Wednesday, Comedy, 8.30pm
Mike Judge is one of the more underrated satirists of our time. His films Office Space (1999) and Idiocracy (2006) both tanked at the box-office, in no small part because 20th Century Fox couldn't work out how to promote sly, subversive comedies that didn't involve an icky alternative to hair gel. Office Space went on to achieve home-video immortality, and the same might still happen with Idiocracy and its critique of the cretinism and corporatisation ascendent in American society and politics. But it is Judge's crowning achievement, Beavis & Butt-head, that remains his most under-appreciated. Beavis & Butt-head was more than just a high-water mark on the bowl of American toilet humour; it was a scathing indictment of a society blighted by child neglect, a broken education system, and an omnipresent media that bombards children with sexual imagery and ridiculous music videos. With Silicon Valley Judge has returned to his own roots as an IT engineer, and with HBO he might just have found a home that will let his comedy breathe. Silicon Valley follows hapless whiz-kid Richard Hendricks (Thomas Middleditch), who has come up with a compression algorithm that could make him billions, but who is so clueless about business that he might end up making nothing at all. Around him is a perfectly cast geek chorus of friends and hangers-on who are ever ready with snarky comments. And to remind him that the name of his company, Pied Piper, comes from a story about ''a predatory flautist who murders children in a cave''. Tonight covers the vanities of tech billionaires, the utility (or otherwise) of hallucinogenic drugs in formulating marketing strategies, and a reminder that there's a lot of human wreckage strewn by the Yellow Brick Road.
