What I’m Watching: Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley: Season 4, Episode 4 “Teambuilding Exercise” (B+)

As soon as Richard started working with Gavin, I kept waiting for the bottom to fall out. What’s great about this show is that sometimes things don’t fail but instead they succeed in completely different ways than expected without some of the original players attached. Richard went through a very showy process of interviewing candidates and keeping some rather explicit notes about them – the least scathing of which was a callback to his hatred of spaces instead of tabs – that just resulted in him working with Jared and Gilfoyle again. I love that Seefood was only capable of distinguishing between hotdog and not hotdog, and Jian-Yang’s argument that he can quit if Erlich could steal led to a very entertaining turn of events. Erlich having Big Head use his class to scrape the internet for food images failed miserably because the class didn’t like how he was treating Big Head and ended up banding together to create the technology instead. The best part was that Erlich taking an explicit photo to be obnoxious to Jian-Yang led to Seefood turning into a penis filter that netted him $4 million. The absurdity of what happens on this show and the speed with which technology and fortunes change is incredible. Gilfoyle making Dinesh paranoid about his hacker girlfriend getting onto their wi-fi and using his phone while he wasn’t there was fun, even though I’m pretty sure it’s all made up to make the man who has to spend every day looking at penises on the internet go insane.