The return of Silicon Valley and Veep on HBO marks Sunday as one of the sharpest nights of satire on TV. While the latter skewers the ridiculous politics of Washington D.C., the former takes aim at another area of the U.S that plays a huge role in shaping our world.
From legendary creator Mike Judge (Office Space, King Of The Hill, Beavis & Butt-head), Silicon Valley’s first season wasn’t perfect but it had a cast that gelled quicker than most new comedies and was very funny – season two kicks off in the same vein.
Following on from Richard (Thomas Middleditch) and his team’s triumph at the TechCrunch Startup Battlefield at the end of last season, and one of the most intricate and brilliant dick jokes in the history of TV, Pied Piper are entertaining offers for their first round of funding. Now they’re being wooed by all the big investment companies in the valley, with big parties thrown for them.
They’ve got all this access and privilege, but they still act like little boys and outsiders – shown by the cold opening that has them turning down the chance to hit a pitch from a pro-baseball player in the home of the world series winners – “If someone has to go, I’ll go, but it seems very frightening. Would it hurt your feelings if no-one went?”
Richard just wants to go with Peter Gregory’s (Christopher Evan Welch) company Raviga, who have supported them from the beginning, but Erlich (T.J. Miller) sees it as the perfect opportunity to rub in everyone’s faces the fact that he’s now part of something big – “If you can’t enjoy this many people kissing your ass at this level, there must be something wrong with you.”
It was always going to be interesting to see how the writers dealt with the fact that Welch died during the filming of the first season, and they’ve addressed it in the most straightforward way possible – by having Gregory pass away in the show. Welch was one of the stand-out parts of the show and will certainly be missed, but with all respect it might work out to their advantage. They get excellent jokes out of how the investor died and out of a funeral that looks like a tech product launch, complete with a PowerPoint slideshow that attempts to quantify his impact and tech celebrity guest stars. It’s also used as an opportunity to bring in another (much needed) female character, with Suzanne Cryer’s Laurie Bream. Bream is the new managing partner at Raviga and mirrors Peter in her speech patterns and Richard in her lack of social skills, and looks to be the start of an interesting new dynamic.
The show continues to mock tech companies who profess to aim to save the world while also grabbing every last dollar they can get their hands on. Pied Piper’s rival, Google clone Hooli, and its CEO Gavin Belson (Matt Ross) look to launch their rival software with a campaign that sells data compression with the words “Inspire, believe, imagine, innovate”. Belson, hilariously fearful of a ‘data-geddon’, just wants to crush Richard and inadvertently sums up the hypocritical and ridiculous ‘beliefs’ of these kinds of companies by saying “I don’t want to live in a world where someone makes the world a better place better than we do.”
Unsure about what Gregory’s death will mean for their investment, Erlich convinces Richard to take meetings with other companies. The pair soon realise that firms are “negging” them, making them feel bad about themselves to make them more receptive to their offer, and counter with Erlich’s perfectly suited asshole personality. The sequence hits out at the version of machismo that prospers in the valley, the peacocking nature of it all. The investors, (all middle-aged white guys with the same semi-casual jumper-shirt combination, highlighting the homogeneity of the industry), are all impressed with the Pied Piper team’s dismissiveness and up their offers. Erlich, who even goes as far as to literally show them how big his balls are, notes a direct correlation between how intolerable he was and the height of the valuation, a sign of a culture that appreciates and thrives on arrogance and aloofness.
Bream, desperate to keep Pied Piper at the company, offers Richard $20m and a valuation of $100m, which is beyond anything they expected or have been offered. However, Monica (Amanda Crew), Gregory’s former assistant and now firm partner, secretly advises Richard to reject the offer and take one much lower. If they are able to keep growing at a reasonable rate then the company could avoid a ‘down round’ in investment and having to settle for an acquisition, most likely eventually being left with nothing – much like an old colleague Richard ran into at the episode’s opening party. Richard’s growth is shown by his self-made decision to take a lower valuation and it’s going to be interesting to see how he develops throughout the series. His next big challenge will be to take on Belson and Hooli, who’ve hit him with an intellectual property lawsuit in an attempt to drain his resources and attractiveness to investors.
It’s another confident kick-off episode for Silicon Valley, and while the show might sometimes seem to drag its heels in terms of storyline, the journey, filled with fun interplay and asides between the characters, is so enjoyable that you just don’t mind the time it’s taking to get there.
Silicon Valley air Wednesday nights on Foxtel’s The Comedy Channel.
