Digital TV Review: Silicon Valley – The Complete Second Season

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In the race to make our lives easier with their own tech, start-ups, apps, and lines of code, a group of young men make their own lives ridiculously complex while navigating the tricky terrain of the titular Silicon Valley in HBO's ingenious Emmy nominated hit.

Yet rather than focus a majority of its energies on laughter with a more immediate punchline payoff on par with the "us vs. them" approach taken by network television’s smash sitcom The Big Bang Theory, Silicon Valley makes us feel like a fellow conspiratorial member of underdog compression start-up Pied Piper's team throughout.

Operating like well-oiled comedic machines, while each technique serves their respective series well, it nonetheless provides an important distinction between two frequently compared programs. And when it comes to the HBO show, it's one that makes us feel far more invested in the in the goings-on of the stressful environment where with each laugh, we stumble a little further down the path of our slow uphill climb to the top of Silicon Valley.

Fueled by conflict and chaos, the second season of Silicon Valley burns through as much plot in one half hour episode than ABC's sudsy watercooler drama Scandal does in double the running time and twice as many episodes.

And while it's all played for fast-talking, fast-walking thrills in the arena of politics on ABC, the high stakes threats of lawsuits, bidding wars, and reverse engineering woes are no less compelling, despite Valley's laid back demeanor and witty presentation.

But similar to the way that the average consumer isn't going to understand what it takes to make a computer run besides simply relishing in the end result, casual viewers aren't going to give Valley a deeper thought the first time around other than just kicking back for some much-needed Sunday night laughs.

And that's precisely what makes taking a second and closer look at the stellar second season all the more exciting as within the first few minutes of the Emmy nominated season opener, patterns begin to emerge as you realize just how frequently throughout Valley, flickers of what will become some of its strongest subplots are woven into seemingly throwaway exchanges several episodes in advance.

Namely, just like a stand up comedian will often close out their act with a punchline that harks back to one of the first jokes they made in the set, one of the most impressive feats of Silicon Valley's most recent season is in the way that the final cliffhanger in the season finale alludes to a warning given to our main character in the opening sequence of the season premiere.

Obviously, of course, the layering in or foreshadowing of a plot twist that will pay off later on is hardly a new tactic in comedy or drama alike. But when you also consider the countless ways that Valley moves beyond the traditional juggling of an A, B, and C storyline each week without letting you forget the half dozen other characters potentially working against Pied Piper that could come out of the woodwork at any time, you begin to realize just how structurally sophisticated it is all around.

In addition to bringing in some terrific new supporting players to challenge the Pied Piper team in the ten episode second season, Silicon Valley's talented writers built upon the foundation they'd crafted in the first season to likewise enrich each individual preexisting character.

As such, season two is at its best when it pins its ensemble cast into a corner and the forces the guys to rely both on their own intellectual creativity as well as each other to turn things around.

Moving past the limitations of watching antagonists Dinesh (Kumail Nanjiani) and Gilfoyle (Martin Starr) simply try to one-up each other, the series soon realizes how staggeringly funny the two are as (albeit combative) allies, particularly in scripter Carrie Kemper's season highlight episode, "Homicide.”

While Zach Woods remains one of my favorite bright spots as Jared, the selfless teddy bear often overlooked by the rest of the group, one of the smartest things the writing staff did was to expand upon the persona of Freaks and Geeks and Party Down sitcom veteran (and frequent series scene-stealer) Martin Starr's sardonically deadpan Gilfoyle.

Knowing that they have an ace in the hole with Starr, Silicon makes him Pied Piper's secret weapon in season two as he instigates some ethically shady outside-the-box thinking that pushes the troubled start-up in some surprising directions for better and worse.

In addition to giving T.J. Miller’s larger-than-life Erlich Bachman a foil in the sleazy entrepreneur Ross Hanneman (Chris Diamantopoulos) – a rumored extreme composite of Donald Trump and Mark Cuban – which by extension helps soften some of Erlich's often tasteless edges, the series offers Amanda Crew’s delightful Monica a few more great female personalities to play off of as a straight (wo)man and potential romantic interest for Richard (Thomas Middleditch).

Although attempting to fill the shoes left behind by the death of first rate character actor Christopher Evan Welch who played oddball visionary Peter Gregory is an impossibly thankless task, casting Suzanne Cryer as Laurie Bream, another (yet decidedly different) oddball was one of the best behind-the-scenes decisions made by the comedy so far.

Going from over-the-top crass to conceptual to cultural, the series (created by Mike Judge, John Altschuler and Dave Krinsky) culls comedy and conflict from any number of sources, which makes it compulsively watchable for its sheer unpredictability alone.

Deriving some of its most relatable laughs from the stresses of work and everyday life from a precarious phone battery to income rivalry, in addition to skewering the tech industry, Silicon Valley makes a worthy successor to co-creator Mike Judge's word-of-mouth breakthrough hit, Office Space.

