Silicon Valley

There isn't an actor or character you won't look forward to seeing again, and that includes those you may initially resist. Each is allowed to be right or wrong, each could exist in the world as we know it, and each can be uproariously funny in his or her own way.

Judge has a keen eye for the absurdities of human behavior and speech, but he's not the kind of guy to waste that on subtle inside jokes or wordplay. He's not someone to waste it on farce, either: Silicon Valley also happens to be sly and smart.

Every performance is terrific.... While these characters are written and performed as over the top, the show also celebrates the subtle underplaying that goes into making Big Head and Gilfoyle so memorable. That variety of tone is another way in which Silicon Valley sets itself apart from most other half-hour comedies.

The pilot is flat-out brilliant ... It’s the best, most wide-appeal show that HBO has had in ages.

The writing is sharp, and laughs are both low (Ehrlich commissions a Latino graffiti artist for a street-cool logo that turns out to be incredibly, hilariously vulgar) and high (in the same episode, Ehrlich's repeated attempts to avoid coming off as racist come off as racist).

It's a perfect marriage of creative team, channel and subject.

Judge isn’t quite jury and executioner of this whole crazily infantile, insular scene. But he clearly knows how to probe its soft spots. In that respect, Silicon Valley is its own killer app.

As in Office Space, the heart of the show is watching Richard and his friends struggle to make sense of themselves and their purpose. They're good, weird guys you want to hang out with.

Silicon Valley often has the watch-it-all-come-together plotlines that make those shows [“Seinfeld” and “Curb Your Enthusiam”] such delightful comic puzzles.

Silicon Valley is the funniest out-of-the-box pay cable comedy in a good while.

It’s a precise, sharply executed sendup of the high-tech, billionaire-making culture and economy of Facebook/Google/Apple/Amazon/Yahoo that has infiltrated (“disrupted,” as they say) contemporary life. Better still, Silicon Valley is also here to make you laugh.

The plot itself isn’t particularly complex.... The satire, on the other hand, is exquisite.

Created by Mike Judge, it does for techies, venture capitalists, and tech-biz campuses what Judge’s film “Office Space” did for cubicle dwellers, their bosses, and office parks back in 1999.

It arrives fully formed and packed with smart observations that will appeal to anyone with even a passing interest technology, modern capitalism and geek culture. Even if you don't care about those things, Silicon Valley works as a well-crafted ensemble comedy about a particularly eccentric workplace.

The show’s version of machismo is hilarious, and feels new. Silicon Valley captures the pack-wolf preening of guys whose muscles are located mostly above their necklines.

Silicon Valley is a funny, insightful, blistering satire.

Not only is it funny, it has an air of authenticity thanks to co-creator Mike Judge, who mines his previous experience as a Silicon Valley engineer for laughs.

With an appealing cast, a relatively fresh setting and smart jokes ("Every party in Silicon Valley ends up like a Hasidic wedding," i.e., the men and women are always separated), Silicon Valley is definitely worth your time investment.

Silicon Valley is good. But “Silicon Valley 2.0” is going to be even better.

Silicon Valley has its share of pause-the-DVR laugh lines, but it's not as relentlessly funny as, say, Judge's "Office Space." It does, however, get better as it goes along.

It's a well-observed comedy that succeeds because it's so rooted in specificity.

Silicon Valley is a comedy, certainly, and a very funny one, but it doesn't spend all its time reminding you of the fact.

Even in today's world in which everyone lives online, the milieu of Silicon Valley makes for a rather small target. But Judge and his colleagues manage to hit it smartly.

[A] sharp, very funny new HBO comedy.

Silicon Valley, the latest creation of Mike Judge ("Office Space," "King of the Hill"), gets off to a rough start Sunday night; one might say it tries too hard. But it's certainly worth the 30-minute expenditure, because well before Episode 5 it's in a comedic groove and seems destined to run beyond the eight-week run HBO currently has planned.

Silicon Valley, a new comedy about programmers trying to make it big in a world where unimaginable fortune may be only an app away, is both smart and funny.

The show is well structured, with blunt but effective sitcom beats, and, refreshingly, it isn’t an “Entourage”-tinted fantasy.

Assuming you aren't a programmer and don't plan to invent the next killer app, you may at first find HBO's Silicon Valley more pathetic than amusing.... By the end of the second episode, however, the personalities take off, the humor sharpens and there's no need to reboot.

There’s a lot to like, in a series with genuine laughs.

In the grand tradition of Mike Judge projects, HBO’s new comedy, Silicon Valley, is a bit messy, a bit shambling, and often very funny.

There are a few elements of Silicon Valley that are still works in progress at this point. The force of Miller’s personality can be overwhelming, and a little of Erlich goes a long way.

Valley starts well, with needling absurdities, but payoffs are few. [Apr 2014, p.50]

Judge clearly likes his characters, and his charismatic actors often justify that affection, but it's disappointing to see so much of an episode's running time spent, for example, on the homophobic implications of a piece of street graffiti, when we could be in the inner chambers of Hooli, or even in the incubator watching as the nerds bicker their way through code to realize the compressor's greatest potential.

Some of the resulting tech and geek jokes feel accessible to all. With others, we feel like we need a password, and that could limit the long-term appeal of Silicon Valley. But if it only settles in as niche humor, it’s solid there.