Jonathan Glatzer’s Silicon Valley comedy-drama has a strong cast and a handful of sharp, nasty laughs, most of them Zach Galifianakis’s, but it keeps its people at arm’s length and its targets have been hit before. Decent, cold and slow to start.
Jonathan Glatzer’s eight-part series looks at Silicon Valley from the chairs opposite it: the therapists, spouses and children who live with the men who want to change the world. Billy Magnussen plays Duncan Park, who has the confidence of someone who has never been told no, and Sarah Goldberg plays Dr. JoAnne Felder, who is paid to tell him things he does not want to hear. The tagline is “Move fast and break people.” That is the joke, and the series makes it well in flashes and at length in between.
The cast is the reason to stay. Magnussen has the gift of being handsome and faintly alarming at once, and he plays Duncan with a smile that arrives a beat before the thought behind it. Goldberg listens, which is harder than it sounds; JoAnne hears everything Duncan says and lets about a third of it show on her face. Their scenes together are the best thing here, two people each certain they are the one running the conversation.
Then there is Zach Galifianakis as Carl Bardolph, and we laughed, out loud and more than once, at a man who has given up on seeming well. Galifianakis has always been better sad than silly, and Carl is both: he says appalling things in a flat, tired voice, as if reading them off a prescription, and everyone else in the scene has to decide whether he is joking. He is the only person here we would follow into a show of his own.
The rest of the ensemble is good and underused. Lucy Punch gives Lili Park-Hoffsteader the bright, brittle manner of a woman who has rehearsed being fine. Simon Helberg and Meaghan Rath, as Martin Phister and Anushka Bhattachera-Phister, play a marriage conducted mainly through scheduling. Paul Adelstein’s Gary Felder is mild until he is not. Rob Corddry turns up as Tom Ruffage to be loud. The children, played by Everett Blunck, Ava Telek and Thailey Roberge, are written as witnesses rather than people, which is a choice, and a cold one.
Richard Rutkowski and Paula Huidobro share the cinematography and keep it clean: wide, level frames, a lot of glass, daylight through tinted windows landing on nothing warm. It suits the subject and it wears thin over eight episodes, because everything looks expensive and nothing looks lived in. Saunder Jurriaans and Danny Bensi score it with a low, nervous hum that rarely resolves; it suits the people and it kept us faintly on edge. Four directors, Lucy Forbes, Daniel Sackheim, Daniel Gray Longino and Alexander Buono, and four editors, Ron Rosen, Janet Weinberg, Steve Rasch and Jordan Kim, share it, and the seams show in the pace. The first two episodes take their time over who is married to whom and who owes whom; the later ones hurry.
The trouble is the one most critics have named. The series looks at its people the way JoAnne looks at Duncan, from the far chair, taking notes. We admired a good deal and were moved by almost none of it. Somewhere in the fourth episode we noticed we did not much mind who got what they wanted, and a show about wanting cannot afford that. The satire is aimed where a lot of satire has been aimed lately: men who say disruption and mean people, and the wellness business. Glatzer and his writers, Semi Chellas, Irving Ruan, Charlotte Ahlin, Marie Hanhnhon Nguyen and Arthur Phillips among them, are sharper than most on how the people around the money talk, and no sharper than anyone on what the money does.
Silicon Valley found the comedy in the work and Succession found the misery in the family; this wants both and lands outside both. The reviews so far split on whether it is cold by accident or on purpose; we say on purpose, and were not much consoled. Watch it for Goldberg and Magnussen circling each other and for Galifianakis, and over a fortnight rather than a weekend, because these people in a row are a lot. It carries a 15, and is decent weeknight company for anyone who does not need to like anyone on screen.
