The 25 best episodes of 'Silicon Valley', ranked

What gets this episode onto the bottom of this list is the titular party. Erlich Bachman, an amoral libertine, decides to throw a massive Hawaiian-themed party at Alcatraz, a party that drives his country bankrupt. Watching Bachman’s braggadocio curdle into dread and panic is weirdly satisfying. Plus, who doesn’t like a big party-turned-sour story?

In the final season, Mike Judge and company were moving the pieces into place for the end of the story. Richard considers taking money from a Chilean billionaire with shady politics, one of many moral debates he faces. On top of that, Jared gets a great scene where he freaks out on Richard, a man he cared about deeply, for insulting his new focus, programmer Gwart.

Either you like Russ Hanneman appearances, or you find him grating. The Mark Cuban-inspired character is a polarizing one. We’re fans, so when he pops up in “Customer Service,” it’s a welcome appearance. There’s also some fun Gilfoyle and Dinesh stuff in this episode.

This is only the show's second episode, so the pieces were still getting put in place. In “The Cap Table,” Jared leaves Hooli to work with Richard on Pied Piper because he believes in him. Also, because Gavin treated him truly terribly at Hooli. Big Head gets better treatment from Belson, but only in a power play against Richard, the beginning of their seasons-long battle.

The final season begins with Richard being questioned by Congress. He’s come a long way from being one of several people working out of Erlich’s incubator. Unfortunately, Richard's promises in front of Congress are undermined by one of his business partners. To make matters worse, the data mining he was doing ends up being seen as the “killer app” of Pied Piper by the board.

Silicon Valley did several quasi-heist episodes, and this is one of them. Here, Pied Piper sneaks into Hooli-Con to try and get a bunch of new users since they need them for the sake of making their company work. This episode is also notable because it’s where Erlich decides to move to Tibet after yet another failure. Bachman would end up staying there and never return to the show, partly because actor T.J. Miller — for as good as he was in the role — turned out to be a rather problematic individual.

Richard finds himself in charge of a massive team and needs to be a leader, not merely a brilliant coder and programmer. He’s not up to the task at first, as all the vomiting indicates. Eventually, Richard is able to gain his recorder's respect, but he does it with a psychotic 48-hour coding session where he takes on four days of work.

Peter Gregory could have been a great character. As portrayed by Christopher Evan Welch, he played a brilliant but offbeat and emotionally distant billionaire investor. Sadly, Welch died after the first season, and the show had to pivot completely. “Articles of Incorporation” ended up the best example of the character that Gregory could have been.

So much stuff is going on in this episode. There’s a business race between multiple companies, and each company has multiple people acting out of their own personal best interests and not what’s best for the company. There’s Richard, Laurie, Belson, Jian-Yang, Yao, you name it. The chaos, backstabbing, and front stabbing make for an exciting episode.

Two of Richard’s nemeses, Gavin Belson and Jack Barker, are now working together to try and take Richard and Pied Piper down. Of course, as two egomaniacal billionaires used to being in charge, it doesn’t always go swimmingly. In the fourth-season premiere, Richard also finds himself at a crossroads and decided to go all-in on creating a decentralized internet.

Pied Piper is at a crossroads, and not for the first time. They have a bunch of downloads but few daily active users. Once this becomes known beyond Richard and Jared, it becomes a huge problem. When things seem like they are about to collapse, the users suddenly tick up. We find out that Jared has established a “click farm” in Bangladesh, the kind of specific you only get in a show like this.

The second season begins with a pivot. We noted that Welch died, and “Sand Hill Shuffle” features Peter Gregory’s funeral. It also features Richard figuring out what to do without Welch being involved as an investor. The show manages to wring humor and pathos out of the death of a character who only passed away because of unfortunate actual events. That is not always easy.

OK, so “RussFest” is insane. It’s not like any other episode of the show. Russ Hanneman basically creates his own Burning Man only with the internet and with Pied Piper providing the infrastructure. The episode is just madness, but before you call it all implausible, remember that Fyre Fest was real.

