take the lump sum and move on to their next project? Or do they take a fraction of that in the hopes of making significantly more in the long run, developing the algorithm for bigger and better uses and making their mark on Silicon Valley and the world? Fortunes have likely been won and lost by people who faced that exact conundrum.
Is this algorithm the next Google? Or is it the next Friendster? I suppose it all depends on who does what with it, and that's what these guys need to figure out.
I love that Mike Judge is behind a project like this -- along with Dave Krinsky and John Altschuler -- and I love that it's at HBO. It's a comedy, and a funny one at that, but it's also full of dramatic potential, and some of HBO's most successful comedies -- Sex and the City and Entourage come to mind -- were both of those things and look how well they did. Silicon Valley "The Movie" may be a ways off and a very optimistic bit of speculation, but it is Mike Judge, after all, writer and director of Office Space. So let's not rule it out.
In the meantime, it looks like the characters' next challenge is coming up with a business plan for their software:
Silicon Valley airs Sundays at 10:00 p.m. The series stars Thomas Middleditch, T.J. Miller, Zach Woods, Kumail Naniani, Martin Starr, Josh Brener and Christopher Evan Welch. Read our review of the first episode here!
