Why Mike Judge Is Ending 'Silicon Valley' And The One Thing They Never Got To Do [Exclusive]

Silicon Valley was the first live-action show Mike Judge created, and it's been a winner. Applying Judge's brand of satire to the tech startup world has fueled five seasons of comedy. The upcoming sixth season of Silicon Valley will be its final season and wrap up the story of the Pied Piper gang.Judge attended WarnerMedia's party for the Television Critics Association with the cast of Silicon Valley. /Film spoke to Judge about deciding to end the show, how much victory the Pied Piper crew can really achieve, and the one idea he never got to do on Silicon Valley. Season 6 will premiere in October. 

When Judge and co-creator Alec Berg were at Paleyfest in 2018 for season 5, they were speculating that the show could go past a sixth season. Now they've decided season 6 will, in fact, be the final season. So what changed their minds? Did they run out of ideas?"We just sat down this season and started writing and just felt it out and just decided we had a really good way to go out this season," Judge said. "So that was that"Simple enough. Sometimes you just know the end is in sight, and better to go for a great ending than water everything down for the sake of getting another season.

Pied Piper never got to enjoy their victories for too long. Every problem solved led to an even bigger one. The fact that they have lasted six years, after surviving Hooli and multiple bankruptcies, is probably the only victory they can enjoy. "I think we have a pretty nice ending to it all," Judge said. "I think it's a very interesting, appropriate ending to it all. I think we don't want to frustrate everybody but there are, in the real Silicon Valley, we're not really exaggerating the ups and downs."Judge shared a story of someone he consulted whose real-life story was even more extreme than that of Richard Hendricks (Thomas Middleditch)."Without giving away people's personal stories, I was talking to a guy a few months ago who's now very successful," Judge said. "I think his ups and downs have been kind of beyond Pied Piper. At the time, he had an app that everybody here has heard of, he was still deeply leveraged with things, AWS fees, got an $8 million injection that went straight to AWS. It's all real stuff. From the beginning, we just decided to try to make this really true to what's happening in the valley in every way we could and finding what's funny and interesting about it. That just happens to be what's funny and interesting about it. It's how you can be almost a billionaire and then just go off a cliff and then almost [become] a billionaire again. Or not even just money success, but your technology success can come and go so quickly."

Pied Piper has evolved a lot since season 1. It was originally a music app, and Richard ultimately developed it into a whole new internet. Judge said they had one idea for another application of Pied Piper they never got around to exploring."At one point we were talking about having them go into DNA biotech stuff, which lossless compression is really useful for," Judge said. "We never went there. There's a lot of ways to go. We were always just looking for wherever the funny interesting stories are."Judge didn't quite know that this is where Pied Piper would end up in the beginning, but he knew it would go somewhere else."In the very beginning, what I like about compression and setting it up for a series is that I knew just from my tech background, compression is something that could be applied to anything," Judge said. "While we didn't really think about all those things ahead of it, where it would go. We did think we'd like to go into a lot of different areas."