Silicon Valley: Articles of Incorporation First Watch

May 23, 2015 11:29 AM - Season 1, Episode 3

The guys find themselves in trouble with their company name when they find out it's already taken. So whilst Richard tries to find a solution, Erlich searches for a new name in another dimension of his consciousness.

A.V. Club's recap/review, by Les Chappell:

Certainly Peter Gregory succeeds by being himself, as he expertly commands Silicon Valley’s first subplot unaffiliated with Richard’s algorithm. His company is approached by two business owners who need an emergency cash infusion, but mentions of deadlines and layoffs don’t seem to get through to Peter. The reason? He passed Burger King earlier that day and has been thinking about it all morning, realizing that he doesn’t know anything about their products: “And their selection consists of burgers, of which they are ostensibly king.” Dispatching an employee to buy one of everything, he assembles the menu in front of him as if he’s translating an ancient text, laying out the language of fast food.

Robert Ham at Paste Magazine on this episode:

As with any of Mike Judge’s work to date, it’s the little things surrounding this central story that make the episode so very good. Such as the realization that Gilfoyle (Martin Starr’s character) is actually from Canada and living in the country illegally, which opens up a world of great banter between he and Dinesh. (“You know who else is Canadian? Justin Bieber, the Hitler of music.”) There’s also the extended b-plot where Peter Gregory is inspired by the food of Burger King to invest in sesame seed futures and, in doing so, help save one of the companies he helped fund. If that sounds ridiculous, it is, but it’s a great excuse to hear the late Christopher Evan Welch deliver his lines with such weird panache.

What “Articles of Incorporation” also plays with is the struggle that I think all new tech firms must be dealing with: trying to live up to the successes and triumphs of their peers. For as much as they laugh at the shit being spewed out by folks like Belson, they want to be the ones making the hyperbolic pronouncements about how they are going to change the world. And of course they want to have as much “fuck you” money in the bank as possible. Getting to that point is, of course, never as easy as it seems. That’s the beauty of satirical shows like this, though: they offer up some glimpses of the sausage being made and all the mistakes its creators make as they try to create the recipe from scratch.

Pied Piper has a website.

Dinesh on the Pied Piper logo: “It looks like a guy sucking a dick, with another dick tucked behind his ear for later. Like a snack dick.”

posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome (2 comments total)

I am such a sucker for characters who are mostly unfamiliar with mundane things and describe them in big formal language. And there's TWO of them in this show! I'm lovin it.
posted by bleep at 3:08 PM on May 23, 2015

I think this is when Peter Gregory became my second favorite character, after Gilfoyle.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 2:28 PM on June 16, 2015