I doubt you really need to worry about Halt and Catch Fire hurting your education. It’s a narrative show taking place in tech, not a step by step guide to building a bad OS.

Doctors watch Grey’s Anatomy, Cops watch Brooklyn 99, Chefs watch The Bear. I can’t imagine anything you take away from a show will outweigh the reality of you being in the domain day to day. The problem really only applies to careers you aren’t involved in.

That said, I’m in tech and Silicon Valley gets a lot of fun things right (while also being absurd and hyperbolic like any TV show)

If for any reason you wanted to stick with PHP, Symfony + Doctrine has been a delight to work with. For JS projects I pretty much always go Node for easy startup, but the frontend changes based on project needs and my whims.