Mike Judge is my generation’s Woody Allen, or maybe even Bill Shakespeare. And before you roll your eyes, just remember that I’m Gen-X, so my expectations for heroes and leaders have already been beaten down to next to nothing (thanks, Boomers!).

Remember Beavis and Butthead? That show should have been terrible. But underneath the sophomoric humor and bent edges where television had just begun to push the envelope of taste (see: Tosh.0), that stupid cartoon neatly skewered everything that was wrong with MTV, the music industry, and pop culture, back when we cared about that kind of thing.

The best parts of that show were and still are the music video commentaries. The rest of it was just filler, but filler we forgave.

And then Office Space, Judge’s Citizen Kane and a film virtually ignored in the mainstream when it was released, became a cult classic and an industry standard. Fifteen years later, it remains the most oft-quoted workplace movie of all time.

I still drop lines about TPS reports, PC Load Letter, and cases of Mondays, not because I’m looking for a cheap joke like I would with an Anchorman quote, but because I know you’ll get the message.

And now we’ve got Silicon Valley, a new Sunday night HBO show aimed directly at the Hollywoodized, overhyped, and preciously insider parts of startup. I wanted to hate this show so much. I put off watching it until the fourth episode, although thanks to the startupish miracle of digital streaming and binge watching, I was able to start from the beginning. Within minutes, I heard this line:

“Yeah, I know what binary is! I memorized the hexadecimal times tables when I was 14 writing machine code, okay? Ask me what 9 times F is! It’s fleventy-five!”

And I laughed out loud. Then I was hooked, and my faith in Mike Judge once again paid off.

Here Comes Judge

See, you’re not going to hear that kind of joke on Two and Half Men. Or for that matter the Big Bang Theory. Or at least I don’t think you would. Truth be told, I’m guessing. I’ve never watched either show.

My point is that Mike Judge went and made a show for startup people under the guise of a show about startup people. The brilliance of Silicon Valley isn’t in how it depicts what startup is really like, because it doesn’t. It’s a good show because it depicts exactly what everyone who isn’t in startup thinks startup is really like.

The jokes about startup in Silicon Valley are kind of like the “adult” jokes in Pixar movies. Your kids might not get them, but they’re funny and they don’t distract from the story. Those jokes are for you, because you know who Peter Thiel is.

And I realize how elitist that sounds, but that elitism is the exact thing that Judge is poking fun at. Touche, Mr. Judge. You got me. This show should really suck, and it’s the exact opposite. Of suck.

Tune in on Sunday Nights ….

Silicon Valley is a good show, and you’re watching it, even if you’re not admitting it. And if you’re not watching it, you should be.

You will get all the buzzwords, from the perfectly named fictional behemoth Hooli to all the talk about compression and algorithms and pipes and cloud and Weissman Scores – that last one I’ll admit I had to look up to make sure it didn’t exist.

You will have worked with or might even be one of the character archetypes. Even if you don’t know the socially-awkward and leadership-challenged founder, you’ll recognize the quietly funny front-end developer or the darkly sarcastic back-end developer. You’ll have dealt with the biz-dev guy, and you’ll likely have read about the detached investor genius or the self-worshipping Hooli CEO.

You’ll want to be TJ Miller’s pitch-perfect former-founder-now-incubator-owner Erlich. At least I do. Not just because he gets the best lines, but because after every exit, I always say I’m going to do exactly what he’s doing. And I never do.

Between the Lines ….

You’ll see the issues we have in startup, even when they’re not brought to the forefront. The undiscussed lack of women contemporaries and over-worshipped CEOs and misguided investment and undeserved hype and cost-of-living jokes and vision jokes and brogrammer jokes.

All of this is more prevalent in Silicon Valley, and that’s something to be thankful for, but you see hints of it anywhere. And not just in startup. It’s a statement made without a heavy hand.

You’ll say “Thank you!” to lines about the uselessness of Scrum, the meaninglessness of meetings (always a go-to), the mistakes of adopting a hierarchy, and even the pointlessness of mission and vision for the sake of mission and vision.

Most of all you’ll see yourself in it somewhere and you’ll get called out. Gently, hopefully. And it will make you laugh at yourself. And if there’s anything startup needs it’s more people willing to laugh at themselves. Otherwise you might as well be working at Hooli.

This is what Mike Judge is so good at.

The Office Space Reality 

I remember back in 1999, about a week after I had seen Office Space, me and a co-worker, we were two of four at a small startup that we were trying to get off the ground, made a post-lunch-time visit to IBM. My co-worker was a former IBMer, and we were there to poach. I’m still amazed at how easy it was for us to get in and get around.

But what amazed me even more was that nearly every person my co-worker caught up with could not stop talking about how great Office Space was. They knew it was about them and for them, but it wasn’t mocking them. Sure, they had the equivalent of TPS Reports and they had their own personal Lumbergs and they were resigned to the fact that if they busted their asses, IBM might ship a few more units, but it wasn’t their lives.

They knew their corporate techie culture was more than what Judge had put on the screen. They knew that Office Space wasn’t about their jobs, but it was about what everyone else thought about their jobs. They got the jokes.

And that’s what makes Silicon Valley a must-watch for anyone in or interested in startup.

Editor’s note: Joe Procopio is a serial entrepreneur, writer, and speaker. He is VP of Product at Automated Insights and the founder of startup network and news resource ExitEvent and new venture Teaching Startup. Follow him at @jproco or read him at http://joeprocopio.com