At first I kind of rolled my eyes when I heard this show was coming out -- I was pretty certain I could fully predict most of the jokes that would be used for a cheap laugh.
But I like the characters, and the plot is pretty fun - it's a show that's easy to watch and enjoy for those of us that don't take much too seriously.
I had the exact same experience. I was expecting it to be another 'Big Bang Theory.' But I genuinely enjoy it. It's not the dumb kids making fun of the smart kids. It's the smart kids making fun of themselves.
It's definitely gotten me to laugh a few times. Check out this scene, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-OQhot_ml0 and if you like it, you'll like the show. If not then it's probably not for you. Also Silicon Valley has got by far the most accurate technical jargon of any show I've ever seen. Now it's not perfect, but I'm glad to see a show about developers that doesn't have random text scrolling down screens and bullshit 'hacking' going on while EDM plays in the background.
My biggest complaint with the show is that it still presents all software developers as socially awkward imbeciles who can't talk to a girl or stand up for themselves. But there is some truth in that statement.
> "My biggest complaint with the show is that it still presents all software developers as socially awkward imbeciles who can't talk to a girl or stand up for themselves."
They do have the `bullies` at their office who are also engineers and definitely fit the `cool kid` stereotype. I think they purposefully want to position the protagonists as being walked on and socially inept even within a group already considered to be socially inept by the general public.
"You want me on that firewall. You need me on that firewall. Son, we live in a world with networks and those networks are guarded by people with packet filters."
does anyone actually watch this show? I've tried several times to get into it, but I just don't find it funny at all. Sure hearing startup names being thrown around (like Github) and knowing who they are is present day nostalgia, but not enough to make me committed to the show. I compare the likeness of Silicon Valley to "the Big Bang Theory"; those who are into those fields find them more annoying then funny.
I love this show. Not only does it accurately portray the SV startup scene, but it has a well-written story line. You can't really compare this to Big Bang Theory. I've seen nearly every episode of Big Bang and that is way, way more sitcom-style than Silicon Valley. Big Bang has a lot of nickle jokes related to science fields, with situational comedy surrounding the characters thrown in. Silicon Valley is not a sitcom, and the episodes follow a well-researched story line.
> Big Bang has a lot of nickle jokes related to science fields, with situational comedy surrounding the characters thrown in.
I think you have it backwards. Big Bang Theory these days is primarily a sitcom with some geek humor* thrown in.
* I use the term geek humor loosely. I don't consider superhero outfits or comparing someone to $nobelLaureate to be proper jokes (especially if I mentally edit out the laugh track).
Does Silicon Valley have a laugh track? I don't remember one from the first episode, but I watched that a couple of weeks ago.
Often (not always, though) shows with laugh tracks are an entirely different level of "not funny". It's bad when the show creators have to rely on cheap psychological gags to trick you into enjoying yourself. Silicon Valley operated at a higher level than that, although I still found a lot of its humor just referential and not too humorous or too easy. Honestly, just reading hacker news every day provides you with way more satire than the show does... I didn't watch anything past the first episode, so I can't speak to the story which you seem to like - I was just looking for a comedy show.
But tastes do differ. Especially when it comes to comedy. I'm glad you liked the show. I wouldn't compare it to Big Bang Theory, but I wasn't a fan.
It shouldn't be compared to Big Bang Theory. That show is a typical paint-by-numbers sitcom, the kind that CBS has been cashing big checks on for the past decade. They aren't particularly funny. I think Chuck Klosterman wrote something that these shows are "in the form of funny", which means that they follow a common comedic timing and use the laugh track as a cue. Once you start looking for it, you always see it.
The three camera and laugh track are usually indicators that the show probably isn't "smart funny", but it's not always true. I can watch Seinfeld reruns and pick out the camera cuts, laugh tracks and joke timings, but the show is still pretty clever.
But most people capable of making shows of Seinfeld-quality aren't going to go do a CBS sitcom. Seinfeld's set up was mostly a relic of its era. Today, you can get a single-camera comedy greenlit thanks to the cable channels. Even networks took some chances. I don't watch too many network shows anymore, but I know Scrubs and Arrested Development were single camera shows without laugh tracks and they were on NBC/ABC and Fox, respectively.
