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FORTUNE.COM // JANUARY 2020
TECH
Bill Gates had long been a fan of the show, and
you finally got him for a cameo in the finale. How
did you pull that off?
Berg: We’d met and spent an hour with him
in 2017. We asked, “If you had advice for
Richard, what would it be?” He said, “If you
get petitioned by a foreign government to
explain your business to them, you should go
in person.” [Laughs] We’d talked about put-
ting him in the Senate hearings episode at the
beginning of season six.
Judge: But this was better. If you get him,
you might as well save him for the end.
Berg: He was so great and incredibly
prepared. We set up for two hours at his offices
[in Kirkland, Wash.]. They said, “He’ll arrive
in one hour and 42 minutes.” He walked in
exactly when they said. “You’ll have 15 min-
utes with him.” He gave us about 20. “Okay,
we have to take him now.” It’s funny, we never
really had a big discussion about that scene;
only just that it feel very real. That’s been
our approach overall. It’s also made the show
10 times harder to write. There’s that saying:
“Comedy thrives in a confined space.”
Judge: The challenge of being confined to
writing about introverted people who sit and
program all day forces you to come up with
creative solutions. [Laughs]
Berg: And tone, too. This show is about the
comedy of pause, silence, and awkwardness.
Is there a joke from Silicon Valley that you feel
best represents the way you wrote the show?
Berg: A lot of people love the “jerk-off equa-
tion” from the season one finale. There was a
hole in that story, and we needed a very funny
way for Richard to get inspired.
Judge: Some funny analog to a mathematical
thing.
Berg: One writer had talked about how he
and his friends had a running joke about
how you could jerk off four guys at once if
they stood tip to tip. It was my Beautiful
Mind moment. “Yes, that’s it!” [Laughs]
Actually, the rats in the finale—that idea
came late and in a similar way. We talked
to [consultant] Todd Silverstein about how
the guys could fail in the finale. Maybe they
shut down the network, and phones start
emitting a weird noise? Then Todd told us
he’d lived in an apartment where the person
downstairs had a sonic pest repellent. It
drove rats and bugs crazy, and they ran into
his apartment. Then [writer] Sarah Walker
goes, “Wait! Rats and Pied Piper!” And we
were like, “Oh, my God.”
And here people thought you’d been sitting on
that joke for six years.
Judge: Yes, we decided to name the company
Pied Piper because we knew six years later
we’d be doing a scene with rats. [Laughs]
The finale answers a lot of questions and
yet leaves us with one great, lingering
mystery: Did Jian Yang kill Erlich Bachman?
So, did he?
Berg: There were more definitive versions of
it that felt too ghoulish. I think it’s funnier to
be coy and let the audience fill in the blanks.
By the way, Thomas improvised what’s maybe
my favorite line in the finale: When he finds
out that Jian Yang is dead, he turns to the
camera crew and says: “Um, okay, he’s dead.
What do we do?” [Laughs]
Judge: Totally what an engineer-type would
say. “I don’t understand emotions.”
Berg: I feel like we’ve always deferred to the
actors for those moments. Even when we were
running late, if they asked, “Hey, can I just try
one thing?” We’d say yes because it was likely
going to end up on-screen.
Judge: They saved a lot of scenes that maybe
weren’t great to begin with. It also helped that
the actors always understood their charac-
ters. They were their own unique versions
of under dogs. Who knew we could find that
many flavors of nerd?
“ We’ve put
in a lot of
real- world
stuff
without
having to
change
a thing.”
—Alec Berg
(above right,
with Kumail
Nanjiani)
EDDY CHEN
—HBO
