What I’m Watching: Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley: Season 2, Episode 3 “Bad Money” (B+)

This show is quite a rollercoaster, taking its characters from top of the heap to bottom of the barrel and then bolstering them up again just in the course of three episodes so far this season. Casting Chris Diamantopoulos as the new investor in Pied Piper is pure genius, and Russ Hanneman might as well be a slightly more egocentric version of Caster Soto, the character he played on “Episodes” in season three. He truly is a maniac, raving about how he put radio on the internet and then arriving at Erlich’s home ready to derail the whole process with distractions galore before spending $30,000 on meaningless billboards and taking it out of their cuts. The notion of Dinesh and Gilfoyle having twelve and eleven-person teams is mind-boggling, and even three underlings per person would be quite the change. It’s going to be hard for Pied Piper and its inventors to survive now that Russ has revealed himself to be insane, and I’m eager and nervous to see how that plays out. Gavin comparing billionaires to Jews in the Holocaust was fully preposterous, and his complete lack of self-awareness is what makes him such a formidable and frightening character. His plan to build up Big Head and make him seem like an inarguable genius is fantastic, and watching him walk around cluelessly while his intellect was described was extremely entertaining. Something tells me that he’ll be a terrible patsy, but it’s sure to cause plenty of headaches for Richard and his friends nonetheless.