As for Silicon Valley, I was expecting more from it. It's a Mike Judge show and the reviews were very positive. I've only seen the first two episodes, but they were at least good enough to make me want to watch more. It sometimes takes these shows a while to build the characters and build enough background for more jokes to connect, but at this point, I'm more worried about the story lines being thin than the comedy. That's what ultimately lost my interest in Entourage. That show started out as being a fun 30 minutes, but it was very superficial and once you realized that the plots were ridiculous and the characters didn't make that much sense, it became tedious to watch. Since both Entourage and Silicon Valley are both based on specific, unique cultures, I think they're fairly comparable.
Couldn't agree with this more. I cringe at laugh tracks that literally get set off after each line of dialogue in many exchanges, especially when it is not even a joke and not funny.
Compared to that, SV is much much better in my opinion. I can't even watch BBT because the laugh track is so grating and don't get me started about "Bazinga", the most trite manufactured catch-phrase ever created.
The first two episodes had their funny moments, but the sum of a few laughs and some "present day nostalgia" moments still didn't make for a great show.
However the third episode that aired Sunday was pretty good, several laugh out loud moments (most of which weren't actually related to technology in any way, just good comedy).
I feel now that the basic premise of the show has been established (which may be pretty obvious to us, but probably not to the average Joe) and you have an idea of who the characters are Mike Judge's true strengths can start to shine.
I do agree that there are more than a few cringe moments if you have some knowledge of the tech and startup scene (the more you have, the worse it gets), but if you can see past that and they keep the momentum from the last episode I think we're in for a pretty nice show that is treating a topic that hasn't gotten all that much attention from main stream media so far and to be perfectly honest, could use a little bit of poking fun at.
I'm into the fields talked about in "the Big Bang Theory" and don't find it funny, but I'm also into the fields depicted in "Silicon Valley" and find it funny. I think the humor is better in this show. One of my friends is a doctor, and couldn't watch "Scrubs" because it was a little too close to home... maybe that's the case here ? Anyways, I'm embracing the poking fun of our culture!
I second your feeling about Big Bang Theory, but I don't think SV is that bad. Personally, I liked the competing show "Betas" a lot better because it had subjectively more soul and better dramaturgical timing, but other than that Silicon Valley is mildly entertaining. Compared to BBT there is not a lot of pretentiously presented flavor text with at best a tenuous connection to real science, so I think Silicon Valley might at least have better expert consultants than most professional-themed drama and comedy shows. That still doesn't mean one can or should expect total factual accuracy from a TV show, it's still just entertainment - it just has to be enough to make you believe for a few minutes.
The show has received great ratings, both in critical reviews and in viewership. (although a lead-in from Game of Thrones might contribute to the latter).
I have mixed feelings. There are some laughs that I really enjoy, but the main character is just so awkward. I realize it's meant to represent the programmers out there who are exactly that awkward, but I just can't stand it in real life or on the big screen.
I find the supporting characters much more funny and enjoyable.
I almost wrote it off after the first episode but said I'd give it another chance - pilots are hard.
Then some of the technical rants from the 'staff' in ep 2 won me over. There is a striking balance/hover around real and humor/farce in the show I'm starting to really like.
I've seen other networks do it for shows in the past. Most notably http://www.bettercallsaul.com/ was created a while ago in reference to Breaking Bad.
The show has mostly made sense technically. The only thing they got wrong is the code is clearly proprietary but Richard tells the assistant that it's up on github in the first episode.
I actually watched the first season of Betas after someone recommended it in a Silicon Valley thread, and thought it was pretty good. Beta's seems to use the silicon valley theme as more of a backdrop for character development whereas Silicon Valley does seem to poke more fun of the SV culture. I like them both.
That algorithm sounds like total B.S. As if someone could stumble onto a lossless compression algorithm with file sizes 50% of an mp3. Even a comparable size would be a huge compression breakthrough.
