Say it ain’t so! For Silicon Valley fans, Thursday brings a sordid round of Good News/Bad News. The good: the HBO comedy will return next year for a fifth season. The bad? That return will be executed without the irreplaceable comedic stylings of T.J. Miller, who for four seasons has been delivering a heaping dose of bong-ripping insanity as the narcissistic Erlich Bachman. Miller is leaving the series after this season, following a “mutual agreement” between the actor and the comedy’s producers. (The actor has been consistently busy outside of Silicon Valley as well, most visibly with films like Office Christmas Party and The Emoji Movie.) Sure, the show will go on—but Miller’s absence will almost certainly affect its comic alchemy.
Erlich Bachman has a punchline for every iota of self-awareness he lacks—and, by the way, that’s a lot. He’s a total blowhard who, in his own words, has his head so far up his ass that he can see the future. He’s got insults for days—especially for Zach Woods’s Jared, whom he once compared to “a sad bag of potting soil.” As an actor, Miller has always put the insanity in his character’s Bachmanity—from the pretentious way he pronounces the name of his old start-up, Aviato, to his deadpan delivery of the show’s most absurd lines. (The best example might be that time he riffed for four straight minutes on Stephen Tobolowsky’s “Action” Jack Barker, hitting him with a slew of insults without missing a beat.) In an ensemble, every actor has a part to play, but Miller’s might be the toughest to replicate.
Silicon Valley finds its earnest yet bumbling striver in Richard, its charming naïveté in Bighead, its moral compass in Jared, its apathetic thirst for chaos in Gilfoyle, and its tender insecurity in Dinesh. As Miller strikes out for a solo career—a move that’s already attracted some comparisons he would probably rather avoid—it’s worth considering the gap he will leave behind, and how the series might fill it.
Countless comedies have lost key players over the years, and some have emerged just as strong, if not better, for it. Consider Cheers, which lost Shelley Long but managed a successful soft reboot by introducing Kirstie Alley. Currently, the entire cast of characters lives in Bachman’s house/start-up incubator. When he moves, Bachman will either have to leave the guys the house or, perhaps more interestingly, scatter them to the wind as the show embarks on a new path. The latter would probably make more sense—both narratively and practically for the writers, who could probably use a way to shake things up so that Miller’s exit feels less like a hole and more like a purposeful transition.
Speaking of practical considerations: in truth, Miller is one of the ensemble cast members who, as Rachel Green once put it, lifts right out of the action. He is not an engine for the greater narrative of Silicon Valley; he doesn’t necessarily need to be replaced for the show to continue. But if the series does seem to lack impertinent, irreverent humor in his stead, there are plenty of smaller characters who could rise to the occasion. Most obviously, Russ Hanneman comes to mind. He did, after all, give the show one of its most quotable jokes when he looked Jared right in the eye and said, “This guy fucks.”
