SILICON VALLEY – Live-action comedy developed by Mike Judge; rated TV-MA; airs Sundays on HBO; 30 minutes. Episode 1.3: “Articles of Incorporation” (original airdate, April 20, 2014). Directed by Tricia Brock; written by Matteo Borghese & Rob Turbovsky (8 out of 10)
The story so far: Richard Hendrix (Thomas Middleditch), Big Head (Josh Brener), Gilfoyle (Martin Starr), Dinesh (Kumail Nanjiani) are four programmers working out of Erlich Bachmann’s (T. J. Miller) incubator on various projects. Hendrix’s project, Pied Piper, includes a lossless algorithm that could change all digital media as we know it, allowing for quicker streaming and less space needed for storage. This begins a bidding war between philanthropic rebel billionaire head of mega-corp Hooli Gavin Belson (Matt Ross) and angel investor Peter Gregory, who offers less money but allows Hendrix to retain ownership of the company. After they decide to keep the company to themselves, hiring Hooli business analyst Jared Dunn (Zach Woods) to help them write their business plan, Hooli hires away Big Head in an attempt to reverse engineer Pied Piper, market it as “Nucleus” and bring it to market first.
In this episode: Richard can’t deposit Peter Gregory’s check, which they desperately need because they are broke. Richard just spent the last money on his credit card to purchase company t-shirts. And they are terrible. Meanwhile, Hooli has already released an ad for “Nucleus” in hopes of beating them to market.
But apparently, the name “Pied Piper” is registered to a sprinkler company. Because the name of the company is in dispute, they can’t file as a corporation and deposit the check until that is cleared up. Richard begins negotiating to get the rights to the name Pied Piper, which blow up after Erlich gives interviews to several major tech blogs about Pied Piper and its superiority to Nucleus, causing the owner of the sprinkler company to demand more money and threaten to kick Richard’s ass.
Meanwhile, the employees begin brainstorming new names, all of which are terrible. Erlich’s solution is that they should drive into the desert and do a lot of drugs, going on a “vision quest” to find a new name. When he actually does this, hijinks ensue.
We also find out fun things about our characters, like Jared’s name is actually Donald, but he just changed it to Jared because Gavin Belson called him that his first week. Also, Gilfoyle is Canadian. And in the US illegally. Dinesh really resents this and his Canadian citizenship, even referring to Justin Bieber as “The Hitler of Music.” Jared points out that since Hitler played the bassoon, Hitler is actually the Hitler of music.
And Peter Gregory spends the entire episode exploring the menu of Burger King, having never eaten there before. He becomes obsessed, specifically with sesame seeds on their buns. It’s brilliant and insane the way I expect people like Howard Hughes were.
And it ends with an Amber Alert. that’s all I’m going to say about that.
Final verdict: 8 out of 10
This episode had a lot of laughs and also moved our characters forward. It had a lot going on but didn’t feel overstuffed. Richard has to stand up and protect his company. And the hallucination sequences and Hooli’s commercial for Nucleus are brilliant as satire of the tech startup world. It’s great to see them advancing the plot, develop the characters, and still cram in a lot of laughs at the same time. A marked improvement from last week’s episode.
CAST:
Thomas Middleditch as Richard Hendrix, T. J. Miller as Erlich Bachmann, Zach Woods as Jared Dunn, Kumail Nanjiani as Dinesh, Martin Starr as Gilfoyle, Josh Brener as Big Head, Christopher Evan Welch as Peter Gregory, Amanda Crew as Monica, Angela Trimbur as Langdon