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entrepreneur, “went to grad school for computer science at Stanford, a few doors down from Sergey and Larry”—Brin and Page, whose graduate work turned into Google. Dan Lyons, a writer on the third season of the show, was a tech reporter who left journalism to work for a startup, then got fired and wrote a memoir, “Disrupted,” about the experience. Another “Silicon Valley” writer, Carrie Kemper, graduated from Stanford in 2006 and worked in Google’s H.R. department. At Google, Kemper noticed that her boss’s morning routine included Googling himself. That joke made its way into a recent episode. (“I started my day, as I always do, by typing my own name into Hooli search. I enjoy the ritual, which is designed to center me,” the C.E.O. of Hooli, a Google-like company, says. “Lately, it’s been doing the opposite.”)

Mike Judge, known for enlivening his comedies with authentic details, filming on location. Photograph by Frank Masi / HBO

When I was on the Sony lot where the current season of “Silicon Valley” was being filmed, several people encouraged me to talk to Jonathan Dotan, an entrepreneur who is now the show’s lead technical consultant. “He’s the one who looks like a con man in Havana in 1947,” Dan O’Keefe, a writer and producer, told me. This turned out to mean that, in contradistinction to the writers, crew members, and actors, who tend to wear jeans and sneakers both on and off camera, Dotan favors tailored blazers, pocket squares, and colorful dress socks.

I waited for him in the offices of Raviga, the show’s fictional venture-capital firm. The décor—exposed brick, burnished steel, geographically ambiguous throw rugs—felt eerily similar to actual V.C. offices I have visited, the way a Hyatt in Toronto might exhibit an aesthetic entanglement with a Hyatt in the Houston airport. To give the show’s directors the freedom to point the camera wherever they like, the set designers built a whole floor of office space and covered it with realistic touches, from the plaques on the walls to the issues of MIT Technology Review fanned out on a waiting-room table. Compounding the paramnesiac effect was the fact that many of the rooms actually were being used as offices—production staffers who weren’t needed elsewhere sat behind closed glass doors, typing or making phone calls.

Dotan led me to Raviga’s boardroom. He tried two fake outlets before finding a real one, then plugged in his laptop, opened it on a blond-wood conference table, and launched a PowerPoint presentation he had prepared about the show’s research process. “The first part of the job is making sure we get the specifics right, because our audience won’t tolerate any mistakes,” he said. “Silicon Valley,” a show about computer nerds, has a fan base that is particularly attuned to minutiae, and particularly apt to argue about them on the Internet. If a Post-it, URL, or line of code is legible on the show, it will be screengrabbed and scrutinized. Last year, a few hours after an episode aired, a Reddit user with the handle HeIsMyPossum started a thread called “Why did the writers just obliterate all the good karma they had built up with their core audience?” He made an impassioned argument that a plot point—the a

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