On January 30, 2013, Middleditch joined HBO’s comedy pilot Silicon Valley playing Richard Hendricks. He said the pilot was explicitly written with him as the lead (the character was originally called Thomas Pickering; the latter was the maiden name of his mother).
This was the result of a “random” audio sketch that he once created for a stand-up routine that he later animated himself and pitched to several people, including the production partners of Mike Judge, John Altschuler, and Dave Krinsky, who later set the show.
