What I’m Watching: Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley: Season 1, Episode 5 “Signaling Risk” (B+)

I’m officially on board with this show now, and I’m definitely seeing why it’s a worthwhile and lasting concept. There’s a level of industry speak to it that works to its advantage, using the real-life event of TechCrunch Disrupt to cast Richard as a naïve programmer who innocently entered his company to be eligible and didn’t realize that having seed funding from Peter Gregory means that he shouldn’t be there. Of course, like with everything involving him and involving Pied Piper, it turned into a pissing contest, with Gavin showing up to catch Peter off guard during lunch and break the news about Pied Piper and about using it as a Launchpad for Nucleus. His holotechnology was the ultimate example of innovations being useless, as evidenced by his subsequent video and phone calls that ended quickly due to bad service. Buying the old logo and putting it on display was pretty ridiculous and showy as well. I think that Erlich was used perfectly in this episode, driving the Aviato van into questionable territory to hire a convicted criminal and street artist to design their logo. The initial work, which unveiled a far more troubling pot farm inside the garage, was certainly not what they wanted, but it was great to see that it all worked out in the end, and that Erlich helped save it. Jared’s unsubtle effort to motivate Gilfoyle and Dinesh into doing work by competing with each other was brilliant and truly successful, best evidenced by the sad look Dinesh gave when Richard asked him to go outside and Gilfoyle wouldn’t stop working. It was nice to see Monica put some personal time into wooing Richard, and to comfort him in a perfectly platonic but very reassuring way.