Reviews for Mike Judge's "Silicon Valley" on HBO | Hacker News Reader

Reviews for Mike Judge's "Silicon Valley" on HBO

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66 pointswikiburner40 comments

I'm really looking forward to this show. I trust Mike Judge will deliver based on the quality of Office Space and Idiocracy.

They've done a great job casting the show. It's a great list of funny actors(Martin Starr), improv(Zach Woods), and comedians(Thomas Middleditch, Kumail Nanjiani and TJ Miller). Kumail Nanjiani and TJ Miller are two of my favourite comedians.

Kumail has a video game podcast with his wife Emily called "The Indoor Kids". http://www.nerdist.com/podcast/the-indoor-kids/ His standup special Beta Male is available for $5 here http://ccdirect.comedycentral.com/watch/kumail-nanjiani-beta...

TJ Miller's Special is $5 here http://ccdirect.comedycentral.com/watch/tj-miller-no-real-re...

Here they are in a couple "This is not happening" sets on youtube. Kumail https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNpRMfiwwlM and TJ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kf9N5AWprG8

It's pretty tragic that main character Christoper Evans Welch died while in the middle shooting the show. As a result they ended up having to change the show drastically.

Can't wait. Mike judge is just straight out Genius.

He's pretty smart, but he's also a guy who knows how to get his hate on. I haven't seen the new show, but I'm concerned that it's going to be an uninformed hatchet job. Mike once worked as a developer, but he knows little or nothing about Silicon Valley and how it works (he's from Texas and has never lived in California). My fear — and I hope I am proven wrong — is that the show will be based on all the misinformed stereotypes and presumptions that outsiders have about how technology, innovation, and entrepreneurship work in the bay area.

>is that the show will be based on all the misinformed stereotypes and presumptions that outsiders have

So your fear is that it will be like every TV show about anything, ever.

Silicon Valley is not so special that it deserves or needs some particularly higher standard accuracy.

His actual fear is it that he won't be able to suspend the necessary disbelief to enjoy it. You see the same thing from anybody who has specialty knowledge and sees it misrepresented on TV. They know what they're seeing is wrong, so it breaks the illusion. A great example is my buddy's wife. She's an MD and he loved to watch House. She could never get into it because every time they skewed medical facts to fit the story, she knew.

You are correct about that, but to most people, the stereotypes about silicon valley apply to everyone in working tech, even people like me working on legacy enterprise software in MN. For the non-tech people I know, their impression of the tech industry as a whole, and thus my job, are tied to stereotypes about silicon valley.

I agree with you on the last part man, I feel like once the show - if it's popular will just deliver ignorant opinions from couch potatoes...not to mention the view on the valley

A good friend saw the SXSW screening of the first two episodes and loved it. He's founded a failed company, founded a successful small company, coded for a failed company, and is currently in SF coding for a startup.

A lot of the jokes are tech-hilarious and well-informed about the tech culture here. Mike Judge's long-time residence, Austin, has plenty of tech and some startups, but of course not as much as the Bay Area.

It's a comedy so I expect it to poke fun at our culture.

It's a comedy so I expect it to poke fun at our culture.

And after living in the Bay area for six years, I realize that there is much to poke fun at.

I've been watching shows about "The South" written by ignorant Californians my whole life. I'm perfectly alright with one instance of a Texan telling a Cali story. It'll be fine and at the very least should be fresh. :)

As part of the industry, I can see an awful lot of irrational exuberance and shallow cargo culting that would benefit from a sharp, witty, cynical eye.

You don't think some of those stereotypes and presumptions are well deserved?

> he knows little or nothing about Silicon Valley

"Everything is so different here, an outsider couldn't possibly know anything."

...

Get over yourself. Quite frankly people starting to think California is some sort of promised land would be a good thing.

"Lee[1] was quoted as saying, "What do I know about gay ranch hands in Wyoming?" In spite of the director's removal from the subject at hand, Brokeback Mountain showcased Lee's skills in probing the depths of the human heart."

... and I remember, as someone who grew up in that time period, in the poor-white-trash southwest, being amazed at how perfectly he nailed the aesthetic and mood of the entire movie[2].

So it can be done ...

[1] Ang Lee is a Taiwanese-born American film director, screenwriter and producer.

[2] Brokeback Mountain

"he's from Texas and has never lived in California"

Mike lives at least part-time in LA and attended UCSD.

https://twitter.com/MikeJudge http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Judge

He worked at Sun Microsystems. His time there inspired a lot of Office Space apparently.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylnMb6niDJ0

Yes, that's what gives it a chance of being funny. You sound like you'd like to show people how great it is here, but that wouldn't be funny.

>> is that the show will be based on all the misinformed stereotypes and presumptions that outsiders have about how technology, innovation, and entrepreneurship work in the bay area.

That sounds a lot like Amazon's show Betas.

Ok someone should run a book on how soon into the show the common "nerd" tropes are used :-)

Just mentioning DnD is always good a for a few laughs :-(

Having said that C4 did this a few years ago with "Nathan Barley" - one of the people being parodied actually worked at the same company that I did.

Will it be as good as the IT crowd though?

I can't tell if I should be excited that Mike Judge is coming out with something new or downright hateful that I now have to almost certainly subscribe to HBO for whatever price the provider sees fit.

