HBO’s Silicon Valley ends its second season Sunday night with a finale I have seen and will warn you is so tense that I actually skipped forward a little bit at one point. That’s how suspenseful I found it. And remember: it’s a comedy.
Created by Mike Judge, John Altschuler and Dave Krinsky, the show follows a startup called Pied Piper, run by monumentally hapless founder Richard Hendricks (Thomas Middleditch). Richard is a basically kind, loyal, anxious, twitchy dude who is very good at compression algorithms and very bad at taking deep breaths at any time. He operates out of an incubator owned by Ehrlich Bachman (T.J. Miller), a strangely charismatic complete idiot who fancies himself a kingmaker. (Okay, not a complete idiot. But mostly an idiot.) Richard also employs programmers Gilfoyle (a perpetually seething Martin Starr) and Dinesh (a perpetually mellow but quizzical Kumail Nanjiani) and CFO Jared (Zach Woods). The team works alongside Monica (Amanda Crews), a representative of the venture capital firm that’s got a huge investment in Pied Piper.
The blessing and the curse of Silicon Valley is that it’s set in a very specific universe. You will hear a lot about incubators, investors, buyouts, network security, coding, conferences, a giant company called Hooli (essentially this universe’s Google), various versions of software launching — and keep in mind that Richard’s company is in the business of file compression. He started out wanting to make a music app, but now all these people are deeply engaged in perhaps the unsexiest thing they could possibly do with themselves: making files smaller for the purposes of transmission. You might as well be employed full-time packing people’s suitcases tighter.
Of course, file compression is critical to the functioning of companies like Goo — sorry, Hooli, and that’s why there’s so much money in it. That’s why Hooli founder Gavin Belson (played with waxen flair by Matt Ross) has done countless unscrupulous things trying to get control of Pied Piper or, if he can’t do that, destroy it. It is nevertheless a really really boring business around which to structure a show if you’re not going to explain how good you have to be to do it well. Without that technical knowledge on the part of the audience, it’s like making a sitcom about a sports team, but the sport is competitively folding pieces of paper into thirds.
But the surprise of the show’s second season, which has been stronger than its first was, has increasingly been that in addition to being reliably funny, it somehow feels familiar as a workplace show, despite being so much a creature of its bro-intensive world in which practically nobody ever goes outside for any purpose other than a meeting he’s dreading and the stakes arise from a business with a purpose as superficially mundane as you can imagine. (It’s no radio station or bar or White House, setting-wise.)