A few thoughts on the Silicon Valley season four premiere coming up just as soon as my office gives me a view of the urinals…
The title of “Success Failure” speaks to the increasingly narrow spot on the Venn diagram in which Silicon Valley has to operate at this stage of its run: The guys can never succeed quite enough for the series to run out of conflict and comedy, but their failures can’t make our geniuses look too stupid, nor feel too repetitive from past stumbles. There may come a day when the target becomes too narrow to work, but at the start of season four, there’s far more creative success than comic failure.
The premiere does a few smart things. First, rather than travel the same rough path from the start of the series, only with Dinesh’s video chat app rather than Richard’s compression platform, it quickly sets up a new paradigm, where Richard — inspired by Russ Hanneman, of all people — goes off on his own to work on his plans for a decentralized internet, while the rest of the former Pied Piper team moves on without him. There will likely come a point where the group comes back together — though we’ve seen stretches where characters like Big Head or even Erlich Bachman were on the outside looking in — but the utter failure of Richard’s platform could have risked the show traveling the same ground again and again. Setting up these parallel projects for Richard and the others to work on separately creates a different dynamic and keeps things feeling fresh.
(Richard’s resignation also sets up a lovely scene where Jared — who quit a very cushy gig with Hooli specifically to work with him — comes to grips with their professional separation. Silicon is primarily focused on making jokes at the expense of its characters, but it’s also smart and deep enough to treat them as complicated people when necessary.)
Second, it moves Dinesh into the top spot of the renamed PiperChat company. Last year, I noted that I was torn between wanting to see Dinesh get one over on Gilfoyle just once, and enjoying the inherent comedy in their pairing too much as is to see it change. Promoting Dinesh to PiperChat CEO not only makes sense from the show’s own internal logic — the app was his idea, even if he built it on the back of Richard’s compression algorithm — but from the standpoint of keeping the comedy fresh without undermining what already worked. Here, Dinesh gets put in a position where he’s actually superior to Gilfoyle, and Gilfoyle even agrees to this, but he also knows that Dinesh is going to fail, and because Gilfoyle tends to be right about everything, we know this, too, and can enjoy him waiting for the other shoe to drop. And in the interim, Kumail Nanjiani gets to have fun playing the role in a slightly different mode, as Dinesh starts getting insufferably smug about the fact that his idea is now what everyone’s working on.
But mostly, “Success Failure” is just Silicon Valley doing Silicon Valley, to the good. The subplot where a bitter Gavin, for instance, insists his security chief Hoover keep flying back and forth between Shanghai, Jackson Hole, and Moffett, just to prove that Jack lied about the flight to Jackson Hole being slightly faster, is a wonderful example of how even the show’s most successful characters can get caught up in the smallest, pettiest, least productive of feuds.
All in all, a good start to the new year, and the next couple of episodes advance the stories in fun and unexpected ways, while keeping the jokes flying.
As with Veep, Silicon weekly reviews are going to be a casualty of this absurdly busy April/May stretch, and also of the fact that at this stage, I enjoy it more the less I have to take it apart to see what makes it tick. If there’s something notable before the finale and my schedule allows it, I’ll try to check back in, but otherwise we’ll reconvene in nine weeks to see how both the guys and the show are doing.
What did everybody else think?