Please, Don't be 'Entourage' for Nerds

HBO’s newest comedy Silicon Valley is hitting your airwaves on April 6th. The show will join quite the lineup that night along with the season premieres of Veep and Game of Thrones. So HBO clearly has high hopes for the series created by Mike Judge, the man behind cult classic Office Space. The network just released its f first stinger trailer for Silicon Valley and it looks like we’ve got quite the motley crew of tech nerds on our hands.

The series follows a programmer played by Thomas Middleditch who lives in a hostel full of hackers that is owned by T.J. Miller aka the raddest candle-maker from Our Idiot Brother. The series also features the talents of Zach Woods (The Office), Josh Brener (The Internship), Martin Starr (Party Down) Amanda Crew (Charlie St. Cloud), and Kumail Nanjiani (Burning Love). If the short trailer tells us anything about the series it’s that its creators are taking full advantage of the stars’ improv backgrounds with the seemingly off-the-cuff nature of a lot of its jokes.

The trailer also dedicates about a third of its airtime to dick jokes. And when it comes to HBO and dick jokes, the first thing that comes to mind is Entourage. Surely, you think “Now, now, come off it. This show is about NERDS it won’t be anything like Entourage!” But au contrare. It has the potential. Tech start ups lead to big money and we all know how Vinny Chase and co. loved that green. It’s also about a brigade of dudes trying to build an empire. The “Started from the bottom now we’re here” reference is there, except with Silicon Valley it’s probably a little more tongue-in-cheek.

The tech world is also a notoriously difficult environment for women. And not that I think Mike Judge and his writers are going to make anything overtly sexist — his treatment of female characters in his other projects are generally hilarious and multi-faceted, they just don’t get the same recognition or airtime as the fellas. Which is just as troublesome. But I can sort of smell the geeky dudes with stupidly hot chicks thing happening and it makes me squirm a little. Or worse, the stereotype of computer guys never seeing live human breasts and having some sort of sophomoric obsession with them. Please, HBO, promise you’ll spare us.

All in all, Silicon Valley looks like an energetic injection of straightforward laughs into HBO’s comedy roster. At first glance, Silicon Valley looks like something that belongs more on FX than HBO. And with the Instagram filtered world of Girls along with the sexy, sophisticated, and dreamy land of Looking , Silicon Valley will (hopefully) take the HBO twentysomething into a very different territory. You have our attention.

Image: Silicon Valley/HBO