Silicon Valley HBO: The Recode recaps

Each week, we watch “Silicon Valley” on HBO and then reflect on the ways the show mirrors — or doesn’t — the real Silicon Valley. This week, Richard’s too-limited beta catches up to him, and Gavin gets his groove back. You can catch up on the recaps here.

With only one episode left in this season, the Pied Piper team is ping-ponging back and forth from highs to lows quicker than Maria Bamford. Buckle your seat belts, because this was definitely a bumpy ride.

Each week, we watch “Silicon Valley” on HBO and then reflect on the ways the show mirrors — or doesn’t — the real Silicon Valley. This week, a mystery: Who’s dumping shares, and why? You can catch up on the recaps here.

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Each week, we watch “Silicon Valley” on HBO and then reflect on the ways the show mirrors — or doesn’t — the real Silicon Valley. This week, the Pied Pipers release their beta and struggle with ethical issues. To catch up on the recaps, you can see them all here.

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Each week, we watch “Silicon Valley” on HBO and then reflect on the ways the show mirrors — or doesn’t — the real Silicon Valley. This week, our founding fellas make halting forays into the world of romance. To catch up on the recaps, you can see them all here.

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Welcome back to the Recode recap of HBO’s “Silicon Valley”! After last week’s failed prediction, you’d think I’d slink back to my lair, but it turns out I don’t actually have a lair. So I’m back to unpack this week’s episode the Recode way.

Just the facts: Richard took interim control over Pied Piper’s day-to-day operations and put the company into austerity mode. Unfortunately, his lingering fury at being dethroned from his CEO role led him to unknowingly run his mouth to a tech blogger. To halt the story, he found a better one: Big Head revealed how Gavin Belson scrubs the internet of negative mentions of him.

Gaah. Last week’s theory was a red herring. Richard really did trip accidentally; the plans were not purposely given to the Ottomans Jack Barker. All was, in fact, exactly as it seemed, and the only result of my wild suppositions is that I avoided feeling terrible for Richard all week.

Welp.

The thing we love about “Silicon Valley” is that they get us. They know it’s a show for geeks, and it’s made by geeks, and they aren’t going to make naive mistakes like that time Steve McQueen drove around San Francisco via magical portals through space and time.

If you haven’t tuned in yet, you can catch up here on the recaps of episodes one and two. This week’s plot was fairly simple: Richard tries to go over Jack Barker’s head, which doesn’t work. Jack tells him that “the box is here to stay.” The fellas continue working on the algorithm while pretending they are creating the physical data-compression box that Jack and the sales team have promised to the denizens of dystopian subterranean server stacks. But at the very last moment of the show, the plans for this caper are spilled across the floor of the fancy new Pied Piper digs, thereby scuttling the project we spent an entire episode watching them develop.

Good news, Silicon Valley viewers who were traumatized by the horse-head scene from “Godfather II.” You now have a new horse-related pop-culture moment to be traumatized by!

Ahem. Now that I’ve finally managed to undig my fingers from my eye sockets, it’s time for our re/cap of HBO’s “Silicon Valley,” the insider sitcom that’s so on the nose, it might as well be a giant funny zit.

Welcome to the newest installment of our “Silicon Valley” Re/cap, where we connect HBO’s satire to the real world. Or, at least, Silicon Valley.

Well, that was a nail-biter of a season finale. Phew. It was nicely done: A dramatic wrap-up that left us with questions, but not the ones we expected to have for the first 25 minutes of the show.

Welcome to the newest installment of our “Silicon Valley” Re/cap, where we connect HBO’s satire to the real world. Or, at least, Silicon Valley.

The last episode of HBO’s “Silicon Valley” ended on such a stinkin’ down note — with Pied Piper realizing that Endframe had fully stolen their algorithm — that I was worried sick about the boys all week. I should have had more faith. Richard is really coming into his own as a leader, and he met this challenge head-on.

Welcome to the fourth installment of our “Silicon Valley” Re/cap, where we connect HBO’s satire to the real world. Or, at least, Silicon Valley.

This episode focused on failure: Do you handle it by pretending it doesn’t exist, or by making sure your worst co-workers haven’t noticed it, accepting the criticism and moving on, gently slapping a bottle of energy drink into the trash as you exit?

This was the first episode that really let us down. And it was weird. Devoted viewers have been lulled into complacency by the show’s constant attention to every infinitesimal detail, from the questionable fashion choices of Gavin Belson to Richard Hendrick’s on-point grammatical specificity.

Yet this week’s plot twist hinged on an event so unlikely, so out of the realm of possibility, that it yanked us right out of the show’s reality. It’s the kind of thing that rarely happens in modern comedy — once Generation X took the TV-writing reins, we agreed, as a group, to rise above the contrived Brady-Bunch-style plots that hinged on simple misunderstandings, answer our own questions inside the script and never ask the audience to ignore Solikamskiy-sized sinkholes in sitcom plots.

Season 2, Episode 2 of the HBO-produced nerd-Desperate-Housewives had our boys losing their stack of VC offers due to Gavin Belson’s lawsuit suing Pied Piper and saying Hooli owns the intellectual property.

As part of Re/code’s insiders’-eye recaps of the show, we’re going to take a deeper look at three tech companies that were name-checked in the situations leading to the comedy.

Hey, tech nerds! “Silicon Valley” is back! The half-hour HBO comedy does a masterful job of lampooning South Bay culture, and sometimes we who are of this world can’t decide whether we’re in on the joke or not. We wanted to welcome it back for its second season by applauding some of our favorite moments in this first episode.

Let’s begin with the most cringeworthy moment in a pretty cringe-inducing show, which came before the first episode even premiered. Basically, let’s just acknowledge that these are not the same people: