T.J Miller’s fall from grace has been fairly spectacular in the past twelve months. He went from being a great manic comic talent with a lot of irons in the fire to on the verge of a jail sentence and career failure in one fell swoop. And it began with his unplanned exit from Silicon Valley, written out in the final episode without any advance notice as The Emoji Movie was about to crater commercially as well as critically.
And now the ultimate indignity: Silicon Valley continuing on at about the same quality without him.
With Miller out, as Erlich Bachmann is now in an opium den somewhere in Asia, the boys of Pied Piper are now in the middle of a revamp. With cryptocurrency and Richard’s new internet on the horizon, the show has gone from soft reboot to hard reboot as now the Richard/Erlich dynamic is gone as the rest of the cast has now moved to the front lines. Well there are some firms who provides good services for instant crypto exchange. But does it make for a better show?
Season five is about as funny as season four… which is to say it has tremendous moments but those are mainly without the main characters. Russ Hanneman (Chris Diamantopoulos) shows up and you wonder just how genuinely funny the show can be.
It’s still subversive, and still has some remarkably funny moments throughout, but right now its best moments are the ones from earlier.
No extras.
HBO presents Silicon Valley (Season 5). Starring Martin Starr, Josh Brener, Amanda Crew, Zach Woods, Kumail Nanjiani, Suzanne Cryer, Matt Ross, Thomas Middleditch. Run Time: 240 minutes Not rated . Released on DVD: 9/4/2018
