Not Just Any Office

After Game Of Thrones, before Veep, is Mike Judge's new comedy, Silicon Valley.  It's about a bunch of programmer nerds and their start-up.  They live in Silicon Valley, surrounded by newly minted billionaires, but so far have little to show for their efforts.

The pilot, "Minimum Viable Product," does what a pilot is supposed to do--introduce the characters and set up the story.  The programmers put in time at the incubator--the house of Erlich, a guy who sold his company and made enough to buy a place and live decently, and is trying to develop something new. He's a low-rent Steve Jobs, into the vision thing over the actual technical stuff.

The main nerd is Richard Hendrix, who invents a new code without fully realizing how important it is. But the big guys hear about it and are willing to pay him a lot. Gavin Belson, the cant-spewing, cultish leader of the biggest company on the block, Hooli (a stand-in for Google) offers as much as ten million for the discovery.  Meanwhile, another big name, Peter Gregory (played by Christopher Evan Welch, who has since died, so I'm not sure what will happen to the character), offers a few hundred thousand for a stake in a future company.

After making himself sick over it (and hearing personally from Gregory's hot assistant Monica), he decides to go with the stake money. He and his pals, all wisecrackers in their own way, will try to develop their company.  Will they succeed?  Stay tuned.

The acting is fine and the script fairly humorous, though I wouldn't say laugh-out-loud funny.  A good start, anyway, and worth checking out.