If the aim of satire is to make its target smart with irritation, a new sitcom about Silicon Valley has hit the bull's eye. Wealthy hi-tech tycoons, powerful entrepreneurs and geeky engineers are all lampooned without restraint in HBO's show set in Palo Alto, the global business hub in California.
The sitcom, called Silicon Valley, is broadcast in America Sunday and will be seen by British audiences this summer on Sky Atlantic, but it has already been hailed by critics as the boldest attempt so far to skewer the absurd side of the influences shaping the modern world.
Last week reporters spotted an angry Elon Musk, founder of tech companies Tesla and SpaceX, criticising its barbed portrayal after a preview screening, and some of those whose careers are parodied have gone so far as to declare war between California's two major industries – Hollywood and Silicon Valley.
"None of those characters were software engineers," Musk said, attacking the accuracy of the show. "Software engineers are more helpful, thoughtful, and smarter. They're weird, but not in the same way."
The show was created by Mike Judge, the man behind the 1990s cartoon hit Beavis & Butt-head, and the Emmy award-winning King of the Hill, and it tells of the launch of a start-up business, Pied Piper, born almost by accident, as Twitter was, as a side project of another failing IT venture. Actor Thomas Middleditch, star of the American version of The Office, plays Richard, a shy programmer who works at Hooli, a tech company, reminiscent of Google, where slogans such as "It takes change to make change" and "No fear, no failure"are part of the decor.
Just how much pain the show will inflict is already in dispute. Rather as the British Olympic supremo Lord Coe removed the potential sting of the BBC's satirical sitcom 2012 when he agreed to appear in it, so Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google, makes a guest appearance in Silicon Valley during a party scene in which the boss of a new company climbs on a stage and shouts: "We're making the world a better place … through constructing elegant hierarchies for maximum code reuse and ostensibility." Schmidt said he would appear in the scene because "I've been to that party".
Judge, who also made the cult film Office Space, had been planning a television comedy about the Palo Alto world of "geeks" for 14 years but decided that the fruit was now ripe for picking. "There are a lot of people getting rich very quickly now and it has become more of a zeitgeist thing," he told an audience at a public event in Los Angeles last week.
"If these web developers had been born 100 years ago, or even less, I don't think they would be the richest people in the world. They would be well-paid engineers or something like that. They are introverted and socially awkward and nobody is telling them 'no'. It's kind of perfect for comedy."
Musk watched the preview in the valley's Redwood City last week with Craig Newmark, inventor of Craigslist, and Mike Arrington, founder of TechCrunch. His chief complaint against the show was that the talented people he employs are less uniform and less self-conscious than the characters Judge has created with his co-writer Alec Berg, who worked on Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm.
"The truth is stranger than the fiction," he said. "Most startups are a soap opera, but not that kind of soap opera." Musk went on to suggest that the world of Hollywood finds it hard to imagine a place where people are allowed to be individuals – however "weird".
"The parties in Silicon Valley are amazing because people don't care about how they're perceived socially. Hollywood is a place where people always care about what the public will think of them, and it's fucking sad, and the show felt more like that. I've lived in Hollywood for 12 years, and I've never been to a fucking good party."
Speaking truth to power is a dangerous game, but it is also an entertaining one. "The valley is a place that takes itself too seriously, and it has yet to be properly lampooned," said Middleditch. "So it's time for a wedgie."
His co-star TJ Miller, who plays an older dotcom millionaire, is also happy to wage a Hollywood war. "If the billionaire power players don't get the joke, it's because they're not comfortable being satirised," he said last week. "And they don't remember that to be a target of humour is an honour – you have to be venerated to be satirised."
Critics have also hailed the show for closely reflecting the male-dominated, engineer-heavy tech business. The sitcom has one female lead character. Judge, who once worked in Silicon Valley, said it was "very important" to him that the show was accurate. "I still know people in that world. But a lot of this stuff is just so absurd you don't have to do too much. You get called "satire" when you are really just showing it like it is," he said.
