The guys on Silicon Valley work with computers, so sometimes they think in binary. Things either are or they aren’t T.J. Miller is a being who totally exists in binary. Either he’s playing T.J. Miller in something, or he’s not in it. He never plays anything other than himself. He went from a 1 to a 0 when he left his hit show recently, and now he can’t stop talking about it.
“It felt like a breakup with HBO,” Miller said. “The final phone call was them going like, ‘Well, I don’t think this is the end of Erlich. I still want to see him on television,’ and I was like, ‘I know but I think this is for the best.’
That sounds characteristically like T.J. Miller. Like I said, he can only be 100% T.J. Miller, or he can be silent.
Even though his character, Bachman, was a fan favorite, people mostly seem to be taking the news of his departure well. Even his castmates seem to be cool with Miller leaving. That, of course, begs the question: Is it terrible to work with T.J. Miller? You know what you’re signing up for, but I can see it being a chore.
Miller was less friendly when it came to parting ways with his producers, Thomas Middleditch and Alec Berg.
He went to Harvard, and we all know those kids are f—ing idiots. That Crimson trash. Those comedy writers in Hollywood are f—ing Harvard graduates and that’s why they’re smug as a bug … I think that in television you usually have one element that is very challenging, very frustrating. It’s an obstacle, right? So you’re doing the best work that you can do. Alec was that for me, and I think I was that for Alec.
He finally brought it back around to the positive, concluding:
We have a contrarian relationship, like a big brother–little brother relationship. And this is also an opportunity for me to be like, “Let me just step off, dude. Like, just do your f—ing thing. You’re amazing.” I did a two-man improv show with him for a decade. He’s amazing.