The Peter principle was born in ’60s corporate America, but it’s not relegated to stuffy old workplaces—we basically see it in action every time a new series or film turns out to be a hit. Whether they’re in Hollywood or on Wall Street, executives can’t help but try to wring as much value out of any and every good idea, even in the face of diminishing returns. A merely respectable performance can bolster enough confidence to nab a promotion or renewal order. But at some point, the rising star is simply not up to the task at the next level. The principle dictates that our incompetence or lack of suitability will be revealed, and the cycle will start all over again for someone or something else.
That management concept plays out at the micro level—especially in the case of Nelson Bighetti, though it’s arguable that he’ll ever get his comeuppance—and macro on HBO’s Silicon Valley. Now, watching it propel the fictional Hooli and Pied Piper engineers obviously inspires nowhere near the same amount of chagrin and schadenfreude, but it is part of what drives Mike Judge’s series. The first season was a hit, which necessitated a second season, which introduced even more obscenities and absurdity—mostly at the hands of Russ “Tres Commas” Hanneman—which, in turn, led to a third season that somehow managed to fail upwards even harder. At this point, the laughs and disappointments (for the characters) are reliable. We know what we’re getting each season: hilarious disasters, ingenious visual gags, and dick jokes of Mark Twain levels of pithiness or Faulkner-esque virtuosity, the latter of which make up Silicon Valley’s own “Peter” principle. And, not to clutter this up with too many business terms, the demand is there, so Judge and showrunner Alec Berg might as well keep supplying it.
But nothing lasts forever, least of all in the real Silicon Valley, so is this the year that Silicon Valley fails to perform? We’ve watched Richard (Thomas Middleditch) repeatedly rally the Pied Piper team and, apropos of the name, lead them to ruin. The scrappy startup has defied probability time and again even as they’ve adhered to the Peter principle: two steps forward, followed by a couple of lateral moves that skirt the edge of the precipice without ever falling over. So have the intermittent successes and inevitable defeats, which still have few real lasting consequences, worn thin?
The first three episodes of the season quickly raise those concerns and allay them; they head off any fears that this show is moving from satire into pure farce. Silicon Valley still offers plenty of what viewers tune in for—takedowns of corporate raiders and VC bros, breakdown opportunities for Richard, and Gilfoyle and Dinesh’s (Martin Starr and Kumail Nanjiani, respectively) programmer bromance for the ages. And of course, Jared (Zach Woods) continues to act, however inadvisably, as the heart of a company that once featured fellatio in its logo. But the success-failure ratio remains on par with previous seasons, even as the Pied Piper team falls in line behind a new product: the revolutionary video chat spearheaded by Dinesh and his lust.