Sunday night I did the thing where you clear the whole evening for a 28-minute TV show, which is objectively a stupid use of time and I would do it again in a heartbeat. Silicon Valley came back for season three on HBO, and I've been half-dreading, half-craving this premiere since the season two finale, where Pied Piper's compression demo actually worked live on stage at "TechCrunch Disrupt" and the whole thing felt like a fairy tale ending. Season three opens by torching that fairy tale in about four minutes.
The board doesn't fire Richard exactly. They just route around him. In walks Jack Barker, this smiling, folksy, faux-humble executive (Stephen Tobolowsky is so good at this it's genuinely unsettling) who gets installed as CEO while Richard gets kicked upstairs to CTO, which everyone in the room knows is a demotion dressed up in a nicer title. The episode is even called "Success Failure," and I laughed out loud at that because I've sat in exactly one meeting in my life that could be summarized that way, and I still think about it more than I'd like to admit.
Went into the office Monday and it turns out three separate people had watched it too, unprompted, no group chat coordination or anything. That almost never happens with a show anymore, not since everybody's viewing schedule fractured into forty directions. One of our backend guys, completely deadpan, said "we need our own Jack Barker" about our actual VP of Product, and then wouldn't elaborate, and honestly that's funnier than anything he could have said next.
Here's my actual opinion, not just a recap: the show is at its best when it's mean about the boring, structural stuff nobody puts in the pitch deck. Not the hoodies-and-ping-pong stuff everyone already made fun of five years ago. It's the board dynamics. The way a founder can build something that objectively works and still lose control of it inside one bad quarter because he doesn't own enough of the company anymore. That's the part that lands for people who've actually worked adjacent to a startup board, and it's the part a lot of the "quirky nerd comedy" writeups from a couple years back completely missed, because they wanted it to be a workplace sitcom instead of what it mostly is now, which is closer to a dark comedy about ownership and control.
I'll admit the humor doesn't always land for me. Erlich remains a character I find funnier in theory than in any individual scene, and there's a bit in this premiere with him and Big Head's incubator money that felt like a retread of a joke the show already made better the first time. But the Barker stuff alone is worth the season pass.
Small aside, because I can't not mention it: today is apparently a huge day for tech earnings, Apple's reporting after the bell tonight and Twitter's numbers are already out and not pretty by the sound of it. Every outlet with a tech section is going to have five thousand words on stock movement by tomorrow morning and I don't have anything to add to that pile that isn't already being said better elsewhere, so I'm not going to pretend otherwise here. Funny timing though, a show about a startup board pushing out a founder landing the same week actual public company earnings calls are happening. Life doesn't usually sync up its metaphors that neatly.
Anyway. If you dropped off Silicon Valley after season one because it felt like a niche joke for people who already worked in the industry, this is a decent point to wander back in. It's less interested now in whether you get the technical jokes and more interested in whether you've ever watched someone smart get outmaneuvered by someone merely confident. Which, unfortunately, is a much more universal experience than knowing what a compression ratio is.
Setting a reminder for next Sunday already. Which, again, is a ridiculous thing to do for a half hour of television, and I stand by it completely.