What I’m Watching: Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley: Season 3, Episode 7 “To Build a Better Beta” (B+)

It’s fair to assume that, in its beta launch, Pied Piper would experience more than a few small problems. It turns out, however, that things are looking pretty good, that is, to everyone except for Monica, who has always played an interesting role on this show as a somewhat personality-free personal advocate for Richard. Her not liking the beta was important to a degree, but fortunately she gave Richard strong advice, which was to ignore her and to instead emphasize the plethora of positive reviews the beta had received. The other big issue was that Gavin’s overambitious head of security figured out a way to get his hands on a copy of the beta thanks to the preexisting e-mail surveillance Gavin was already running. Richard and Gilfoyle were smart to decide to mess with Gavin, who made the twin mistakes of opening the stolen beta on his personal laptop and phone and not recognizing the engineers he had rehired after firing them following multi-year tenures. The difficulty that everyone except for Jared had coming up with ten friends was funny, and naturally the conclusion that Jared spoke much to Dinesh and Gilfoyle’s chagrin was that they are indeed each other’s best friends. Erlich selling his shares of Pied Piper as the only way to come back from a fate worse than bankruptcy was a bittersweet development as Pied Piper took its next step without him officially on board. That’s what you get when you opt just to pay fines for not serving jury duty rather than just doing the right thing, I suppose.