‘Succession’: In the cutthroat HBO drama about a family of media billionaires, being rich is nothing like it used to be.‘Dickinson’: The Apple TV+ series is a literary superheroine’s origin story that’s dead serious about its subject yet unserious about itself.‘Inside’: Written and shot in a single room, Bo Burnham’s comedy special, streaming on Netflix, turns the spotlight on internet life mid-pandemic.Here are some of the highlights selected by The Times’s TV critics: Television this year offered ingenuity, humor, defiance and hope. (A pesca-pescatarian, he explains, is someone who only eats fish eaten by other fish.) Erlich will extend this charade for all its worth. On the phone, he begs Monica to let him keep Richard in the dark for another 24 hours, just so he can attend an exclusive Vanity Fair dinner, for which he’s already requested a pesca-pescatarian meal. He’s spent the last 10 days basking in the sun, pretending that he’s Jobs to Richard’s Wozniak and making himself available for press appearances and photo shoots.
There ostensibly to promote Pied Piper, he’s fishing for new business to bail him out of his Bachmanity debacle, with the sad proviso that prospective incubees can find him in the White Pages under “Erlich Blachman.” He looks like a pitchman heading into the last hour of an all-night infomercial.Īt this point, Richard doesn’t know that Erlich sold his stock to Laurie Bream the night before the platform’s triumphant launch, which adds an almost childlike poignancy to Erlich’s plight, as if he’s hiding a bad report card from his parents. As the ultimate pretend-sophisticate, Erlich loves to hold court, but reality has humbled him, made him desperate. He’s at once the high-chinned father of Silicon Valley’s hottest compression company and the numbskull who dumped his 10 percent stake in Pied Piper to cover debts from a separate venture. The shot appropriately bookends an episode that opens with Erlich joining Richard on a Bloomberg TV segment, where he pronounces the “c” in the words “Embarcadero” and “San Francisco” with the Spanish “th” sound.
He is an absurd man who longs to be taken seriously.
We’ve seen him inhale through many vessels, so the choice of bong is significant: This is Erlich at his most distinguished and professorial, looking one tweed jacket away from a tenured position at Sarah Lawrence. As the Pied Piper team celebrates 100,000 installs in 10 days and smiting its nemeses at Hooli, Erlich sits alone on the back porch, smoking weed out of a formal glass pipe. Perhaps the quintessential shot of Erlich Bachman pops up near the end of “Bachman’s Earning’s Over-Ride,” in the moments after the self-styled tech visionary has finally hit bottom. Season 3, Episode 8: ‘Bachman’s Earning’s Over-Ride’
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