The Scene
A year before the iconic show debuted on HBO in April of 2014, the writer Alec Berg met the show’s creator, Mike Judge, in an anonymous Santa Monica office. Judge was wrestling with the pilot for a show about Silicon Valley’s power and its eccentricity, but it wasn’t working and he wanted a second opinion.
Berg thought he saw part of the problem. There was a scene in the pilot where Richard Hendricks, the protagonist and founder of the company Pied Piper, is trying to buy a car he can’t afford. Berg told Judge the scene didn’t make sense: “This is not a guy who’s materialistic,” he said. “He’s an artist.”
Berg took over the writer’s room and would eventually become showrunner of the comedy, which ran for six seasons and helped shape the culture it depicted, parodied, and at times glorified. We reached him in Los Angeles Thursday to ask him how he and Judge and their cast had nailed the Silicon Valley scene of the mid-2010s app boom — and, above all, why the show remains uncannily relevant today, from its depiction of tortured founders and unreflective investors to the uncanny conclusion in which the Pied Piper crew builds an AI model too powerful to release.
