Mike Judge’s 1998 movie Office Space struck a nerve with just about anyone who ever wound up in a thankless low-end white collar job. Few movies before or since have been able to articulate the petty indignities, the inanities and the general soul gnawing awfulness of such gigs. Though the film is far from perfect, its abundance of painfully funny jokes along with some eminently quotable lines — “Ummm I’m gonna need you to go ahead and come in tomorrow” — have enshrined Office Space into the canon of cult movies.
Sixteen years later, Mike Judge has a new sitcom that aims its satirical sites on another white-collar ecosystem – Silicon Valley (the home of Open Culture). The series centers on nebbish programmer Richard who unwittingly develops a new revolutionary way to compress files. Soon he finds himself in a bidding war between two of the tech world’s biggest entrepreneurs. Like Office Space, the fun of the show is its wry, acerbic observations about the rarified culture of the valley.
Just like some apps that offer themselves for free before making you pay, the creators of Silicon Valley are offering the first episode of the HBO series for free on YouTube. Check it out above. Now if only they would do the same thing for season four of Game of Thrones.
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Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow.
After watching this I wonder why Elon Musk made a fuss about it. Seems rather harmless.