Spoiler Alert: Tech and chips

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Silicon Valley traces the trials and tribulations of four programmers trying to make it big in the heart of the tech world. Richard Hendriks (Thomas Middleditch, who seems to be an interesting mix of Hugh Grant and Hugh Laurie) is a programmer who works in Hooli, a software company in Palo Alto, and spends his free time building his own programme, Pied Piper, in an incubator house set up by a big-talking, bossy entrepreneur, who hasn’t really achieved much — Erlich Bachman (TJ Miller).

Richard is awkward in the worst way, and completely incapable of holding a conversation with any of his co-workers; so when he tries to tell people about Pied Piper, he is ridiculed. His colleagues, in a bid to see if they can humiliate him further, test the programme, only to be blown away by the efficacy and complexity of Richard’s code. As more colleagues gather to see what the fuss is about, a business development associate, Jared (Zach Woods), realises the code’s potential to alter the industry, and takes the matter up with the Hooli’s CEO Gavin Belson (Matt Ross). Before Richard can understand what’s going on, he’s whisked away to the CEO’s room, and is offered 10 million dollars, on the spot, to sell the code to Hooli. Around the same time Gavin Belson makes the offer, a famously eccentric venture capitalist, Peter Gregory (played by the late Christopher Evan Welch), contacts him, and tells him that he will fund 200,000 dollars for a small stake in the company, which Richard will be CEO of. Richard, who has never been confronted with this kind of money or attention, is forced to make a decision that can change his life — sell out, or believe that he can make his own fortune. After considerable thought, he opts for the latter.

The rest of the show is a painfully honest account of the amount of trouble involved in actually setting up a business. Richard has to deal with Erlich’s bossiness, the constant bickering of the two other programmers in the house, Dinesh (Kumail Nanjiani) and Gilfoyle (Martin Starr), and the fact that Gavin Belson is working around the clock with a giant team of programmers to reverse-engineer the Pied Piper algorithm.

The show has great comic moments, and the equation between Dinesh and Gilfoyle is excellent. Perhaps, the only fault I can find with

Silicon Valley is that despite the abundance of phallic humour, there is close to no female casting. One of the show’s creators, Alec Berg, was asked the same question recently, and he insisted that the reason for that was because of the actual disparity of women in the tech world. It was evident that they weren’t in love with the world they were showing onscreen, and he went on to say that it was screwed up (with an f).

I have to say though, as screwed up as his world is, it’s a lot funnier than the one we’re living in.

(Silicon Valley

is available on the Hotstar app, and is telecast on Star World Premiere HD. )