Silicon Valley: Season 4

Three phenomena at play here with my viewing experience of the fourth season of Silicon Valley.

One is the one I've seen other people bemoaning - this season was still funny, still plenty enjoyable, but the characters are getting flatter and dumber and the plotting is getting more and more ludicrous. Pied Piper has been through, what, a hundred major hurdles that would have ended a real company by now? And it's been valued at hundreds of millions of dollars, what, half a dozen separate times? Obviously you've gotta let a TV show be a TV show - a certain amount of stakes-resetting and status-quo-keeping is to be expected here. But I share the concerns and complaint many people have been voicing about the show this year - there are only so many pivots and bankruptcies and CEO ousts and mergers and so on that a show can withstand and still be about, you know, the same five or six people working on their start up out of the same house. Bottom line, was this the "worst" season of Silicon Valley to date, at least as far as being the broadest, the silliest, the least-honed? Arguably, probably, yes, it was.

Another phenomenon, however, is that this is the first season of the show I watched with Marissa. She caught part or all of the first season at some point, then decided to just jump in at Season 4 with me in April, which is easy enough to do given all the rebooting and resetting and circular plotting referenced in the last paragraph. And here's the thing about comedy, as all of you know - laughter is contagious. It's why laugh tracks exist. I watched the first three seasons of Silicon Valley alone, like I do with so much other television. I found them very good and very funny, sure, but I wasn't laughing at them as much as I was at this season, what with Marissa there on the couch or in the bed or next to me on the plane or whatever. So, acknowledging the difference in viewing atmosphere, I would also have to say that this was the most I've ever laughed at Silicon Valley so far.

Lastly, a third, distantly relevant phenomenon here was the very public departure of T.J. Miller. There's this weird thing with hang-out comedies, workplace comedies, where you just like to believe and imagine that everyone involved - all these funny people, together all day for so many days - are friends in real life, or at the very least hold down mutual respect and admiration. And that's rarely actually the case, but still - when it starts to leak out that, say, T.J. miller is terrible to work with, or that Thomas Middleditch whines about not getting enough laugh lines, I can't say that my view of the show is completely unaffected by those silly behind-the-scenes spats.

Anyway, it's just interesting to me when I think about how different seasons of television compare to one another - sometimes it's not just the TV show itself we react to, but the conditions in which we consume it. Okay, done navel gazing. Enjoy the Fourth of July, assholes!