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easy to collect realistic details. But if you want to know how a non-compete clause would be structured, or what kind of car a typical brogrammer would drive, or whether Richard’s firing would trigger an afternoon of malaise or a personal crisis, then you need to do your homework. TV writers have long consulted experts—a doctor to demonstrate how to hold a defibrillator, a military officer to make sure the uniforms are the right color. In the past, these consultants were often akin to fact-checkers, brought in near the end of the writing process to make sure that nothing looked glaringly wrong. These days, TV is taken more seriously, and everyone’s a critic with access to Twitter and Wikipedia. “You can’t fool audiences with unrealistic schlock anymore,” Jay Carson told me. Carson was the press secretary for Hillary Clinton’s Presidential campaign in 2008; he then served as the Chief Deputy Mayor of Los Angeles. In 2011, his friend Beau Willimon hired him as a political consultant on “House of Cards.” “I helped us pass a smell test, both with D.C. insiders and the general audience,” he said. “Even during the five years I was there, the audience got more sophisticated every season.”

“Silicon Valley” is a reported sitcom. “We do plenty of silly jokes, but we also go to great lengths to make the world feel real,” Berg told me. “The hope is that someone in the Valley”—a scrawny coder, a billionaire, or someone who fits both descriptions—“will be able to watch it and go, ‘I might not like that they’re taking shots at us, but at least it’s grounded in truth.’” Richard has now been reinstated as the C.E.O., and, after several episodes devoted to lawsuits and succession crises, Pied Piper has returned to the simple joy of building its platform. “In the writer’s room, I talked a lot about how the founder of a company has a moral authority that no other C.E.O., no matter how accomplished, will ever have,” Costolo told me.

The showrunner and writer Alec Berg and the actor T. J. Miller on set. “By satirizing them, you’re holding up a mirror,” Miller says. Photograph by Frank Masi / HBO

The show’s signature gag, from the first season, was a minute-long montage of startup founders pledging to “make the world a better place through Paxos algorithms for consensus protocols,” or to “make the world a better place through canonical data models to communicate between endpoints.” This scene was set at TechCrunch Disrupt, a real event where founders take turns pitching their ideas, “American Idol”-style, to an auditorium full of investors. Before writing the episode, Judge and Berg spent a weekend at TechCrunch Disrupt, in San Francisco. “That’s the first thing you notice,” Judge said. “It’s capitalism shrouded in the fake hippie rhetoric of ‘We’re making the world a better place,’ because it’s uncool to just say ‘Hey, we’re crushing it and making money.’” After the scene aired, viewers complained about the lack of diversity in the audience. Berg recalled, “A friend of mine who works in tech called me and said, ‘Why aren’t there any women? That’s bullshit!’ I said to her, ‘It is bullshit! Unfortunately, we shot that audience footage at the actual TechCrunch Disrupt.’”

Berg and Judge have backgrounds that enable them to understand Silicon Valley culture better than most laypeople, and they tend to hire writers who are similarly equipped. In the late eighties, before the first tech bubble, Judge worked as an electrical engineer in Santa Clara, designing graphics cards. Berg’s father is a biophysicist at Harvard; Berg told me th

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