I've heard of Season 1 described as "Don Draper teaming up with Walter White", which makes it sound far more juicy than it is. The entire show gets way into the melodrama of the characters' personal lives, but S1 is no better than the rest in terms of that; it's strongest when the personal melodrama is rooted in the tech, like Joe's self-sabotage of their COMDEX demo followed by the fateful realization in the hotel room of their doom. There's a really great article in Grantland about HCF, Silicon Valley, and Microserfs by Douglas Coupland which points out that these characters are not great men, because they are but footnotes of history:

> The story twists again: Joe loses his nerve. The Giant goes to market as a regular old fast/cheap PC. Then, in a Comdex hotel room darkened as if for a séance, Joe comes face-to-face with his first Macintosh, and realizes he’s made the wrong call: “It speaks,” he says, his voice full of wonder and dread. We realize we’ve spent the better part of a season watching these characters fail — that Gordon and Joe aren’t going to become the Jobs and Wozniak of this world because Jobs and Wozniak are the Jobs and Wozniak of this world.

https://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/silicon-valley-ha...

Cameron is just sort of an unstable tortured genius with a lot of baggage, and while Donna ends up being the responsible "den mother", it is really far from girlbossing, and rather trivializes those seasons and the characters to put it in such a way. And Joe does not take a backseat at all! He ends up being the main foil for most of the show, which is a really interesting turn for the character!

I do think Gordon gets sidelined (with a debilitating disease, no less!) far too easily. But then he's also sort of doomed to be a footnote, his fate is just all the more tragic for it.