Silicon Valley Season 1 Review

Silicon Valley is a show that’s garnered a hell of a lot of positive press since its eight-episode first season run debuted on HBO in April.

I’ve just gotten around to watching it and let me tell you, the praise is entirely warranted.

Without a shadow of a doubt Silicon Valley is the most exciting thing I’ve seen on television in some time. It’s a bright, innovative laugh out loud comedy with an interesting, current setting and an outstanding cast of characters.

The half hour comedy follows Richard Hendriks (Thomas Middleditch) – a socially awkward programmer attempting to build a startup tech company in direct competition with his former employer Hooli – an extremely thin satire of Google – out of the startup incubator where he lives and works with friends Dinesh (Kumail Nanjiani), Guilfoyle (Martin Starr) and their landlord Erlich Bachmann (T.J Miller). Hendriks must also deal with venture capitalist Peter Gregory (Christopher Evan Welch) the man funding his company and attempt to avoid becoming the latest casualty in the war of rivals between Gregory and Hooli CEO Gavin Belson (Matt Ross).

I’m going to talk about the cast in particular, because I think that is ultimately the key element behind the show’s success. The show benefits infinitely from the twin presences of Martin Starr – an old hand of the Judd Apatow rat pack going all the way back to Freaks and Geeks  – and Kumail Nanjiani, who played Pindar Singh in Franklin and Bash, arguably the stand out character from that show.

Nanjiani and Starr, like Steve McQueen and Keith Allen, have a certain tendency towards playing  pretty much the same character in everything, most likely an exaggerated, (or maybe not exaggerated, I have no idea what they’re actually like) version of themselves. Their characters in Silicon Valley are no exception, but that’s no bad thing, because they’ve both been cast pitch perfectly, as I knew they would be. The dry, laconic humour of Starr’s Guilfoyle and Nanjiani’s shy, sarcastic Dinesh are flawless to a note.

But it’s not just the two names I knew which impressed me, T.J Miller as the uncouth, eccentric tech entrepreneur Erlich puts in a riotous performance which brought me to fits of hysterics, whilst Zach Woods brings a different type of laughs as the business savvy, but somewhat bumbling Donald “Jared” Dunn, a Hooli defector who joins Pied Piper early in the season.

Christopher Evan Welch, who tragically died last December after a short battle with Lung Cancer, is also fantastic as the phlegmatic Peter Gregory, and will be sadly missed from the show’s second season, already confirmed by HBO as in development. Gregory’s character really rounded off what was an incredibly strong cast, but even without him for the final few episodes, the show still managed to keep up the same incredibly high standard, building to an end of season crescendo which left me desperate for more.

Now, Silicon Valley could very well be called The Big Bang Theory’s bad boy younger brother, (the endless name dropping and geeky jokes about well-known figures in the tech industry definitely has a Big Bang feel to it) but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s often coarse, occasionally crude, but with bags of irreverent verve and charm. It’s got a real heart at its core, but not one which detracts – in a How I Met Your Mother kind of way – from the actual jokes. It’s an incisive, intelligent comedy seasoned with – to my tastes at least – just the right amount of lewdness. Something tells me you should expect to hear a lot more about Silicon Valley in the near future.

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