Silicon Valley: Season 2 (2015)

If recent seasons of Orange is the New Black and Silicon Valley are anything to go by, there’s a bit of a change taking place in workplace comedies at the moment. Whereas the previous generation – the generation of The Office and Parks and Recreation – was about rescuing some sense of community from an increasingly bleak workplace, shows like OITNB and Silicon Valley seem to have left the idea of community behind altogether. Instead, they’re more interested in collectivity, the ways that people can work together and learn to act on behalf of each other even when community tends to be expropriated by corporate interests. While that expropriation is certainly there in OITNB, it’s especially striking in Mike Judge’s Silicon Valley, where community only really seems to exist in the pro bono arms of large IT corporations, or in the multifarious “communal” apps that form the latest wave in venture capitalism and technological innovation. As a result, the Pied Piper trio – Richard (Thomas Middleditch), Erlich (T.J. Miller), Gilfoyle (Martin Starr), Dinesh (Kumail Nanjiani) and Jared (Zach Dunn) – feel defined, above all, by their comic inability to form a community, or to foster genuine communal feeling and regard. Time and again, they try to retreat into the bromantic rapport that may have defined their office forbears, but it feels even less convincing or available in the second season, as they set out to maintain their compression algorithm as a viable investment before it’s either stolen or overtaken by their competitors at Hooli, led by Gavin Belson (Matt Ross). That makes for a much tighter, more claustrophic focus, with most of the action taking place in Erlich’s incubator pad rather than the expansive corporate parks of the first season, as the team settle into what often feels like a new, emergent home office – distinct from the postmodern post-offices of the Valley but also from the mythical garages of earlier startups – where they spend most of this season trying to maintain their intellectual property as intellectual property. On paper, that might sound somewhat dry as a premise, but it makes for some of the most unbearably suspenseful television released this year – even or especially at its most comic – partly because notions of property, theft and transaction are peculiarly slippery when we enter the IT realm, but also because this particular intellectual property only really exists as a collective effort – a collective property, with equal  contributions from each member – such that the only way for the team to weather the resultant precarity is to weather it collectively, to form a collective even or especially when there’s very little communal affiliation between them. As might be expected, that creates a collective sense of suspense and precarity that’s extraordinarily contagious, passing from character to character and then to viewer, until the series feels like it is compressing and decompressing more than developing in a conventional sense – a wonderful way to actually make you feel the incredible import of this otherwise inaccessible, theoretical, abstracted algorithm. Of course, there are still aspirational, inspirational moments, but what’s so powerful about the show is that even these don’t quite generate community either – instead, they remind us that precarity always exists in the midst or privilege, when upward mobility seems just around the next corner, but never quite available, which is the case of most Americans today. And perhaps the most daring thing about the show is the way it closes the gap between Office Space and Silicon Valley itself, which no longer feels exceptional, visionary or mythical, but simply business as usual, light years from the legendary communities upon which its reputation was founded.