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  • Adorkable:
    • Jared is lovable in a weird and socially awkward way, on top of being a major Woobie.
    • Richard similarly is a socially awkward and clumsy dork, but you can't help but sympathize with him.
  • Alternative Character Interpretation:
    • Is Jared simply just Ambiguously Bi or does he simply have a need to be in an obsessively subservient role as he latches on to Gwart after leaving Pied Piper in season 6 and begins to obsess about even her minute needs? The reason he left Pied Piper was that he was no longer in the position to be in that role with Richard. This all could stem from abandonment issues of not having anyone to parent him so he often finds someone else to "mother" in a way he never was.
    • What exactly is the reason as to why Russ Hanneman constantly ignores Erlich? Is Russ uncomfortable interacting with someone with an equally strong personality and gigantic ego like Erlich, or is he simply really good at reading people and sees that Erlich has nothing to offer him and the company.
  • Alternative Joke Interpretation: Some see Erlich bashing Monica for smoking cigarettes while he himself is smoking bong as not Hypocritical Humor but rather just Erlich seeing cigarettes as an inferior form of smoking.
  • Award Snub: The show only ever received a single Emmy nomination for acting, specifically for Thomas Middleditch in Season 3. The supporting cast likely wasn't helped by being male-dominated, of which there were several standout performances with prominent roles, meaning they likely split the show's acting support in that category, resulting in nobody being recognized.
  • Broken Base: The announcement that TJ Miller would be leaving the show at the end of the fourth season split the fanbase. Even leaving out Miller's behaviors at the time, many saw it as a perfect opportunity for the show to escape from the repetitive rut that they believed it had fallen into while others believed that removing Erlich would strip the series of one of the most central aspects of its identity. This was further complicated by TJ Miller's own admittance of being firmly in the former camp, along with his claim that the series lost nothing by removing him from it.
  • Crosses the Line Twice: Richard getting bullied by a neighborhood kid after being ripped off, not particularly funny. Erlich beating said child up and scaring him into giving Richard the adderall he paid for? Hilarious.
  • Diagnosed by the Audience: Peter Gregory is a truly peculiar man, even by eccentric billionaire standards, and is also very stiff and awkward in conversations. This has led to many viewers theorizing he is somewhere on the autism spectrum.
  • Ensemble Dark Horse:
    • Big Head, post-Flanderization. His cluelessness and character arc (proving that Flanderization can still make a good arc) make for some of the fans' favorite moments.
    • Pete Monahan, Pied Piper's cut-rate trial lawyer. His personal anecdotes are bizarre and oddly audacious, but are delivered in such a matter-of-fact way by Matt McCoy. He also displays a genuine sense of duty to Richard that few in the series do.
    • Speaking of lawyers, Ron LaFlamme, Pied Piper's usual lawyer, is loved by the fans. He's not an exceptional lawyer by any means, but he looks out for his clients, and treats them like his friends, and has some of the funniest dialogue and delivery in the entire show.
    • Billionaire douchebag Russ Hanneman proved such a funny character that the show keeps bringing him back for brief cameos long after his importance to Pied Piper concluded. Russ is so much of an ensemble dark horse that he’s known even amongst people who’ve never watched the show.
    • Peter Gregory also counts. Originally a major role, he disappears about halfway through season one due to actor Christopher Evan Welch's tragic passing, which results in him being killed off at the start of season 2. Despite his sadly small role, he has many fans who loved the awkward genius and believed Evan Welch played the role perfectly.
  • Fanon: Due to how much they hate each other and how awkward the two are in their interactions, many love to headcanon that Peter Gregory and Gavin Belson were exes and that their break up is what caused such a petty rivalry between the two of them.
  • Genius Bonus:
    • Many of the equations seen on screen are genuinely relevant to the topics being discussed. Mike Judge even mentioned being happily surprised at being able to understand the roomful of dicks equation and being able to picture in his head the type of curve the show's technical director was describing (Mike Judge has a physics degree and used to work as a computer engineer).
    • The title sequence is a fairly accurate (albeit highly stylized) representation of the tech market with each season's sequence being adjusted to show the ever changing trends.
    • A lot of the things referenced in the show are specific to the culture of Silicon Valley and the tech industry in general.
    • At TechCrunch Disrupt, Erlich requests dramatic spotlights "like Pride Fighting." This is a reference to PRIDE Fighting Championship, a now-defunct Japanese Mixed Martial Arts promotion that featured bombastic lighting and pyrotechnics during each fighter entrance.
    • In the episode "Sand Hill Shuffle," Erlich's has a T-shirt with binary on it. It translates to "BITCOIN."
