Should Be Working

Of course we're all expecting PP to win the porn contract playoff; and by all rights and logic they should. The writers have thus far spent Season 2 repeatedly throwing bad luck their way; it's only appropriate (and satisfying from an invested viewer's standpoint) that PP now embark on a winning streak of sorts (a real revenge of the nerds) for the remaining season episodes. Yet I'd never put it past Judge and his writers to throw a few more depressing curve balls our way when we're already tired of them.

Poor Jared, who started out in Ep. 2 of Season 1 as a very sharp business planner and the voice of reason, has in Season 2 been transformed into an inarticulate dull-witted spokesman on gender issues. Yes, Erlich can be a bloviating mess, annoying at times, but he still provides an often-hilarious, extroverted, and meglomaniacal contrast in an incubator populated by reserved,neurotic, and emotionally stunted nerds. And he's been the source of some of the best lines in the series.

Well, at least this episode got them out of the incubator for an extended period of time. But implausible story lines still abound. Gavin, the exalted demigod would surely have insisted on a trial run of the product's video streaming to ensure that Nucleus would perform well during the fight broadcast. Not like Steve Jobs used to micromanage every new product demonstration to the nth degree, but just to make sure the product worked according to plan. But no, the paranoid meglomaniac was too satisfied enough with the lame assurances of his terrified developers to insist on it. Doesn't ring true. How did the engineers at that venture firm figure out how to successfully duplicate PP's new middle-out method from a few short minutes of Richard at the white board?

I agree with your assessment about the Season 2 nosedive, but will keep watching because the show is still better and funnier than anything else out there. Do what I do when a Season 2 episode disappoints: watch an episode of Betas on Amazon to remind yourself just how badly high tech humor can be done.

Yep, Hooli is way behind schedule and no one wants to tell Gavin the bad news. Perhaps he'll resort to water boarding to get the truth out of his team. When he does, expect something underhanded like a spy mission to the incubator to secure PP's secret recipe.

This episode's entire storyline is based on the need for PP to remain in and run their business (and data center) from Erlich's house. Judge was apparently unable to come up with a more plausible scenario for preserving Erlich's continued and constant presence (couldn't they have just moved into the swanky office space and hired him as their "corporate dreamer" and skipped all this nonsense?) Even Palo Alto can occasionally get hot during the non-Winter months, especially on the inside of an uninsulated garage built back in the 1950s that is full of heat-generating GPU servers . I don't recall seeing any electrical contractors rewiring the garage from 200 amps service to 20,000 amps to adequately power and cool the new GPU server farm. Expect a visit from a city municipal utilities representative. I wonder if Kiki still has his robotic arm.

Using Season 1 as a standard of reference, I'm still disappointed with Season 2. The show seems to be all over the place now, with too many character changes and lame story lines crammed into its short half hour running time. To top if off, it's beginning to reek of PC. As mentioned previously, Jared/OJ's clumsy and inarticulate welcoming meeting with Carla was totally out of character. He seems to be the shape shifting chameleon of the show, his competence and skill set constantly changing to suit the needs of a given episode. Started Season 1 as the business plan genius, turned into a complete zombie after being hijacked to Peter Gregory's international dateline island (no doubt due to massive sleep deprivation), and now he can't even welcome a female new hire in a professional manner. I obviously missed it, but how did Hanneman's moron girlfriend get a seat at the PP board of director's table, thereby doubling his voting power? Glad that Jared the Cyborg took the job offer from Hanneman. Too weird a character, even for this show, who would have totally messed up the coder pool dynamics. Carla shows promise as a female version of Gilfoyle. If they couldn't write a worthwhile story line for Erlich for this episode, they should have sent him on another vision quest in the the Sierra Nevada. He's too talented and important a character to waste on yogurt/berry spoon rants and other time-wasting hissy fits. Please spend more time on product development and less on the PC, Erlich's and Chen Yang's language barrier, and Hanneman's tiresome over the top antics. These guys obviously need to work their asses off to build a successful beta product. It doesn't have to be boring. Create some classic Dinesh/Gilfoyle/Richard (and now Carla) interplay. Do something entertaining like Season 1's episode with the Carver. Stop wasting time dwelling on lame characters and trying to skewer political correctness with a mallet and spend it instead showing us how these guys actually build and get a successful product to market. Just make us laugh in the process.

Ah yes, Tom Perkins, who also recently asserted that only taxpayers should have the right to vote and that the votes of the uber-wealthy (like himself) should carry far more weight than those of the working poor and middle class. At 83, this guy's internal editor has shut down completely and he finally feels free to say what he probably was always thinking but had the discretion to stifle. Kind of like a senile Erlich.

