Erlich’s absence lets Richard’s emerging dark side become more of a central focus for the series. For years, Silicon Valley seemed almost afraid of having Richard succeed, throwing narrative roadblocks in his way to stop him from becoming an all-powerful CEO and to perhaps maintain dramatic tension. The blundering Erlich helped the series in that regard, but now Richard gets to be his own worst enemy. If Season 5’s first episode is any indication, Silicon Valley will be more exciting--and painfully realistic--this way.

Every season of Silicon Valley isn’t just a new season of television. It’s more like a very smartly designed software upgrade. What does feel somewhat different is the show’s attempt to more directly confront issues of inclusion.

The series is still capable of extracting gut-busting comedy out of its characters' desperate striving for their piece of the pie.

A lot of what’s happening in Season 5 feels like old hat.

The side characters remain terrific--my favorite joke in the premiere may be Laurie’s utter bafflement at Monica complimenting her for the birth of her fourth child only hours earlier--and the show still has a gift for constructing comic set pieces like the black site-style office Richard tried to show the guys in the premiere’s opening. But the series was already reaching the point of diminishing returns last year, and appears to have arrived there now.

Maybe not the most dramatic season, but possibly the funniest one. Loving every minute of it.

As a big fan of the first four seasons of Silicon Valley, I'm going to be scratching my head over what the heck happened in season 5. Season 5 of Silicon Valley is like season 4 of Community, or season 8 of The Office, and so on. But with those two shows, at least the abrupt drop in quality makes sense when you take into account behind-the-scenes stuff, like how Dan Harmon was fired from Community and when Steve Carrell left The Office, but I'm not sure what happened here, unless TJ Miller really brought as much to Silicon Valley as Carrell or Harmon brought to The Office and Community, which I highly doubt. Personally, I theorize that this season's abrupt dip in quality has something to do with the basic set up of the characters up until this point. Before, Richard and his posse are always at the bottom, with bigger companies all over the place kicking the crap out of them, while everything is just constantly going wrong for them at every corner, and everything they encounter threatens to end their company before they can even begin to fully realize their potential, and much of the humor is derived from how all of the characters react to their unfortunate circumstances, and the creative processes they all go through to combat each new obstacle they need to overcome. But now, they're successful. They've got a team of programmers and engineers, big investors, and nothing is as threatening to them as it was before, which means this has turned into more of a basic workplace comedy, and the humor of this show just doesn't gel with workplace antics. At least, that's what I think went wrong here for now. There could be other behind the scenes stuff I don't yet know about that explains why the writing seems to have dropped off so dramatically, but there's just no way of telling, yet.

Episode 1 was so bad it looked like an episode of Big Bang Theory. Or is this to be taken as an ironic metaphor of Facebook: Mediocrity and then rot takes over at the end?

As a huge fan of silicon valley in the past, like many others, I've been disappointed as well, thankfully I set expectations pretty low because it's pretty obvious they're just milking the franchise for everything they can and hte majority of material is something that's been re-hashed from previous seasons. The NEW stuff they've put in is REALLY on the "not" funny side of being stupid, as opposed to it being stupid, but in a funny way, there's a distinct difference. I'm not going to blame the decline on no erlich though, the show is just bad all the way around, rating this 2 is probably a reach to be honest, not sure why/how people are giving this over an 5, no way.

What the hell happened?!!!! This show was so on track to be my favorite and now its just pure ****