Big Head never ended up fitting in with the show great, especially once he no longer is involved in Pied Piper. They do some fun things with him, like in this episode. Here, Big Head becomes a guest lecturer at Stanford solely because of a resume bolstered by his being friends with Richard and Gavin Belson’s pettiness. Richard also finds out that Peter Gregory had been working on decentralized internet once, but that Belson owns the patent on it now.

This is the first Hanneman episode. He is, effectively, the titular “bad money.” Make no mistake, Hanneman is awful. He’s the absolute worst. However, thanks in big part to Chris Diamantopoulos’ performance, Russ is still quite funny, though even we are glad he didn’t pop up all the time. A little Russ goes a long way.

The race against the clock in “Hooli Smokes!” is genuinely intense. Richard and Jared find out how little Hooli is worth. This leads Richard to realize that he could buy Hooli and be done with Gavin for good. However, to do that, he needs to get all the other board members to agree to the buyout, and they have to do it while Gavin is performatively partaking in a triathlon because otherwise, he has the ability to put the kibosh on it. When a comedy can be a successful thriller for a few minutes, that’s truly impressive.

This is the pilot episode. We meet all the characters. We hang out in Bachman’s incubator. We find out that Richard’s Pied Piper app is inadvertently the best file compression algorithm in existence, which leads to interest from both Gavin Belson, who could make him rich but take the algorithm away from Richard, and Peter Gregory, who offers him a small investment for Richard to start his own company. It all begins here.

Once again, the Pied Piper crew has to work around the edges. They agree to work behind the back of Jack Barker, the new CEO of Pied Piper, on their original vision for the company instead of the data-storage box that Barker envisions. It seems like we are about to start a season-long arc of conspiracy and subterfuge. Then, the episode ends with Richard tripping and spilling all the incriminating documents. Silicon Valley pulled the rug out from under us in a great way.

This is the final episode of the fourth season. It follows up the events of “Hooli-Con,” when the Pied Piper app caused some phones to explode. Gavin leaves Erlich in Tibet (for good) and gets back in the game. There’s a bit of fortuitousness to how things end for Pied Piper in this episode, but it still works from a storytelling perspective.

“Exit Event” is, fittingly, the final episode of Silicon Valley. It begins with Pied Piper sabotaging their big release, which would have made them all billionaires because they realize the AI the network uses is too effective and thus dangerous. It’s illegal for them to do this, but they do it anyway. The episode then jumps to 10 years later for a documentary about what happened to the Pied Piper crew. It’s a fun, unexpected, and high-note ending to the story.

This episode follows the failed skunkworks plan to work on their plan behind Jack’s back. They work on the box, trying to make a mediocre product but instead create a product that exceeds all expectations. Even Pied Piper’s successes are failures. Then, the group is saved in a delightful turn of events by a gloating, shortsighted Belson.

Jared’s click farm ploy falls apart here in the third season's finale. This leads to chaos for all parties involved. Monica gets fired by Laurie and joins the Pied Piper team, but is it too late? No, it isn’t because Big Head and Erlich have used some buyout money to become the new owners of Pied Piper. Those two in charge together? That’s a winning combination.

Many consider this, the first-season finale, the best episode of Silicon Valley. That is mostly owning to maybe the highest-brow lowbrow joke — or the lowest-brow highbrow joke — of all time. The show does an extensive, elaborate riff of a sexual nature that is definitely raunchy but also genius. There’s more to the episode, though, which is why it’s only third on our list.

Silicon Valley had a clear strength in its ability to make tech-heavy storylines exciting and easy to follow. Take, for example, the fifth-season finale. There’s a ton of tech and computer stuff going on here. It could be overwhelming. Instead, it’s riveting and gripping with plenty of jokes thrown in.

The best episode? That would be the season-two finale. This episode has everything that showcases Silicon Valley at its best. Pied Piper against the wall. Richard is in a panic. Erlich is brash and obnoxious. A race against the clock. Oh, and success quickly followed by the rug being pulled out from under everybody. This time, Richard has to face arbitration over who owns Pied Piper, tries to keep Pied Piper from being deleted, and deals with his phone battery dying at a terrible time. In the end, Richard saves the company. Then, Russ sells his shares to Raviga, who thus has three of the five seats on the board. The season ends with Richard losing his CEO position. All that work for this slap in the face. That’s the essence of Silicon Valley.