But it's not just an algorithm, akin to some formula merely writtten in a notebook or scrawled on a whiteboard in some fancy SF hotel. Richard installed the much-improved compression product on a MacBook and used it in front of hundreds at Tech Crunch to compress that large 3D file to one about one quarter its size. That's concrete, real-world use of the compression engine components on real-world hardware and software to achieve amazing file compression. I'm still left wondering why no one in Pied Piper took some time out from their daily bitch sessons to file a patent on it to protect it and establish first-use primacy over Gavin. Or at the very least consult a good patent atttorney to find out what other steps they needed to take to obtain a sound patent. Then again, doing so would have eliminated the lame Season 2 plot line of the frivolous Hooli lawsuit, their rejection by all the VCs, and the need to either accept Gavin's offer or secure the services of a psychotic lone wolf investor.

I usually just take a few gulps of coffee from my large two-handled coffee mug and gaze back at them with glassy, indifferent eyes and spout some meaningless economics theory mumbo-jumbo. That always ends the conversation.

Perhaps Silicon Valley set the bar so high in Season 1 for brilliantly nailing outrageous and eccentric tech characters, worker drones and billionaires alike, that the run simply cannot be sustained. I didn't find Ep. 3 all that funny. Although it is still the best tech industry comedy around by far (Amazon's Betas was a terribly-executed waste of time), Mike Judge is still not hitting his targets or successfully building on the existing storyline in Season 2. Yeah, we get it, Hanneman is a crazy wild-man investor, we've all seen his type before, but they take him from crazy to just plain annoying in the span of 30 minutes. And we know Gavin is a power-hungry narcissist who wants to rule the world, but his Season 1 character would never have publicly uttered those comments comparing the plight of billionaires to the persecution of European Jews under the Nazis. He's utterly self-absorbed and malignant, but not stupid.

I agree with every point. Thus far, Season 2 disappoints on almost every level. Gone is the all the spontaneity, freshness, and sly humor from Season 1, replaced by boring and unbelievable plot lines and terrible character development. I might expect this sort of rapid decline after four or five seasons, but so soon? Mike Judge had quite a few months to adjust to the loss of the terrific Peter Gregory character and this is the best he and his team can come up with? I've rewatched watched every episode from Season 1 numerous times and enjoyed it. Haven't had the slightest compulsion to re-watch either one of the first two Season 2 episodes. This is becoming as painful to view as Startups: Silicon Valley. And almost as insipid.

The TV version of Fargo far exceeded my original expectations. Excellent all around. Watched the entire season in one 24-period. The unfolding relationship between Lester and Malvo was very strange and yet compelling to watch. Sort of like a master psychopath and his Milquetoast apprentice, Malvo obviously felt some kinship with him from the start. To the weakling Lester, Malvo embodied everything he himself lacked: a complete absence of fear and a dazzling skill at terminating those who annoyed or threatened him, even his ability to intimidate and even torture everday people with terrifying truths. No doubt these were traits that Lester very much wanted to acquire to settle the score for a life full of humiliations. The strange bond was forged with the murder of Lester's former high school bully and persisted to the end, even after he watched Malvo cooly dispatch his three guests in that Las Vegas hotel elevator and execute his wife at the insurance office. Even knowing that Malvo was in town and after him, he refused to help the police track him down. Perhaps he knew that Malvo would always prevail in any encounter, until that final scene with the bear trap.

Perhaps I jumped the gun in my premature and severe condemnation of the Dubrows based a very brief preview clip. But even if Shannon has just dropped by (even unannounced) and blown a gasket, that's not how a doctor or his highly-intelligent and so socially-sensitive wife should respond to a woman on the edge of a nervous breakdown, even on a RH reality show. Nor am I excusing Shannon one bit for the mess she now appears to find herself in WRT her marriage. We've all seen the countless scenes of her belittling her husband, rejecting his advances, undermining him in front of the girls, generally making his life miserable. Now she's doing her on-air confessionals to explain how she really just wants more of David's time, attention, and affection. Lady has a strange way of communicating that. One would think she holds him in utter contempt. Get thee to a psychiatrist and a marriage counselor, pronto. And nix on the computer till midnight routine. Still can't abide Heather or Terry, though.

As they say, actions speak louder than words, and the preview scene at the Dubrow's seals my opinion of both Heather and Terry as complete privileged assholes. There stands a stern-faced Heather, with Terry and his perpetual nasty smirk standing in the background (as usual), angrily ordering an obviously upset Shannon from their rented mansion. Shannon has obviously gone there to talk to ("confront") Heather about spreading news of her impending divorce from David, and is no doubt highly distraught and emotional, but, given her precarious situation, that's understandable. The fact that the Dubrow's can't see the big picture, can't empathize with this overwrought woman who is in need of sympathy and support and cut her some slack, offer a few words of support, confirms their despicable characters. I'm assuming, of course, that Shannon hasn't ransacked and spray painted their lovely rental property.