    • Gilfoyle has a coffee mug reading "BLACK COFFEE" with coffee beans that imitate the logo of Black Flag.
    • Jack Barker's insistence that the company's true product is the stock price is quite ironic if you're familiar with Jack's real-life counterpart Steve Ballmer. While Ballmer's business-and-sales-focused strategies led Microsoft to record profits, his repeated failures to innovate led Microsoft's stock to hit record lows, to the point that near the end of his tenure, he was being called "the worst CEO in America" and once Ballmer announced his resignation, MS's stock immediately shot up.
    • The 51% attack seen in "Fifty-One Percent" is a real form of attack on blockchain based technologies (though the show embellishes it somewhat).
    • After Gilfoyle hacks Jian Yang's smart refrigerator, a Freeze-Frame Bonus shows the code he's altered to reprogram the refrigerator. In that code, there's a youtube link that if one enters into a url, it leads to Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up.
  • Harsher in Hindsight:
    • During an amusingly awkward conversation, Gavin compliments Peter Gregory on how healthy he looks. The actor who plays Gregory died of lung cancer before the season finished shooting.
    • Richard is convinced to end his highly lucrative deal with Kenan Feldspar by Monica's claims that Retinabyte's bulky and expensive headsets are doomed to fail and that the future of VR is via mobile phones. As of 2020, mobile VR is pretty much dead due to the discontinuation of Google Daydream and Samsung Gear VR while dedicated VR hardware is still going strong with the Valve Index and Oculus Quest.
    • Jared's quip in "The Patent Troll" (aired 2017) that "We may not be a global epidemic yet, but we've leapt from bat saliva to humans and and we've just killed our first few villagers" sits quit a bit differently after the COVID-19 Pandemic.
  • He Really Can Act: T.J. Miller shows real dramatic acting chops in the Season 3 finale as Erlich is furious at Richard betraying his trust and tells him off.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Hollywood Homely: The inhabitants of the Hacker Hostel are all meant to be seen as rather unattractive to the point that it's quite a big deal when one of them gets a girlfriend. The main actors however, really aren't all that ugly.
    • Gilfoyle in particular is played by Martin Starr, who gives the character a subdued hot nerd vibe, with the only "ugly" thing about him being his unkemptness.
    • Jared is seen as anorexically thin in-universe, some characters even say he's akin to a skeleton, but actor Zach Woods looks like a reasonably fit person.
    • Richard is described as ugly by many characters but Thomas Middleditch looks average at worst.
    • Dinesh is seen as very ugly in-universe, to the point that he’s called “dogface” in one episode. But he’s played by the decently handsome Kumail Nanjiani.
    • Erlich’s appearance has been described in the show as akin to that of a “manatee”. While T.J. Miller certainly doesn’t have the body of a supermodel, his face really isn’t that repulsive.
  • Ho Yay: Given that the show's only primary female character is Monica, who's been definitively established as platonic, there's bound to be some of this.
  • It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: While the show is still considered very good by the fans, many of them have grown increasingly restless at the show's constantly hinting that it's going to majorly shake up the status quo, only to go right back to the same setup as always within an episode or two. The announcement that TJ Miller would be leaving after Season 4 actually caused some excitement as the crew would finally be forced to make a major permanent change, with Miller himself expressing frustration at the plot stagnation and hope that his exit would stir the pot.
  • Jerkass Woobie: The "brogrammers" Aly and Jason. They mock and bully Richard and Big Head, but they work for a terrible boss that they're forced to act like syncophants for and are constantly met with tight and borderline impossible deadlines that causes them to feel overworked and burnt out.
  • Love to Hate: Gavin is undoubtedly a terrible person, but his helpless fury towards his constant misfortune makes for some of the funniest parts of the show.
  • Memetic Mutation:
  • Signature Scene: The discussion of how long it would take to jack off everyone at TechCrunch Disrupt in "Optimal Tip-to-Tip Efficiency".
  • Special Effect Failure: Gavin's triumphant moment over the Hooli board is undercut a bit by his standing next to an obvious CGI elephant.
  • Strawman Has a Point: When Gavin meets Richard at the Mexican restaurant he points out that Richard’s main goal is to turn his company into a behemoth just like Hooli. He then points out that he seriously doubts Richard will then try to help his competition.
  • Tear Jerker: Anton’s(Pied Piper’s server farm) death. The scene is played shockingly straight and the look of distraught on the whole team’s face is genuinely heartbreaking.
