Its clever, dumb, often painful and always funny.

The reversals of fortune inSilicon Valleyare the most dramatic currently on TV.

Like, forget aboutGame Of Thrones,The Walking Dead, any of them.

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Mike Judge:Thats way too long, fifteen minutes!

[laughs]

Alec Berg:We dont generally plan it out that far ahead.

We thought, oh yeah, this is going to be what the season is.

MJ:That was a very happy day.

AB:Yeah, wed been there for a week trying to write it all.

I remember going okay!Thatfeels right.Thatfeels like our show.

It does make for really painful viewing, I have to say.

As a fan, its like an exercise in mortification.

A lot of the time were watching it through our fingers.

Thomas Middleditch:[Laughs] Honestly, thats a lot of the interaction I get.

It just makes mesick!

But Ill take that.

Ill trade mediocrity for the extreme.

The scene of him and the tech blogger for instance.

TM:Oh yeah.

Always a mistake, were evil.

Dont talk to us.

[Laughs]

A word we hear a lot from actors and writers is relatable.

Yet, ordinary idiots like me really get it.

Mike and Alec, how did you shape the shows perspective so it wouldnt alienate its audience?

I think weve managed to do that.

We dont know that much about…

I used to be an engineer but we kind of keep ourselves and the actors ignorant.

TM:Thats not that hard to do, actually!

MJ:[laughs] That sounds right yeah, except the workplace is a house.

TM:I think that workplace element is relatable.

I get people not even in tech coming up and saying thats their lives.

AB:We do a lot of that in the writing.

I think there are certain human behaviouralisms that are universal across all businesses.

Yet the show seems to have been embraced by the tech industry.

MJ: I was curious about that from the beginning.

Its sort of a little of both.

The Sarah Palin thing is a good example, I use the example ofSpinal Tap.

We found that when we first made a field trip.

Were glad that you went after them.

How careful do your lawyers have to be in terms of representation and libel?

How scared have you made your legal team with ideas for this show?

MJ: [Laughs] We have a very scared lawyer.

HBO Legal is permanently scared.

MJ: They were born scared!

AB:Lets just say theyre highly motivated.

What your characters do in that workplace isnt actually filmable.

Watching someone write code doesnt make great TV.

I think Sam Esmail said the same thing about makingMr Robot.

We have to be good at figuring out what the emotional angles are and having characters play that.

A theme of season three seems to have been how unreal money is in Silicon Valley.

MJ:Oh yeah, we saw so much of that in our research.

What inflated value things have and what theyre based on is just so flimsy.

TM:Can you?

Im going to get on that.

I need somemore followers!

AB:If you look at the stock market, nobody cares what a company isactuallyworth, right?

Those valuations are insane.

MJ:Its what the users are valued at thats insane.

It was a really cut and dry metric.

TM:Its also hard to guess what valuation everything should be.

MJ:If you really had a compression algorithm like this, theyd offer you 19 billion right now!

TM:You guys are also very predictive.

Weve largely been correct.

AB:I can tell you.

MJ:Yeah, that was a classic.

I think a good one we had this season was the gold chain stuff.

The guys ribbing Dinesh on the chain.

Finally then, the shows endgame: will Pied Piper eventually destroy the world like Skynet?

Is that what all this is building towards?

[laughs]

AB:Yes!

Thats where were going.

Mike Judge, Alec Berg and Thomas Middleditch, thank you very much!

TheSilicon Valleyseason 3 finale airs on Sky Atlantic on Thursday the 14th of July.