People like him should really follow Louis C K's example and make everything available over the web DRM free for a reasonable price. I can't think of a reason they would need HBO or FOX to make things happen. (On a second thought - Louis C K stand ups are one man show mostly but still for serials there must be a ton of independent investors willing to invest in the new model of delivering entertainment. There's Kickstarter even :))

big-budget shows can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per episode to make. HBO has very deep pockets.

Yeah, but House of Cards is the perfect case study example of how it can work. Netflix has obviously broken new ground here where the old rules don't need to be so restrictive. For that matter, I currently live in China, and it's fantastic that I can watch House of Cards for free online legally because it's been properly licensed by the Chinese streaming company. Heck, it's so good, that I might have even paid for it.

How is House of Cards an example of fronting production costs yourself then selling DRM-free copies direct to fans? HoC filming costs were ~$60 million per season, which is several million per episode, and were paid up front by Netflix when it outbid HBO/Showtime/AMC for the rights. The only novel thing about that show's production was releasing the whole series at once rather than one episode per week.

House of Cards pitched HBO too. HBO could have had the show if they wanted it. Mike Judge and Kevin Spacey want to get paid to create the stories that they want to tell. They could care less about the business model and will move to new models when/if it makes sense. It's not their job to change how media is consumed. It's their job to make a great show. Louis doesn't release his show DRM free. He partnered with a network. For his standup special it made sense to release it through his website so he did. The creators have enough on their plate just to make something good. They are going to go where the money is now.

Millions you missed a Zero there

And until HBO offers even a semi-convenient way for me to pay, I'll just pirate their content like I always have.

I know the head of the HBO team here, and I asked him about that topic.

HBO has no incentive to offer streaming only subscriptions. Cable companies pay top dollar to offer HBO content, because putting HBO on a TV package increases the subscription to that package. Like For ever $1 cable companies pay for HBO, those cable companies make $3 from TV packages.

He said that HBO basically prints money, and does not give a damn.

That's fine, we'll just wait. Currently I just use a relative's account. But the day will come when cable companies are not able to afford these premiums, it is only a matter of time.

> But the day will come when cable companies are not able to afford these premiums, it is only a matter of time.

I think this is the most likely outcome. Though with the big failure of municipal internet access, I think cable companies will still be relevant, perhaps just as dumb-pipes, and not content providers.

What evidence can you present that cable companies are becoming less powerful or relevant? All I see is cable companies consistently increasing their power vs. content providers. The latest example being the Netflix/Comcast deal with Netflix paying Comcast. But there are others: Comcast bidding for Time Warner Cable, Verizon FIOS household numbers stalling (they're still a player but not taking much share). They're also becoming more vertically integrated - so buying more content companies themselves.

My take is that until there is another viable internet pipe to the home - wireless or fiber optic - the cable companies will continue to be relevant and powerful. Controlling the last mile to the consumer is just too powerful, especially when you look at how difficult and costly it is to do a new network at scale.

I think you just argued my point:

> I think cable companies will still be relevant, perhaps just as dumb-pipes, and not content providers.

That's fine, I just get the free service for 3 months then drop it, then do it again. For some reason At&t keeps letting me do this for over a year.

By "semi-convenient" you actually mean cheap. If you're a cord cutter all you have to do is sign up for an ~$80/month cable package that includes HBO and HBO Go. You wouldn't even need to install a shitty cable box. You could just use the HBO Go login to watch from your computer, laptop, table, apple tv, xbox, playstation, or whatever.

That's extremely convenient. It is not cheap, but it is convenient. :)

"I can't think of a reason they would need HBO or FOX to make things happen."

I can think of three: cost, distribution and risk.

The cost to produce the show likely isn't cheap - could be as high as $1m an episode, and the risk is you have a bomb after you've invested in, say 5-8 episodes. You could get investors to put in money - but who knows if Mike Judge is interested in that - he might just want to make a great show.

Or you just partner with HBO and get to make the show on a large budget with high end production values, along with HBO's very strong promotional arm to push it - and you still get a boatload of money plus residuals.

Louis CK can do what he does because he's selling a live show - the costs are predicable and one-time (or maybe a few times if he records multiple shows). Not that there isn't some risk - but Louis CK can also offset the cost side by what he gets on ticket sales - so he's probably even on the cost side before he even tries to sell it on the internet.

TL;DR: You can't compare filming a show with filming a series.

1$ Mil per show is cheap thats the cost of show run on shoe string a bit like Amanda Tapping did with her show Sanctuary.

Fringes pilot was round the 4 Mill mark.

Based on the commercials, I'm afraid this is going to be any broad comedy with cheap laughs...like The Big Bang Theory. Big I did like Office Space, Idiocracy, and bits of Extract so I'll give it a chance.

After presenting at the last TC disrupt last year me and my business partner was contacted by someone planing the show. They wanted to use our material and or us as extras when they recreated Disrupt. Not sure what happened but we lost contact with them. Been waiting to see how this show turned out.

HBO's certainly been doing everything they can to promote it in Seattle: https://twitter.com/stuartpb/status/444271882066350081

People at startups look more like MTV Real World celebs and than the awkward geeks they are portrayed as in this series. Watching it I felt like Mike Judge is really out of his element in terms of being able to satirize something he's only familiar with through news articles.

More often it's catered food or food trucks - not ramen noodles.

I wonder who's reviewing this show? Techies like ourselves, or HBO's mainstream audience?

It says exactly who's reviewed this unreleased show right on the linked page - five television critics writing for five different publications.

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