Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.5
Overall		4.0

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

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman April 12, 2017

There’s a thin line between sharing and bragging when it comes to parents of college aged children. I was recently at a party where a bunch of us have kids in college with many of them studying either Computer Science or some other high tech or IT field, and there was a virtual you know what match of parents talking not just about their kids’ academic achievements, but about things like the insanely lucrative internships they were being offered for summer employment. This is all to say that some of the patent absurdities at play in Silicon Valley aren’t really all that absurd. We’re living in a time where the incredible explosion of entrepreneurial startups with some kind of high tech angle can foster overnight millionaires (maybe even billionaires), but which also can be shark infested waters for those without enough sense to protect themselves or make sure they know exactly what they’re doing. That aspect of knowing exactly what you’re doing plays into the third season of Silicon Valley, for while on some levels the team assembled by Richard Hendricks (Thomas Middleditch) is obviously genius level, the series derives a lot of its comedy from some of the boneheaded decisions made by various members at times. That includes Richard, who, as the third season opens, finds himself in precarious straits, perhaps shunted off to the sidelines of the company that he himself founded and made into a high tech sensation.

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

Note: This review assumes that viewers will have already seen the first two seasons of the series, so anyone who hasn’t and who is spoiler- phobic is encouraged to skip down to the technical portions of the review, below.

Silicon Valley: The Complete Second Season ended with what I described in the review of that season as a kind of overly manufactured seeming quasi-cliffhanger, and the upshot of that situation is that Richard finds himself sidelined from his Chief Executive Officer position at Pied Piper. While Richard still maintains an ostensibly less powerful executive position (Chief Technology Officer), the handwriting seems to be on the wall in terms of where the actual power resides—and it’s not with Richard.

The first several episodes of this season of Silicon Valley tend to traffic in a kind of “inside baseball” in a number of ways that might be off putting to “outsiders” if the show weren’t so smartly written and offered characters who are so instantly accessible (which is not to imply they’re all likable, because many of them are not). Richard’s travails with the company he founded ricochet in any number of ways, with him butting heads with Jack Barker (Stephen Tobolowsky), ostensibly Richard’s new boss and a guy whose vision for Pied Piper is manifestly different than Richard’s. This includes everything from exactly what product Pied Piper should be hawking to more mundane elements like what the offices should look like.

All sorts of craziness ensues from the disruption at Pied Piper, and there are a number of sidebars that include everything from product development (where Richard is amusingly unable to make something substandard despite his displeasure with what he’s being asked to make) to stock options. As has been the case with Silicon Valley from the get go, while the context of the show is decidedly specific, a generalist take on workplace comedy still holds sway and is well exploited with the often scheming (if dunderheaded) antics of various players, both within and outside the Pied Piper environment.

The longstanding “nemesis” relationship with Hooli continues to inform a lot of the subplots this season, with Barker ultimately being forced out of Pied Piper and taking up residence there. Silicon Valley might be faulted for so often putting obstacles in Richard’s way which are ultimately (more or less) removed, only to have something new come along. It gives the show a kind of roller coaster feeling that may in fact be authentic, given the wild and wooly ways of high tech startups, but which can seem a bit repetitive at times. That said, there are some engaging detours this season takes away from pure office shenanigans, as in a kind of bittersweet quasi-romance that briefly shows up for Dinesh (Kumail Nanjiani).

As with both previous seasons of Silicon Valley, the Pied Piper team seems almost genetically predisposed toward snatching defeat out of the arms of victory, as once again happens after all the tension and conflict of the early part of the season (more or less) die down and the team is free to pursue a platform offering from Pied Piper. It’s here that the show starts exploring a somewhat darker (if still funny) world of artificially inflated user statistics that backfires. Kind of unexpectedly, Erlich (T.J. Miller) arrives to save the day, and an equally surprising offshoot from Dinesh’s attempts at online dating point the way to what may be Pied Piper’s future. All of this mishegos might be summed up with the idea that starting up is easy, but keeping going is the hard part.

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

Silicon Valley: The Complete Third Season is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of HBO with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1. This season's presentation is very much in keeping with what I described in the Silicon Valley: The Complete Second Season Blu-ray review with a perfectly competent transfer that nonetheless rarely rises to a level of visual "wow". A good representation of a natural looking palette is evident, and consistent contrast helps virtually every episode segue seamlessly from interior (often garishly lit) scenes to some nice outdoor material. Fine detail is excellent in close-ups. There are occasionally slightly ragged looking elements when monitors are seen onscreen, but while there's nothing that's going to knock any videophile's socks off here, there similarly isn't anything like instability or compression issues to complain about, either.

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

Much in line with the video presentation, Silicon Valley: The Complete Third Season's DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix gets the job done without ever offering over the top sonics. The mix does a rather artful job of spatially varying sounds in the office environment (wherever the "office" happens to be), and some of the outdoor scenes have at least occasionally well placed ambient environmental sounds that help to establish a lifelike atmosphere. Dialogue is always rendered very cleanly and clearly and encounters no prioritization issues.

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

Disc One

• Deleted Scenes (1080i; 5:17)

Disc Two

• Deleted Scene (1080i; 00:29)

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

Silicon Valley continues to be rather archly comic, even as it plies a kind of increasingly melancholic subtext where nothing Richard attempts to do seems to work out exactly (or even marginally) the way he planned. The cast has established a wonderful set of interrelationships that feel lived in and which provide consistent humor throughout this season, even as a number of dunderheaded decisions on the part of several characters may stretch credulity at times. Technical merits continue to be strong, though this season doesn't have much to offer in the way of supplementary material. Recommended.