Is ‘Silicon Valley’ season 3 new tonight? One surprise about the season
Before going a little more in-depth on this past season of “Silicon Valley,” let’s start this article with an important reminder that, alas, there is no new episode of the show airing tonight on HBO. The series is done for the season, and you will have to wait for presumably many months to see more of it. We’d like to assume that it will be back in April 2017, but let’s hold off on making any big proclamation until HBO says for sure, okay? The one thing we will say is that we know that this show could produce more than ten episodes. It’s mostly just an issue of telling a compact story, and then allowing everyone to have some time to breathe.
What we want to discuss further is something that we actually discussed during our reviews for the season: That the skunkworks storyline, effective and funny as it was, ended as quickly as it did. The trajectory for the season was set up in such a way that we were going to see it for a while, but then it ended after just one episode. As it turns out, the writers originally planned for this to last longer than it did, as well. Alec Berg, one of the show’s executive producers, confirmed as much to Variety:
“…We spent all this time setting up Barker and having the guys toil under a hostile CEO. Early in the season, they conceive this skunkworks, this company inside the company, and as we started writing that, our intention was that that was going to be the bulk of the season. And it just wasn’t giving us the comedy that we wanted. It was just a lot of very farcical stuff — someone knocks on the door and everyone has to hide their plans. So we called an audible in the middle of the season. That skunkworks episode, they did all the planning and then at the end of the episode, it all blows up in their face. That honestly was just the most interesting way we thought of to get out of skunkworks.”
Certainly we trust Berg and the writers’ judgment on this, but everything looking back at this season certainly makes a whole lot more sense when thinking about it through this lens, especially the convenient way in which the story ended with Richard tripping and the documents falling out.