  • They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: While TJ Miller's departure excited many fans who believed that the show had begun to grow stale and sought a change to the status quo, just as many believed that his contributions to the tone of the series were too important to get rid of.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
    • Jian-Yang was simply just a Funny Foreigner tenant before gaining a bigger role as an antagonistic force, and many fans dislike the way the writers treat him in the later seasons - particularly because they make him seem in the right despite being part of the last two seasons' Big Bad Ensemble.
    • Carla, the "feminist" contract software developer for Pied Piper in Season 2, left at the beginning of Season 3, but many fans believe it would have been better if she'd stayed, and it would have been interesting to learn more about her backstory with Gilfoyle and Dinesh, for example.
    • Monica's role in Season 3 was met with confusion by the fans. There's the Ship Tease with her and Richard in the first two seasons, and she helps Laurie start Bream-Hall Capital in Season 4 before joining the Pied Piper team in Season 5, but she's not given much to do in Season 3 - just being a supportive presence for the guys, as she's still only an assistant to Laurie. Many fans would have liked her to be more important in the season.
      • Monica as a whole doesn’t really have much in the way of a entertaining personality besides being supportive and very attractive. Especially when compared to the other notable female charcters on the show like Laurie, Gwart or even Carla.
    • Russ Hanneman was billed as a main cast member in Season 4, indicating he was about to have a larger role to play. Instead, he literally only has two scenes the entire season before an early exit. He was then barely in the next season before regaining some prominence for the show's final year, though he still never truly joined the main cast.
    • Similarly, Jack Barker was billed in the main cast of season 4. While he had much more to do than Russ, ousting Gavin and taking over as the main antagonist, he also fell quite out of focus, being absent from a good chunk of episodes due to having no other main characters to play off of. Gavin then steals back his company and Big Bad status in the finale and Jack is never seen again.
    • In addition to Gavin never making a Heel–Face Turn despite the opportunity being presented several times (as noted below, he's taken out of commission early in Season 6 and spends the rest of the show not knowing what to do before he randomly becomes the author of romance novels. Despite all the focus Gavin gets, he never truly changes for better or worse, and even his comeuppance isn't satisfying as he still remains incredibly well off despite getting ousted from his company, and the show then tries to rest him sympathetically afterwards anyway.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
    • Season 3 spends an entire episode setting up an Ocean's Eleven style caper for the rest of the season. While the instant collapse of the plan is undoubtedly hilarious, the idea was also a solid setup for a season arc.
    • Season 4 briefly teams Gavin up with Pied Piper, an exciting premise that seems to hint at the series' previous Big Bad showing more depth and maybe even pulling a Heel–Face Turn. Sadly it only lasts one episode before he's Put on a Bus and returns to being an antagonist by the end of the season. The following seasons both hint at him pulling off another Enemy Mine with our heroes, but it never truly happens. Adding on to the wasted opportunity, the initial short-lived team up seems to hint at us hearing more about Gavin and Peter's former friendship, which we never got to properly see before on account of Peter being written out due to his actor dying.
  • Unintentional Period Piece: The show is a pretty good encapsulation of Silicon Valley culture as The New '10s went on. In the first couple seasons, it's an optimistic affair, reflecting the starry-eyed perception the public generally had of it at the start of the decade. By its last season, things are much darker, with the show pulling no punches about depicting the dark underbelly of how massive tech corporations operate, and the audience is no longer really expected to root for any of the Pied Piper guys by the end. The fact that the last season even did some Ripped from the Headlines by lampooning the Facebook Congressional Hearings adds to this.
  • Unpopular Popular Character:
    • Jared is deliberately The Generic Guy and seems incredibly bland, monotonous and a buzz kill of the group. However there are hints of a Dark and Troubled Past with him being The Pollyanna that turned him into one of the funniest and well liked characters on the show (helped by being one of the more moral characters too). And the moments he does snap he maintains that same bland, generic monotone while saying "How would you like to die today, motherfucker?"
    • Russ Hanneman is considered a notoriously toxic venture capitalist in Silicon Valley, he made over a billion dollars back in the 90's just for being the first to think of internet radio but has done nothing since to actually improve his net worth or build a new successful company. His attitude is also something of a ridiculously wealthy Frat Bro, and the Pied Piper crew do everything they can to ignore his suggestions while still accepting his money. But the character is played so hilariously energetic and causes just the right amount of chaos for the show fans enjoy when he shows up in later seasons.
  • The Woobie: Jared. This poor guy was given up for adoption by his birth parents who are revealed to have never given a crap about him, has possibly the weirdest abusive childhood imaginable, and often finds himself in all kinds of dilemmas. He really needs a hug.

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