Yet while it plays extremely well on its own as a highly entertaining sitcom, HBO's most consistently inventive, topical series is even better when you break down the method behind the madly funny code – reverse engineering the laughs to better appreciate what makes this tech comedy tick.   

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Movie Review: The Haunting in Connecticut (2009)

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After the film producer Andrew Trapani caught a 2003 televised account of what has become known as “The Haunting in Connecticut” that chronicled the horrifying experience dealing with “paranormal attacks [which] occurred in a span of months to different members of [the] family,” of Carmen Reed he knew he had the makings of not just a movie but the type PG-13 chilling fare Lionsgate has excelled at in recent years.

While Roger Ebert notes that In a Dark Place author Ray Garton-- who chronicled the case within his book-length work-- realized that the family in question “couldn't get their stories straight,” as Wikipedia explained, investigators nonetheless “instructed [him] to make it up and make it scary."

However, this bit of questioning aside-- the film version of The Haunting in Connecticut is going to great lengths in trying to work the fact that it's based on a historically documented case of the forefront of that advertising campaign. And in doing so, Connecticut's cinematic structure follows suit as director Peter Cornwell begins the movie as though it were a docudrama which keeps us hooked for awhile until about midway through we gets the sense that we're not quite buying into the experience as though it was gospel.

Pairing together screenwriters Adam Simon and Tim Metcalfe (self-proclaimed “students of Victorian horror and the Spiritualist movement”) along with award-winning short film maker Peter Cornwell (who directed the animated work Ward 13)-- the film which holds audiences at a distance in the dark, ominous, foreboding color scheme, cinematography, and “make you jump” musical cues is given instant credibility with the appearance of Oscar nominated actress Virginia Madsen (Sideways).

The versatile and talented Ms. Madsen-- who admits likewise in the press release to not just a love of movies but especially scary movies (having gained “cult status among the horror fans” after appearing in Candyman)-- portrays the devoted, religious, and selfless mother Sara Campbell in a uniformly terrific characterization.

When her cancer stricken son Matt (Kyle Gallner) is accepted into an experimental, highly risky, exceedingly expensive, and physically draining radical treatment program, Madsen's Sara makes the decision to move her family temporarily to a Victorian rental home closer to the hospital during the duration.

Of course, the house gives viewers the creeps right off the bat as the owner catches sight of Sara as she drives by and tells her hill give her the first month's rent free if he doesn't have to finish pounding the sign in the yard before warning her that the place has “a bit of a history." And within seconds of their arrival we start realizing that the history is one involving death, dismemberment, and gore.

As Matt begins to have visions of ghosts in the house, sealed rooms reveal that it was previously a funeral parlor, photos of corpses are found, and a box of eyelids are discovered—he tries to hide some of the bizarre goings-on and paranormal phenomena from his worried mother, siblings, cousin, along with his overworked recovering alcoholic father (Martin Donovan). His reasoning for doing so is logical and sound since his doctor had warned that if he’d started “seeing things” or experienced behavioral changes, they must stop the treatment immediately.

Unfortunately, it’s this issue precisely that pervades a great majority of the film as for a good bulk of the work, the suffering, incessantly ill, overly medicated, and emaciated Matt is the only one who witnesses the creepy goings-on firsthand and we're unsure if he's the most reliable of witnesses.

When he befriends an equally sick reverend (Elias Koteas) who argues that because they’re walking between life and the shadow of death, they’re able to pick up on ghostly activity that’s trapped between worlds (although they should “fear no evil” he says with a straight face, twenty minutes before he’s doing an exorcism), the movie ventures from ghost story into spiritual, supernatural thriller to mixed effect.

Admittedly, the back-story of the home itself is incredibly squirm-inducing and there were a few audible screams during the press screening-- most notably as we discover its involvement in séances, corpse-tampering, black magic and more in a few horrifyingly intense sequences including the poster’s disgusting “ectoplasm” sequence and one involving the aforementioned eyelids that make the PG-13 rating seem a tad weak.

Despite this, later the movie becomes increasingly dubious as a work of fact as it spirals to a conclusion that one could only call silly wherein characters act in ways that don’t seem to fit their personalities in the slightest as Cornwell’s Connecticut leaves the occult for cheap scares befitting of the genre with the obligatory and laugh-inducing, “heroine in the shower” moment complete with a potentially life-saving phone call bearing an all-important message that’s left on an answering machine.

Likewise, it’s hard not to acknowledge that quite a few scenes would be extremely hard to verify as scientific fact which makes the filmmakers’ decision to bookend it again with Madsen’s voice-over and a wrap-up of post-paranormal events seem like a strange fit. Moreover, the eerie Victorian séance stuff would’ve made one hell of a creepy Lionsgate “seat jumper” if the filmmakers had been given the freedom to move away from the trappings of what they describe as a fiercely “true story” and just focus specifically on the back-story which is more effective ultimately than the one being played out during the film’s setting of the summer of 1987.