Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Of all the great things about television, the greatest is that it’s on every single day. TV history is being made, day in and day out, in ways big and small. In an effort to better appreciate this history, we’re taking a look back, every day, at one particular TV milestone.
IMPORTANT DATE IN TV HISTORY: April 6, 2014
PROGRAM ORIGINALLY AIRED ON THIS DATE: Silicon Valley, “Minimum Viable Product” (Season 1, Episode 1) [Stream on HBO GO]
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT: HBO has been a dramatic powerhouse on television for decades now, creating iconic TV shows that have gone into the television canon. But while they’ve certainly produced great comedies (The Larry Sanders Show; Sex and the City), they were never quite able to put two great ones together at the same time. The closest they ever came was pairing Sex and the City with Entourage, a pairing that felt buzzy and symmetrical, but never actually all that good. Who knew that the TV show that would finally unlock the greatest lineup in HBO history would be about a handful of bitter computer programmers tripping over their own egos to create something so unglamorous as a data compression system.
By the time Silicon Valley premiered on HBO, Veep was already in its third season, and Game of Thrones was in its fourth. Thematically, the shows don’t really go together, but brought together by the old gods and the new at HBO, they were forged into the best two-hour block in the history of the network. Silicon Valley was the wild card of the group, the unproven newbie starring a bunch of semi-recognizable face and featuring a lead character so nervous and fidgety that he was constantly puking. But the Mike Judge series found its stride quickly, balancing tech-biz process stuff (I learned so much about venture capital from this show!) with mean comedy with just the right amount of character pathos to keep us from feeling too distant from the story. It was an underrated alchemy for the first couple seasons there, before everybody came around on it. A really good jerk-off joke will do that.
