Silicon Valley

Time to catch up on "Silicon Valley" before the new season begins on April 12. For anyone who hasn't seen this HBO sitcom about six socially incompetent tech geeks who stumble upon the potential for huge success in the online world, you're missing out. This is a show that can make you feel smart while you're laughing at some pretty rude and stupid humor. And even though most of us will never come close to genius, we can relate to the ineptitude.

In an attempt to create Pied Piper, an esoteric app for the benefit of a handful of musicians and copy write lawyers, Richard Hendriks (Thomas Middleditch) stumbles upon a revolutionary data compression algorithm that could very well put him in league with some of the biggest and most successful companies in Silicon Valley.

For maximum success, he has situated himself in a business incubator run by the entrepreneur Erlich Bachman (T.J. Miller). (This is really just Bachman's house. He's basically made a bachelor pad were a bunch of mildly obsessed guys can play video games and write code.) Among the aptitude in this think-tank is a pair of rivaling programmers, Bertram Gilfoyle (Martin Starr) and Dinesh Chugtai (Kumail Nanjiani), and Richard's best friend Big Head (Josh Brener) who's only talented at being an adorable mascot.

When an executive from the Google-like company Hooli, Donald "Jared" Dunn ("The Office's" Zach Woods), and the assistant of an eccentric venture capitalist, Monica (Amanda Crew), discover the potential of the Pied Piper algorithm, events are set in motion that bring everyone together to produce cloud storage platform based on their compression technology.

But Hooli has reverse engineered Richard's code and is coming to market with a competing platform of their own.

The brilliant comic minds of Alec Berg ("Curb Your Enthusiasm") and Mike Judge ("King of the Hill," "Office Space") are sharper than ever in their observations of brilliant incompetence. You don't have to know a lot about tech to laugh at the idiosyncrasies of those who reach the pinnacles of "Silicon Valley."

The bonus features in this two disc Blu-ray collection are particularly fun because of the cast's talent at improv comedy. In "Making Silicon Valley" Berg and Judge take us behind the scenes while each of the actors introduce their characters. "Tech Crunch: Disrupt!" shows the re-making of the Tech Crunch: Disrupt! conference. And our six stars take us on a tour of Pied Piper headquarters in "The Hacker Hostel."

Silicon Valley: The Complete First Season"
Blu-ray
Rated TV-MA / Approx. 228 min.
www.hbo.com/#/silicon-valley/