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FORTUNE.COM // JANUARY 2020
SILICON VALLEY :
THE EXIT INTERVIEW
TECH
THERE’S A REASON Silicon Valley worked from the moment
it premiered on HBO in 2014: It was only about the
pursuit of tech greatness and never ever about icky stuff like office
romances or boring backstories.
The critically acclaimed comedy, which aired its finale Dec. 8,
centers on programmer Richard Hendricks (Thomas Middleditch),
who develops software featuring an unparalleled data compres-
sion algorithm and founds the startup company Pied Piper with
an eccentric group of coders. For Richard, Gilfoyle (Martin Starr),
Dinesh (Kumail Nanjiani), Jared (Zach Woods), and Monica
(Amanda Crew), nothing mattered more than creating something
indelible and good, away from the predatory glare of Big Tech.
And they did. Until they didn’t. And they did
again. Until they didn’t. (And so on.)
A week before the finale aired, Fortune
sat down with series cocreator Mike Judge,
who loosely based Silicon Valley on his own
experience as an engineer in the 1980s, and
executive producer Alec Berg, who wrote
and directed the finale and appears in it as a
documentary filmmaker. Inside their offices
on the Sony lot in Culver City, Calif., Judge
and Berg revealed what had been their biggest
concerns and aspirations for the finale, how
they landed Silicon Valley super-fan (and
Microsoft founder) Bill Gates for a cameo, and
how the series might be the ultimate under-
dog morality tale.
This conversation has been edited for clarity
and space. For the full Q&A, go to Fortune.com.
You’ve both worked on series finales before:
Seinfeld for you, Alec, and Mike, King of the Hill and
Beavis and Butt-Head. What was distinctly chal-
lenging about crafting the ending to Silicon Valley?
Alec Berg: We’d lived with one big idea the
last couple of seasons: that the show was, in
pretentious terms, about the idea that Richard
Mike Judge and Alec Berg, producers of HBO’s hit tech satire,
explain what made ending their Emmy-nominated series so
complicated (and how they landed a Bill Gates cameo).
By Stacey Wilson Hunt
Actors (from
left) Thomas
Middleditch,
Zach Woods,
Amanda Crew,
and Martin Starr
in a scene from
the Silicon
Valley finale.
EDDY CHEN
—HBO
