“Erlich’s exit is rushed and unsatisfactory”

When T.J. Miller departed Silicon Valley this week in a storm of poor relations, insulting his co-stars and showrunners in a sensational exit interview, it marked a significant turning point for a show that once seemed incapable of jumping the shark. After all, Silicon Valley is far too safe a sitcom, affixed semi-permanently after Veep on HBO’s Spring schedule, to ever experience a massive shift in quality. Yet this fourth season, most notable for the increasingly minimised role of Miller’s Erlich – the show’s most animated and most meme-friendly figure, managed to kill much audience goodwill with some stunningly poor storytelling and a reliance on repetitive cyclical character arcs that have been growing ever tiresome since Silicon’s peak in Season 1.

For a show about innovators striving for progress, Silicon Season 4 was extraordinarily backwards in its construction. The season’s initial premise (Dinesh as hapless Pied Piper CEO; Richard off on his own maverick mission) was abandoned after 2 or 3 episodes, and the status quo of The Gang Making Tech In Erlich’s House rapidly returned to. The show remains incredibly funny, on the occasions it tries to be, but there’s only so many jokes that can be made in a small office space with maximum 5 or 6 characters, meaning the writers often resort to Guilfoyle saying “fuck” as a form of comedy.

As ever-anxious Richard and human-embodiment-of-kindness-and-loyalty Jared, respectively, Thomas Middleditch and Zach Woods remain valuable players. Miller too has some solid material early in the season, particularly in his interactions with the delightfully-hateful developer Jing Yiang, but his ultimate writing-out after a season of sharing almost no scenes with the primary cast feels rushed, unsatisfactory and deeply unfair to a character who’s been the source of so much brilliant comedy for 3 and a half seasons. Miller, apparently, is a bit too much like Erlich for his own good, but he’s a very funny performer and will hopefully find fortune in a film career. The more superfluous supporting players – Gavin, Bighead and whatever Amanda Crew’s character is called – really have no place on the show anymore. The refusal to add new members to the main cast (unless you count Jing Yiang) is becoming frustrating: with Erlich out, there’ll need be someone new and unique in the incubator come Season 5 if Silicon is ever to return to its hysterical best. I hear Danny Pudi is available…