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" The world of Silicon Valley isn&amp;#039;t a direct reflection of our own, but it also isn&amp;#039;t some kind of funhouse mirror distortion. Instead, it sits right alongside ours, an alternate universe where the absurdities on display land because we can&amp;#039;t help but recognize them. The corporations and technologies and people on display in HBO&amp;#039;s comedy series, which has just begun its third season, are generally ludicrous, but they contain just enough reality. Even when the series gets very silly (and it is often very silly), one thought bounces around the back of your brain: &amp;quot;Oh, this probably happened at some point.&amp;quot; Take one scene that occurs late in &amp;quot;Founder Friendly,&amp;quot; where Richard Hendricks (Thomas Middleditch), having been demoted from CEO to CTO within the ranks of the company he founded, entertains job offers from another company. Flutterbeam, the series&amp;#039; latest fictional company whose silly name and sillier logo are just ridiculous enough to feel like they actually exist, want Richard on their team. In fact, they want him on their new top-secret project: a program that will place a digitally rendered mustache on the user for\u2026well, reasons. And this one scene, a brief but important one, Silicon Valley reveals all of the reasons why it&amp;#039;s one of the most consistently funny shows on television and the rare comedy whose carefully constructed world allows it to do whatever the hell it wants. &amp;quot;We raised a shit-ton of money and we&amp;#039;re growing fast as balls, but we&amp;#039;re not exactly super-psyched about the quality of our engineering,&amp;quot; one Flutterbeam founder tells Richard as they give him a tour of their building. Like so much of the dialogue on the series, this is delivered in a delightful deadpan\u2014the movers and shakers of the tech industry don&amp;#039;t have time for irony, so they certainly don&amp;#039;t have time to take one step back and realize how idiotic they sound. Silicon Valley recognizes one of the great truths of any industry, that the smart people at the top are often as dumb as a bag of hammers, and runs with it. The technology may be next generation, but those steering the ship are oblivious bros at best and Gavin Belson (Matt Ross) at worst, who makes himself look like a noble leader by falling on the blade of the Nucleus debacle and &amp;quot;bravely&amp;quot; firing nearly two thousand employees.  Silicon Valley is defined by how it explores the idiotic core of a world that seemingly requires intelligence to exist within and the mixture of low comedy and techno-babble can be delicious. &amp;quot;With your help,&amp;quot; one Flutterbeam founder says to Richard, &amp;quot;We can cut our stache-lag to just twenty millisecond motion-to-photon in nine months.&amp;quot; Richard, the closest thing we have to an audience surrogate on the show, is as bowled over by the stupidity of the entire endeavor as we are. It&amp;#039;s the kind of terrible idea that feels like it could actually happen, the kind of stupid idea that even legitimately smart people working in the technology industry bubble would think users would want. &amp;quot;Just in time for Movember,&amp;quot; one founder says, showing off digital &amp;#039;stache options like the &amp;quot;John Waters&amp;quot; and the &amp;quot;Sam Elliot.&amp;quot; This is the landscape series creators John Altschuler, Mike Judge, and Dave Krinsky have crafted. This is a world where late-night auto accidents involving &amp;quot;Bambots&amp;quot; from Stanford Robotics are common enough to inspire irritation rather than awe, a world where Gilfoyle (Martin Starr) and Dinesh (Kumail Nanjiani) have to apply coding tactics to real-life conversation just to help cut through the bullshit of their day-to-day lives. Silicon Valley has introduced its fair share of clever phrases into the lexicon, and it&amp;#039;s easy to see &amp;quot;RGBY,&amp;quot; a stand-in for the niceties that always come before your privately tear down a friend, catching on. But the greatest trick Silicon Valley has ever pulled, and one that it continues to pull in &amp;quot;Founder Friendly,&amp;quot; is that those jokes never get in the way of allowing you to care about what happens to these characters. When it dawns on Richard that joining Flutterbeam may not be the right choice, when he grapples with his own ego and internally weighs his options, it&amp;#039;s as thrilling and as heartbreaking as anything on Game of Thrones. The show is wily enough to temper the drama by leaving an absurd digital mustache on his face, but Middleditch is allowed to lend his predicament actual dramatic weight. If Silicon Valley wasn&amp;#039;t so funny, it would be the most devastating and draining show on television.  To paraphrase those Flutterbeam guys: No one else is doing it. Nobody. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a44293/silicon-valley-season-5-episode-1-recap-founder-friendly/>