When was the last time you watched Beavis and Butt-head? Five, ten, fifteen, twenty years ago, when it was first on the air? Likely not recently. Even more than its MTV brethren at the time like The State and Daria, Beavis and Butt-head's cultural relevance has faded (and it's only available on DVD and streaming in bastardized versions, with the music videos cut). The attempted re-launch of the series in 2011 didn't work out, perhaps because MTV's current tween viewers are more likely to be one of the show's punchlines than laugh at them. There are few places in America where you can still make a "Cornholio" or "Pull my finger" reference without getting a roomful of puzzled stares. But the show's creator, Mike Judge, continues to hold out hope for bringing his idiots back because, as he says, "It's my favorite thing that I've ever done. It's the thing I'm most proud of." Beavis and Butt-head is also the thing that has defined all of Judge's work since, including his new HBO show, Silicon Valley, which premieres Sunday.

Watching it now, Beavis and Butt-head actually holds up surprisingly well, or as well as it ever did. People shake their heads at the mention of it, but then again they did the same thing in 1993. The show wasn't quite like anything else on the air, by design. Mike Judge was an upstart working for an upstart network. He had left computer engineering in Silicon Valley (he described his coworkers as ) to make his own animated shorts. MTV hired him because they wanted to compete against major-network scripted programming on a next-to-nothing budget.

Judge's solution was not to recreate the animated sitcom, but to blow it up. Forget A and B storylines; there is hardly any storyline at all. Beavis and Butt-head move through their suburban universe laughing at everything and fucking shit up, everyone else aghast at their behavior. Recurring characters that would be spun off like Hank Hill and Daria Morgendorffer exist merely to be annoyed. Beavis and Butt-head never learn any lessons or evolve. Instead they return to the sanctuary of their couch at the end of every episode and comment on music videos that MTV already had in rotation. They dismiss anything remotely pop ("Change it!" Beavis freaks) and jam out to anything remotely hard-rock or metal or hair-metal. In a twist of cosmic irony, their relationship to these videos mirrors how we see them now: The videos by Megadeath and Def Leppard and Jackyl, the ones they loved, are the ones people don't talk about anymore. The Madonnas and the Sinead O'Connors live on in our collective memory.

Beavis and Butt-head, had they been real people, would not have gone on to live memorable lives. They would be remembered, if at all, as deadbeats. Beavis and Butt-head don't have any ambition and don't want any. This is the show's political point. "What's with this laughing? Are you gonna laugh for the rest of your lives?" an irate teacher asks them in one of the early episodes. The answer is yes. Mike Judge was audacious enough to believe that such people not only deserve hours upon hours of TV, but our sympathies, too.

Mike Judge would continue to write about outsiders, with surprising success. The family of King of the Hill are the sort of churchgoing Texas hicks you rarely see treated with any nuance on TV. Mike Judge made their story bleak, but also uplifting. Office Space did the same for middle management. Idiocracy, Judge's bleakest work to date, stars Luke Wilson as a U.S. soldier of average intelligence and zero ambition, who is propelled into a future overrun with idiots where anyone halfway articulate is called a "fag." Idiocracy is sci-fi, but it's a satire of the here and now. Rather than feel powerless, however, Judge finds hope. Wilson's soldier is emboldened to become the leader of this new, dumb America and make it at least a little better.

Since he made Beavis and Butt-head, Mike Judge has himself gone from outsider to insider. He is now running a show about the very Silicon Valley types he fled, on a premium-cable network targeted at their income bracket. The desire to ruthlessly mock these people must be high. And there is some of that needling in Silicon Valley. A Google stand-in called Hooli is a campus full of zealots, a cult with higher profit margins. A venture capital investor gives more attention to the sesame seeds on his bun than hundreds of employees who might be fired.

But Judge is more interested, as always, in the people on the periphery of this world, and it's his sensitivity to their struggle that makes Silicon Valley unique. The main character, Richard (Thomas Middleditch), a mid-level programmer at Hooli, develops a compression algorithm that's suddenly worth millions. The show has the same basic setup as Entourage — reject friends find themselves at the top of their industry and don't know what they're doing there — but it doesn't buy into the lifestyle porn. The show is acutely aware that success is built on other people's misbegotten dreams, and that "thinking different" is often just another way of imposing the same old order. Everyone in Silicon Valley is hustling to get to the top. Everyone is building an app, even a liquor store employee. As one character observes, only so many turtles ever make it out to sea. There's even a little bit of Beavis's punk spirit around the edges of the series, as in a graffiti artist who's hired to create Richard's company logo and paints an employee getting literally screwed in the ass.

Silicon Valley can be read as a metaphor for Mike Judge's own career. What happens when one average guy becomes successful beyond his dreams? Does he leave his old bum friends behind? Or does he find a way to incorporate them into his new life? If you're anything like Mike Judge, you don't forget the assholes who made you who you are.

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Paul Schrodt Paul Schrodt is a freelance writer and editor who also contributes to Esquire, GQ, Money, The Wall Street Journal, and more.

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