And there are theoretical limits to what you can do with lossless compression and I suspect that the algorithm in the show breaks those.
Well, everything else can be waived as marketing-speak. From a cursory glance it looked like the landing page for a small team that came up with some cool compression technology and then got some marketing wiz-kid to throw up a webpage. Everything except the technological claims I could just disregard.
I was confused for a second and thought this was the most ego-centric startup I've ever come across. What team stares at you from 80% of the landing page instead of revealing the product?
Yes, similar to why I flog my children for liking Toy Story : toys cannot move or talk, fools!
At one point these complaints stop being "this is too much to suspend my disbelief" and become "yes an opportunity to thinly veil my desire to seem smarter than everyone by pointing out every single insignificant mistake!".
I suspend disbelief, and I enjoy the show. I am just critical of how they chose this magic algorithm as the McGuffin. I guess it's easier to write as a justification for a billion-dollar profit possibility than trying to foresee the next social media revolution. That's fine. It comes down to what is writable, but the trade off here irks my technical sensibility.
That's pretty much the only thing in the show that doesn't "make sense" though. They clearly made a real effort to use real world terminology and archetypes so that developers wouldn't be too distracted by inaccuracies and concentrate on the comedy. Even the way they discovered the algorithm was pretty on-point technical wise.
The premise that people are interested in the underlying technology of a product rather than the product itself is also a common theme in the valley. I personally am impressed with the show thus far.
I enjoy the show as well, but no one is ever going accidentally invent a quantum leap in compression technology like that. He might as well have accidentally cured cancer for as much sense it makes.
> And there are theoretical limits to what you can do with lossless compression and I suspect that the algorithm in the show breaks those.
Compression schemes achieve better results the more they're tailored to the data you're compressing. The theoretical limits are not the issue.
For example, here's my compression algorithm for popular movies: You take the most popular 255 movies of all time as of a particular date and include an uncompressed copy of all of them within the compression algorithm itself. Then the compression scheme works as follows: If the first byte is not a zero, the decompression code will emit one of the 255 most popular movies, and the 255 possible non-zero values for the first byte identify which one. If the first byte is a zero, what follows is an uncompressed copy of a movie that is not one of the 255 most popular movies, and the decompression code merely strips the first byte.
Using that algorithm I can compress each of the 255 most popular movies into a single byte. That's basically the theoretical limit. You could create a compression algorithm that could compress every film ever released into maybe three or four bytes. The problem is naturally that such an algorithm is a) completely useless for all the films that haven't been released before the algorithm is created, and b) completely impractical because the compression algorithm itself is far too large to be distributed or stored efficiently. Because it's a trade off, and achieving the theoretical limit for data size takes the trade off too far in the direction of specializing the algorithm to the data.
But that doesn't mean there can't exist algorithms that make a more interesting trade-off than the existing ones do. Suppose you specifically design a compression algorithm for music. It's pre-programmed with the sounds made by common musical instruments and that are common in human singing. If the recording contains a guitar playing a G#, the algorithm identifies it as a guitar playing a G# and calculates the difference in pitch, volume, tempo, etc. between the recording and the idealized note built into the algorithm. That would be a significantly more complicated compression algorithm than most of those currently used, and it probably wouldn't get very good compression ratios for recordings of things other than music, but you would have something that could conceivably compress most music better than existing compression algorithms.
1. I think that's why they generally include the size of the decompressor in compression contests.
2. Great points re ___domain, but on the show they specifically say that the algorithm is general purpose, and the talk about using it for compressing images, documents, etc. I don't know about you, but I don't have any G#s in my excel spreadsheets. ;-)
So maybe it's meta. Instead of being a compression algorithm, how about a machine learning algorithm that takes a corpus of data and generates a compression algorithm specialized to compress that type of data. You train it against music and get an algorithm suited for compressing music, you train it against spreadsheets and you get an algorithm suited for compressing spreadsheets, etc.
But I like the characters, and the plot is pretty fun - it's a show that's easy to watch and enjoy for those of us that don't take much too seriously.