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The boys are back! As you may remember, Re/code has been re/capping the episodes since Season One, a view of "Silicon Valley" from inside Silicon Valley. It’s meta meta.
The plot picks up exactly where last season left off, with Richard entering the house and telling the others that he has been fired from his role as Pied Piper’s CEO. If you don’t remember how that happened, here’s HBO’s two-minute catch-up:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wo0z1P_MN1U
Dick in the writers’ room
This new season seems to be shaping up to be comedic gangbusters. I’m unable to determine if, mathematically, there was literally a laugh a minute. But it’s close.
People generally refer to Dick Costolo’s experience in comedy before becoming Twitter CEO, but for improv nerds, the story is much more exciting: He trained at Second City and "improv-ed around" with Steve Carell, Rachel Dratch and UCB co-founder Matt Walsh. It’s not an overstatement to say this core UCB group and their circle of friends (Amy Poehler, Tina Fey, Seth Meyers, Stephen Colbert) have reshaped comedy in the past decade.
Onstage at the premiere, Costolo played down his role in the show, but Kumail Nanjiani, who plays Dinesh Chugtai, said that his value was in encouraging more and more daring choices (in improv parlance, "heightening") for the show. "I thought it was too far when Gavin Belson compared rich people to Jews being persecuted by Hitler, but it turned out that was a real thing," he said. "We need that perspective so we know there’s nothing we’re going to come up with that’s more ridiculous than reality."
Best gags or most fantastic gags?
There were several terrific gags in the season opener, including a jab at Stanford Robotics and those utterly terrifying lumbering robot videos.
The ever-maternal Jared reaches out to local tech companies to gather job offers for Richard, while Erlich marches into Raviga intent on destroying their Pied Piper CEO with his "premium old-man jokes." Instead, he’s quickly disarmed by the Costolo-like Stephen Toblosky, playing Jack Barker, a serial success-story with the Midas touch — with companies, yes, but also with people, which may be his true value.
"I’ve been a big fan of yours ever since you were at the helm of … Aviato," he says, pronouncing it with Erlich’s slightly lilting ersatz accent. And just like that, Erlich is defanged.
Back at Hooli, Gavin follows up his first horrifying, PTSD-inducing layoff scene with another, this time of anyone with the same kind of employment contract that set Pied Piper free last season. He blows the whole $20 million to offload Nelson Bighetti, a.k.a. "Big Head." What’ll he do with all that money? Will it be his ticket back into Pied Piper?
Richard’s new CTO gig turns out to be another fantastic visual gag: It’s nothing more than a virtual 3-D mustache, which will surely be invented for real by the end of this week. His lawyer — now jailed for falling off the wagon in a kombucha-induced bender — points out that he’d be a CTO at either company, but Richard is still adamant that he won’t return to Pied Piper as anything but CEO.
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New glossary term: Decacorn, a company that is valued at over ten billion dollars before its IPO. Like a unicorn but presumably with ten horns.
And yes, those are fresh opening credits, now featuring people climbing the Twitter logo and leaping off with golden parachutes and yellow Amazon Prime delivery drones. Nice touch, fellas.
Good re/cap? Or re/crap? Hit me on Twitter @madfoot with your views, thoughts and insights. The show airs Sunday nights at 10 pm on HBO, so check back here for more re/caps.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
