Miller), perhaps TV’s best current satire of how awful bros crop up in any male-dominated culture. When season four arrives, they’ll be back together, working in the same house, living off the faux largesse of that house’s owner, Erlich Bachmann ( T.J. I wouldn’t dare reveal how the third season finale (which I’ve seen) reconfigures the show’s basic setup, save to say that it doesn’t scatter the characters to the winds. How Silicon Valley is about the world we live in today Erlich Bachman (T.J. But the show does seem to me to be falling into a pattern where everything works out, until it doesn’t, and that might be even harder to deal with. I don’t think this is a fair criticism of the show, because Silicon Valley is really good at making Richard’s victories seem earned. The most persistent complaint against Silicon Valley, then, is that it’s "nerd Entourage." Everything works out for the characters in the end, even if their wins might seem improbable. But every time the guys fall back into ruin makes them seem slightly more incompetent and thus harder to invest in.
Structurally, it can’t use them to satirize Silicon Valley excess, because it already has the preposterous Gavin Belson ( Matt Ross), head of the fictional tech giant Hooli, to do that for it.
The series has to clip its wings and curtail its ambitions just a bit, if it wants Richard and his friends to still be interesting characters to be around. But the more times the show has to reset them to their "we’re about to lose everything" state, the less convincing it becomes. In short, if Richard and the other characters actually became the major successes the show is clearly building toward them being, they would cease to be the lovable underdogs fans of the show love. At times in season three, Silicon Valley itself has seemed to be struggling with the same problem. Thus, Pied Piper is more or less too good to work for the public at large. (So far as I can tell, it’s meant to provide storage of one’s files in some sort of computing cloud, but by compressing them so much that bandwidth and hard drive space essentially become infinite resources.)
Laymen simply don’t understand how to use it. They understand it, because they’re engineers.īut when Pied Piper goes to market, it dies because it was only tested by other engineers. What season three has gradually, brilliantly teased out is that it’s not really clear to anyone but Richard and his co-workers just how Pied Piper might change the world. He’s a bumbling guy, but he’s also a genius, someone who’s invented Pied Piper, a compression algorithm so strong that it could legitimately change the world. HBOįor those who don’t already know, Silicon Valley follows the career of one Richard Hendricks, played by Thomas Middleditch, a man who can turn playing awkwardness into a kind of epic poetry. These guys are geniuses, but they can’t get anyone to understand their revolutionary product Jared (Zach Woods) and Richard (Thomas Middleditch, right) contemplate Pied Piper’s future. And in that space, it’s inadvertently telling a story about the world we live in right now, one where unfiltered anger at the economic elite is having political consequences. It’s a wonderful homage to famous shots from the films Playtime and The Apartment, both of which were comedies that spoke to the dehumanizing aspects of the modern world.īut it’s also a reminder of where Silicon Valley finds itself in season three - trapped between its own success and its greater ambitions.
He disappears into a warehouse, where the camera reveals a massive room full of computer users, idly logging into Pied Piper, crossing the bare minimum threshold for "daily active user." The computers seem almost to stretch as far as the eye can see, the dispiriting backbone of whatever digital economy Pied Piper finds itself a part of.
The camera cuts to a crowded street in Bangladesh, following the man from the other end of the phone call. And that’s when something the audience likely already suspected is confirmed: The strange uptick in users that is keeping Pied Piper alive has happened thanks to fake users in Bangladesh that Jared is paying for. Jared ( Zach Woods), the seemingly hapless financial wizard who keeps the data compression app Pied Piper from losing all its funding, places a call to a mysterious someone else. "Daily Active Users" concludes with one of my favorite shots in recent television memory.
The episode of the week for June 19 through June 25 is "Daily Active Users," the ninth episode of the third season of HBO’s Silicon Valley. Every Sunday, we pick a new episode of the week.