1) Silicon Valley – Optimal Tip-to-Tip Efficiency
“It’s like if The Big Bang Theory were on HBO.” Okay, yes, and no. Silicon Valley is about a group of socially stunted man-boys doing and saying smart things and sometimes a pretty girl shows up. But where CBS’ head-scratcher of a hit sitcom flails around in trying to “be nerdy” (why would a brilliant physicist, who references Grand Theft Auto and Shadow of the Colossus, ever waste precious spare time playing Champion Jockey?), HBO’s new comedy shoots through the bull’s-eye and into the wood at the back of the target.
The guys on the show, all living in the same “incubator,” become unexpected founders of a piece of software that… well, it doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that there’s a company called ‘Hooli,’ a subplot concerning a character that inexplicitly gets shipped to the middle of the ocean by a smart car, and a piece of hilariously over-sexualized garage door art that would make a porn star blush. The characters, all self-conscious and insecure, don’t explicitly like one another, either. You get the sense that if they weren’t living in the same house, they’d never talk to one another again. But their unified terror of the world around them, combined with their delightfully succinct manner of speaking – “He’s as pointless as Mass Effect 3’s multiple endings” – results in one of the most endearingly off-beat rogue’s gallery in recent memory.
And it all reaches its zenith in the season’s finale, “Optimal Tip-to-Tip Efficiency.” The show is in its sweet spot when it’s just characters, in a room, talking. And that’s perfectly epitomized in the finale’s big set-piece handjob scene.
Given that the show’s on HBO, you could greatly miscalculate my meaning of that last sentence. It’s not what you expect, but it is unabashedly glorious. It takes one simple idea, laser-focuses in, and pushes the boundaries on how long you think something can be funny for, then goes even further. It’s a revelation in how dick jokes can be told, and its biggest success is in how nonchalant the show tells it, revels in it, and moves on, seemingly none-the-wiser in its own success.
The funniest things are, after all, the ones that aren’t trying to be funny. This episode sees the show at its dotcom millionaires and silicon valley-skewering best, awash in the irony of the pure genius it takes to make it in this world, and the gloriously awkward nerds who do. And even though it’s the last episode, the show is such an eager-to-please riot that the biggest spoilers lie in the carefully layered minefield of jokes and lampoonery awaiting you in its first seven episodes, a gift of riches not even its masterwork of a finale could spoil.
