Created by Mike Judge (BEAVIS AND BUTT-HEAD, OFFICE SPACE, IDIOCRACY) and with a fantastic cast of comedic actors, HBO’s SILICON VALLEY is a fantastic comedy series about a group of coding nerds who claw their way through trials and tribulations to launch the next big thing in tech.

Richard Hendrix is an insecure, dweeby coder working at tech giant Hooli, which he considers a soulless dead end. Silicon Valley seems awash in cash, and he wants in on it. Along with some other coders, he lives in a house owned by Erlich, who earned a few million after selling his company and now finances budding app coders as an incubator. Richard produces a horrible music app, but at its heart is an amazing compression algorithm, which could dramatically speed up content transfer speeds and thereby revolutionize the Internet. Soon, the game is afoot, with everybody wanting a piece of it, Hooli trying to claim ownership, venture capitalists trying to control it, and Richard and his pals struggling to learn how to build and run a rapidly growing business.

The comedy isn’t thick or knee slapping, but it’s constant and smart. You don’t have to be in business or a coder to understand the show, but it feels like an education nonetheless. Anything and everything that can go right or wrong in the development of a business happens to these guys. What makes it work is every pivot in the show is attached to human emotion–Richard’s insecurity, Danesh’s desire to be loved, Erlich’s need to be aggrandized, the Hooli CEO’s massive billionaire ego–which shows how ridiculous all this is as well as cool.

I’m on to season 4 now and loving every minute of it. SILICON VALLEY is one of the most entertaining, intelligent, and again, honestly educational things on TV right now. I love a show that treats its audience like grownups, finds the heavily flawed humanity in a lionized, highly glamorized business, and pulls no punches.

CAPTAIN FANTASTIC (2016) is a drama about a reclusive, left-wing anarchist family that lives off the grid in the wilderness of Washington State. When Lesley Cash, the mother, dies, Ben, the father (Viggo Mortensen), takes his six children on a road trip to the funeral, where they hope to honor her last wishes in opposition to her father, Jack (Frank Langella). The film is interesting throughout if a bumpy ride.

This is what might have been if the hero of MOSQUITO COAST had been a left winger. He raises his children to be critical thinkers, educates them far beyond their years, and teaches them to live without reliance on modern technology. They celebrate Noam Chomsky Day instead of Christmas. They live according to a strong philosophy and seem the better for it, but when they road trip into modern America, two of the kids begin to question their father and his methods, one believing that their lifestyle comes at a cost, which is inability to function socially in the real world. When Ben begins to question himself, it begs whether he can preserve his approach to life while compromising.

Overall, the film is pretty entertaining. Ben’s philosophy is great, challenging, and uncompromising without being preachy or overly belligerent. The acting is terrific across the board, particularly from Mortensen, though the child actors all pull their weight, and the side part adult actors are all recognizable, solid character actors. The moral of the story–live life on your own terms, but learn to give to get along–is good, though not quite strong enough to pull the film to a really satisfying finish, which is sweet but a bit weak.

Overall, I loved elements of the film, and I liked the whole. Usually, supposedly liberal Hollywood serves up cranky, belligerent but endearing right wingers but not left wingers on screen, so the film earned props from me for that alone. Noam Chomsky Day sounds good to me.

Okay, today, I’m going to step in it. Feel free to disagree, but after a stellar first season of FOR ALL MANKIND (Apple TV), I was hugely disappointed in the second, which changed writers and leaned heavily into kitchen sink melodrama. What began a brilliant science show took a hard turn into becoming a soap opera.

It’s 1983, Reagan is president, and both the USA and USSR have bases on the Moon. As Cold War tensions escalate over rival lunar mining claims, the Department of Defense gets involved in the space program, resulting in militarization. To alleviate tensions, the superpowers plan a joint Apollo-Soyuz mission with astronauts and cosmonauts shaking hands in space, but it may not be enough to prevent hostilities from breaking out on the Moon and spilling down onto Earth as World War Three.

What I liked: anything having to do with the Moon and space program. Seeing Marines fly into combat on a lunar lander was fantastic. The Jamestown base is awesome. The problem solving at NASA is less prevalent but when it happens is terrific. One thing I particularly appreciated was seeing how the space program produced consumer technology far ahead of its time, just as the real space program eventually gave us things like videocameras and so on. I also loved how NASA licenses mining rights and tech to the private sector, resulting in the agency becoming self financing. It’s beautiful and sad to see what might have been, particularly in light of seeing billionaire tax dodgers taking vanity rides in space yachts. The season begins with a series of quick news images showing how history changed because of the space race.

What I didn’t: New writers were brought in to pump up the drama, which takes over the show, forcibly shoves out the hard sci-fi focus, and kitchen sinks it with melodrama in which characters do all sorts of what-the-hell things the show didn’t need and I didn’t care about. As a result, the climax, which is brilliant, wraps up too quick and neat, robbing the show of what really makes it work for me. As a side note, Reagan is continually lionized as some kind of poetic, saintly cartoon character of how he’s remembered rather than who and what he was, which was off putting.

Overall, I was disappointed, as the show’s roaring first season had set me on a path of high hopes for the second. I understand I’m in the minority here, as the second season was highly praised by critics and fans. For me, though, it took a bad turn into becoming a soap opera.