Mike Judge's "Silicon Valley" (HBO Show)

todd loiuso was great casting

Realtor things otm ime - my best friend growing up is a tech guru that jumped ship on the dwindling returns from software in recent years to a lucrative real estate business. He even ended up on a reality show which was weird af

there's a certain personality overlap between a realtor archetype and a guru/cult leader one imo

Haven't searched Twitter yet to see if there are any "Kanye is Gavin Belson" takes.

They really need to pull back on Dinesh being such an insufferable asshole .

I vomited into my shirt

i ate two egg whites and a green bean.

They really need to pull back on Dinesh being such an insufferable asshole.

Remember when he was briefly CEO? It's a feature, not a bug.

yeah i get it but they totally drained the guy of any likeability at this point.

Dinesh's angst and pettiness doesn't feel like it's at 100% like it might have been if this were Halt and Catch Fire. This seems to be consistent with Mike Judge live action (but weirdly not animation) where everyone's performance is marked by a lack of affect, and I'm wondering if the opportunity to have so many characters where a lack of affect is built-in played into him developing the show.

As much as Gilfoyle still brings the lols, I think the writers have been struggling what to do with both of them as this arc plays out.

What if they marry each other?

ok?

Dinesh's asymmetrical relationship with the (former) mole makes me think he really needs a buddy

I think the writers have been struggling what to do with both of them as this arc plays out

a lot of the humor in this iteration of the show is too "sitcomy" for my taste but in general the Dinesh/Gilfoyle B-plots have been particularly painful.

aren't the A-stories equally hacky?

I came to a point after watching several seasons of The Apprentice - the UK version - where I just thought "wouldn't this be more interesting if they dropped the buffoons and had a season with actual smart people"? And Silicon Valley is kind of the same. If the characters were less grotesque, they might be funnier. I love Martin Starr but his character is basically Garfield at this point.

The strengths of this show are definitely not realistic or consistent characters

that ep was subpar and maybe the worst of this season.
most of (actually ALL) the plots were not very interesting/funny (the new china/jian yang, the robot, the gay subtext of richard/jared's relationship, the richard/laurie relationship fail, the dinesh/gilfoyle terrible competition...).
hopefully it's just a one-off in an otherwise mostly great season !

It was a surprise to see Big Head though !

man they really seemed to be going hard on the assholish entitlement angle + the direct equation of Tesla with a pyramid scheme + the literal idiot hunting through mountains of garbage + the bitcoin rhapsodizing... everyone is getting pretty fucking unlikable.

Still some quality lolz though - Bighead w the Rubik's cube, the whole scene with Monica + Gilfoyle + Richard in the office

This show has made me realize that my generation finally has its own stock villain: the tech billionaire. First yr the hero, then yr the monster (if you live long enough)

even Jared's been getting his turn as a bit of a monster

Happy that they didn't do a full episode about Bitcoin - seems a bit too obvious and Gilfoyle's alert was the only joke they needed

welp...

bighead and the Rubik’s cube was my fave, too

he can’t even cheat right

dinesh has completely worn out his welcome. whoever said they no longer know what to do with him is correct.

it's weird bc arguably (unless i'm forgetting someone?) he is having the best career of the ensemble

maybe middleditch if u weigh phone commercial $$$ against oscar noms

i know we never could have, but if we had had david gregory and laurie bream on this show at the same time it would have been so, so great

I think it makes more sense, you can write off a character with a bad trajectory more easily than one that's integral to the plot. Dinesh ends up ditching, and Kumail is free to go make movies and other shows, maybe pop in for a cameo

his character could even be wildly successful after pied piper and it'd be him returning to rub salt in wounds

they've already set up a possibly lethal comeuppance for betraying hacker girlfriend.

Can we now agree that the show is missing TJ Miller?

Nah

Everyone else has become more assholish in his absence

need more bighead

I feel like T.J. Miller had charisma, or at least a belligerent forced version of it, and they could introduce that in a more insidious way down the road

A character in the new China supply/patent chain who is devilishly charismatic would be great

there is an entire archetype of the dude who thinks he is charismatic that other people eventually give up in the force of their unrelenting sales pitch that you give up and laugh along

Miller is that way, and, I think, the lead actor on the Deadpool movies
the idea that if you think you’re funny and are really aggressive about it, or attractive, people will just accept it eventually a

Happy that they didn't do a full episode about Bitcoin - seems a bit too obvious and Gilfoyle's alert was the only joke they needed

welp...

Yep spoke too soon. But surprisingly to me, they have played it mostly straight so far rather than gone the satire route

Yeah Dinesh is getting obnoxiously ridiculous this season, but I loved the joke where his employee calls her friend to say her boss bought her a car

he was reduce to custom rims, which is a decent car joke

it strikes me that elon musk is genuinely weirder and more craven than anyone on this show

peter thiel for real has blood transfusions from the young, paid for a lawyer to represent a wrestler in a sextape beef and a guy who falsely claims to have invented email against a media website, ended up speaking at the rnc, is a gay man who defended people yelling bigotry when he’s gay, and is an anti-immigrant immigrant. he also funded a real libertarian oil platform community startup

he’s so,far beyond Musk in stupid unbelievable shit to the point the shoe integrates things and no one thinks them plausible

Musk made money from a few ventures and now seems to have the same interests as my friend’s two year old who likes pretty ladies, Thomas the tank engine, and rockets

and, presumably, candy

they need a mcafee character. he could summon richard to his jungle lair.

"He has been extremely bullish about bitcoin, writing on Twitter in July 2017 that he predicted that the price of one bitcoin would jump to $500,000 within three years, and "If not, I will eat my own dick on national television"

lol I forgot candy

also, sorry. i'd drinks

also, I meant to type "show" but ended up pulling an ed sullivan

they need a mcafee character

isn't this Russ Hanneman?

i guess? kinda different though. russ is more like a wall street douche who got lucky. mcafee is more complicated than that.

i mean mcafee had the one big thing but he was also a tech/software lifer.

kind of, I think he's mostly been a figurehead or investor for all the stuff he's done since the 90s

his full-time career was being a batshit crazy synthetic drug aficionado in central america

Hmm, turns out it's only an 8-episode season, ending tonight.