Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.5
Overall		3.5

Silicon Valley: The Complete Fourth Season Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman September 15, 2017

HBO released both Silicon Valley: The Complete Fourth Season and Veep: The Complete Sixth Season in tandem, and having gotten to the Julia Louis-Dreyfus series first in my review queue, I have to say I feel at least a little bit similarly about this fourth season of Silicon Valley with regard to what I mentioned in my Veep: The Complete Sixth Season Blu-ray review about that show’s previous couple of years, namely that while it had continued to be funny, it (for me, anyway) had lost some of its creative mojo. The trials and tribulations of Richard Hendricks (Thomas Middleditch) and his cohorts in the high tech world have often offered both razor sharp writing solidly grounded in character, but also a rather bracing insight into the overnight success some entrepreneurs have enjoyed by simply wrangling lines of (to the general public) impenetrable code. But this fourth season of Silicon Valley, while often wryly amusing, retreads a number of issues that the series has already exploited — in some cases, repeatedly — over the past three years, and as such the series is, kind of like Pied Piper itself, starting to feel a little old hat and behind the eight ball.

Our reviews of the previous seasons of Silicon Valley can be accessed by clicking on the following links:

Silicon Valley: The Complete First Season Blu-ray review

Silicon Valley: The Complete Second Season Blu-ray review

Silicon Valley: The Complete Third Season Blu-ray review

With all the ups and downs Richard has experienced through the years, it takes a moment to realize that the first scene showing him as an Uber driver is not in fact a depiction of a new, even more troubled, state of affairs, but rather a little gambit Richard and the Pied Piper boys have arranged in order to pitch their new idea to a venture capitalist, the increasingly panicked passenger in the back seat of a car Richard doesn’t quite have mastery over. It’s one of those squirm worthy scenes that Silicon Valley has often exploited, neatly delineating Richard’s social inadequacies in a world that virtually demands the “art of the schmooze”.

Things are in a typical state of disarray at Pied Piper after the events that transpired in the third season, though a video chat app that Dinesh (Kumail Nanjiani) has authored, using Richard’s MacGuffin-esque “compression algorithm” as a foundation, has unexpectedly taken off, leading to a disruption in the already dysfunctional Pied Piper team. Erlich (T.J. Miller) is keen (maybe desperate is a better word) to recoup his investment, and wants the chat app to be the company’s sole focus, something that the other guys (excepting Richard) are more or less happy to do. Erlich is already trying to finagle partnership stakes in this new arrangement, much to the disapproval of Mr. Bighetti (Patrick O’Connor), the father of “Big Head” (Josh Brener), who is wielding some behind the scenes power. Richard increasingly becomes aware he’s “not that into” the video chat app, and just as the other guys are reading to fire him as CEO, he offers to resign, albeit with conditions (big surprise there).

Interestingly, Richard’s crisis of conscience comes courtesy of a potential investor with absolutely no scruples whatsoever, Russ Hannemann (Chris Diamantopoulos), who suggests Richard is like a gay guy trying to bed a woman, and that he needs to be true to himself and “f*** that guy” (in this case, Richard’s idea for a “new internet” built out of networked smart phones, or something like that). That sets up a nice dialectic for a few episodes between Richard and Dinesh, who has assumed CEO duties at the newly renamed PiperChat. In the meantime, similar machinations at Hooli have resulted in a power struggle between Gavin Belson (Matt Ross) and Jack Barker (Stephen Tobolowsky), a conflict that is sparked somewhat ridiculously by a skirmish over who should be dropped off first on a private jet trip home from China, where Hooli has entered into an agreement to manufacture a device Barker invented.

These threads ultimately intermingle, as might be expected, after Dinesh’s ascent into leadership doesn’t go exactly as planned (big surprise there), leading to a potential lawsuit that could cost billions. Without spoiling too much of the (admittedly fairly predictable) twists and turns this season of Silicon Valley takes, suffice it to say that Belson’s machinations actually end up saving Dinesh, but not Belson himself. A bit later, Richard is gobsmacked to discover that he needs Belson in order to further his plans for his “new internet”. It’s just a little too incestuous at times, especially given the already at times improbable commingling of Pied Piper and Hooli histories that have informed the show.

There are some admittedly very funny bits sprinkled liberally throughout this season, including a really well done sidebar involving the always scheming Erlich and Jian-Yang (Jimmy O. Yang), with Jian-Yang’s proposed app being taken over pretty much whole cloth by Erlich, which in turn leads to a conscription of students from another sidebar involving Big Head and a nascent “teaching” career. For all the “been there, done that” feeling that tends to permeate this season, it’s these kinds of smartly written interrelationships that make the series still offer some requisite comedic punch, even if overall plot arcs seem awfully familiar and increasingly tired.

Silicon Valley: The Complete Fourth Season Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Silicon Valley: The Complete Fourth Season is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of HBO with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1. This show and the aforementioned Veep share more than their network and occasional peaks and valleys in their comedic momentum, they also tend to offer perfectly competent looking high definition presentations that nonetheless rarely if ever rise to "wow" heights. This is another solid season, one graced with generally excellent detail and fine detail levels, and an appealingly natural and at times quite robust looking palette. That said, there's very little opportunity for really impressive looking visuals here, and occasionally clunky CGI elements as well as brief moments of insecure contrast tend to crop up. While not something that will make anyone's reference quality list, the transfers are problem free in terms of compression issues.

Silicon Valley: The Complete Fourth Season Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

As I've stated in reviews of previous seasons, Silicon Valley: The Complete Fourth Season's DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix is perfectly in line with the video component, meaning total competence if also almost total lack of a sonic "wow" factor. Some of the closing credits music in particular is bass heavy hip hop and the like, and as such provides some pretty emphatic low end and general sense of energy, but the bulk of the show tends to play out in fairly small scale dialogue scenes, where immersion is limited to ambient environmental effects. Fidelity is fine throughout all episodes and there are no issues with distortion or other anomalies.

Silicon Valley: The Complete Fourth Season Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Deleted Scenes (1080p; 2:45)

If I might be just slightly snarky for a moment, the supplements on each successive season of Silicon Valley's Blu-ray releases feel like they've (or in this case, it's) been subjected to Richard's "compression algorithm".

Silicon Valley: The Complete Fourth Season Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

A so-called "sophomore slump" is often mentioned in terms of things like second albums or second seasons of television series, but maybe in the case of long lived HBO offerings, the real dip starts around the fourth year. It's something I felt, however slightly, with Veep's fourth season, and it's something I felt again watching this fourth year of Silicon Valley. There are still a lot more pluses than minuses with this show, but I sure wish the writers would get out of the sort of Groundhog Day rut they often have their characters in. Technical merits continue to be strong if not mind blowing, and Silicon Valley: The Complete Fourth Season comes Recommended.