Reviewed by Kabir Mahajan, a writer.

When Silicon Valley first aired in 2014, the tech culture we know today wasn’t as oppressively colossal—Elon Musk wasn’t at the edge of space, Jeff Bezos didn’t have a monopoly on, let’s face it, virtually everything, and Bill Gates was still the richest man in the world. Over its five-year run, Silicon Valley satirized the growing tech culture, poking fun at the foibles of the tech community. 

The heart of the show is a group of friends—there’s awkward, idealistic coder Richard Hendricks (Thomas Middleditch),  deadpan Satanist Bertram Gilfoyle (Martin Starr), arrogant entrepreneur Erlich Bachman (Todd Joseph Miller), anxious programmer Dinesh Chugtai (Kumail Nanjiani), and loyal business developer Jared Dunn (Zachary Woods). They live in an incubator run by Erlich, who provides them with free rent and utilities in return for  a 10% share in their companies. (Erlich, in his usual patronizing manner, refers to them as his “incubees.”)

The show takes off when Richard invents a revolutionary lossless compression algorithm while trying to code a music copyright recognition app—a technique that can substantially reduce file sizes, and nearly instantaneously. He starts the company Pied Piper in the hopes of making this technology accessible to everyone, bringing on board his fellow “incubees.” The tech, however, turns out to be just the start of the struggle to achieve success: As the team races to secure funding and prepare a product, they must navigate the complex world of venture capital, going toe-to-toe with rivals in the tech industry (including Gavin Belson (Matthew Ross), chief executive officer of fictional tech corporation Hooli). Through the team’s ever-oscillating progress—there are pitfalls, followed by high jumps, followed by more pitfalls—it grows and shrinks, but manages to stay together.

The show wastes no time in providing commentary on Silicon Valley, highlighting the crippling self-doubt mixed with savior complexes characteristic of many tech giants: “I don’t know about you people, but I don’t want to live in a world where someone else makes the world a better place better than we do,” Gavin Belson tells his employees. Each episode ridicules the idiosyncrasies of tech culture, such as the tabs versus spaces argument between coders (spaces take a long time to type, but are standardized, whereas tabs are easy to tap, but may change on others’ computers). These critiques have become increasingly relevant, as it seems the tech culture has itself become the satire—Elon Musk walking into Twitter with a sink seems rather Belson-esque, after all. A court case in the sixth season, which came out in 2018, also mirrored Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony earlier that year. 

While Silicon Valley certainly captures some aspects of the tech world well, others are handled unwisely. The lack of female characters present in the show looms large, especially in season one. It is pushed under the pretense of holding a mirror to the industry, but does little more than carry this culture on. It presents clichéd, lewd humor, along the lines of that in The Big Bang Theory. When the show does try to address the issue of sexism, it fails miserably—Monica Hall (Amanda Crew) says at one point, “Normally the tech world is 2% female. For the next three days? 15%,” as they enter a conference. Though this may seem fairly cutting, it’s one of the rare times the show actually acknowledges the absence of female characters.

The racial stereotypes present in the show are also noticeable. Part of the group’s dynamic is playful teasing—one-liners that have some oomph to them. In both Dinesh and Gilfoyle’s friendship, and in Erlich and new incubator resident Jian-Yang’s (Jimmy O. Yang) reluctant partnership, the racial undercurrent of many insults just serves to perpetuate harmful stereotypes, especially about Asians in tech. The show allows white characters to branch out, with caricatures ranging from dense fools like Big Head (Josh Brener) to tortured artists like Richard to Satanists like Gilfoyle—however, it keeps Asian characters in a relatively small box, particularly in  Jian-Yang’s case. The irreverence of the show is what makes it entertaining, but things like Jian-Yang’s accent are used so often as humor devices that it’s hard to justify them.

In spite of these flaws, Silicon Valley is witty, hilarious, thrilling, and entertaining. All in all, the show is a good comedy, and definitely worth watching.

Silicon Valley is available for streaming on HBO Max, Spectrum TV, Prime Video, Vudu, and Apple TV. Rated TV-MA.