Silicon Valley startups Watch

The Keanu movie may have sucked, but William Gibson’s 1981 short story Johnny Mnemonic starts excitingly enough. The title character, a human USB stick living in a cyber-future only slightly more dystopian than our own, stuffs a sawn-off shotgun into a grubby Adidas sports bag: “Not my style at all, but that was what I was aiming for. If they think you’re crude, go technical; if they think you’re technical, go crude.”

At first glance, Mike Judge’s current HBO sitcom – halfway through its UK run on Sky Atlantic on Wednesday nights – looks highly technical. Silicon Valley paints a vivid, layered portrait of Palo Alto’s urban ecosystem where ambitious entrepreneurs jostle with companies valued in the billions of dollars to create or discover the next killer app.

For a comedy, it feels uncommonly authentic, and not just because real-life Silicon Valley faces such as former Google CEO Eric Schmidt turn up to cameo like fashionistas in Ab Fab. From the coding slang to the goofy-looking startup promo T-shirts, everything feels plausible. Thanks to input and oversight from actual Palo Alto fixers, Silicon Valley expertly taps the zeitgeist like a smartphone touchscreen.

But Judge, the father of Beavis and Butt-Head, knows the benefit of a little crudity. So his evocation of Silicon Valley culture has it both ways, building a believable world – a viable infrastructure, in coding terms – and then ladling on dollops of profanity and raunch. When your story is centred around a mild-mannered nerd struggling to bring a proprietary universal compression algorithm to market, there’s no shame in juicing it up a little.

Richard Hendricks, the nominal lead character, may have named his startup Pied Piper but he’s rarely the guy playing the tune. The rare times that Richard (played by Thomas Middleditch) is not being bullied by his party-hearty business partner Erlich (the Belushi-esque TJ Miller), he is a half-punctured football being kicked between billionaire tech rivals Gavin Belson and Peter Gregory.