‘Silicon Valley’ Star Thomas Middleditch Is The Most Underrated Actor On TV

HBO’s Silicon Valley is back for its third season, and it just might be the best comedy on television. One reason for that success has been its ensemble cast: T.J. Miller, Zach Woods, Martin Starr, Kumail Nanjiani, and Matt Ross are the highlights, but it’s a deep bench. I fully admit I was sleeping on Thomas Middleditch as programmer/protagonist Richard Henricks from the beginning, but the more Silicon Valley I see, the more I feel like he might be the most underrated actor on TV.

It’s the kind of show that’s basically designed to let actors shine from the margins, and when the series began, it felt like the kind of show where the side characters shined while the center remained somewhat squishy. That center was occupied by Richard. Richard was nervous, stammery, and prone to letting the bigger personalities steamroll him. It’s tough to make that kind of character pop in a way that, say, T.J. Miller’s Erlich Bachman constantly does. But one of the reasons that Silicon Valley quickly went from good to great to one of the best is because of Middleditch, who’s made Richard into an incredibly sympathetic, watchable character despite his by-design lack of dynamism.

It’s strange to say about a show’s lead character, but Richard is Silicon Valley‘s secret weapon. He’s the character who keeps the whole enterprise from spinning off into brogrammer one-upsmanship. Middleditch’s work at grounding Richard and making him into someone you genuinely want to see succeed is analogous to if Adrian Grenier had been at all compelling as Vinny Chase in Entourage. He’s the difference between a good show and a great one.

It also helps that the more I see of Middledicth, the more I end up loving him. He’s a major highlight in the horror comedy The Final Girls, which premiered last year and is well on its way to becoming one of the great cult movies of the last decade.

Middleditch is also a rabbit hole worth tumbling down on YouTube. At least follow it down as far as the Improvised Shakespeare sketches.

Here’s an early plea: the Emmy Awards have been in a rough place with the Best Actor in a Comedy category for some years now. They embraced Silicon Valley as a series with a nomination last year. How about this year we give the actors (one in particular) their due?