When I watched the first season of HBO's Silicon Valley in 2014, I thought it was OK, but not amazing. Yet I kept thinking about the show and talking to friends about it. That's when I realized—Silicon Valley isn't a perfect satire, but that doesn't matter. It's the satire we need in our tech-obsessed world. Hunger is the best seasoning, and when it came to tech satire, I was a starving man.

The tech corporations that run the machines in our pockets and the skies have more money, power, and influence than ever before. Even when they're good, but especially when they're bad, we've got to take them down a notch sometimes—just to stay sane. And nothing does that like satire.

So where's The Daily Show for the tech world? Comedies about computers tend to be insipid, miss the target, or worse, culminating with The Internship. That vapid and formulaic 2013 film used the considerable talents of Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn to produce what amounted to a Hollywood press release for Google.

The need for decent satire kept me watching Silicon Valley. In its second season, the show hit its stride, despite the untimely death of Christopher Evan Welch, the actor who played venture capitalist Peter Gregory. I sat down to watch the first episode of season three, which premiered Sunday, with high hopes that Silicon Valley will again feel like the breath I need to take at the end of a workweek. Spoilers ahead!

Career Changes

At the end of season two, Richard Hendricks (played by Thomas Middleditch), the programmer-turned-entrepreneur protagonist of the show, has been fired from his position as CEO of Pied Piper, the video-compression company he founded. The venture capitalists he and Erlich Bachman (T.J. Miller) eagerly courted during the last season have taken charge and shown who the real bosses are.

"You have created a company that is too valuable for you to run,” replacement VC Laurie Bream (Suzanne Cryer) tells Richard. “You should feel good about that.”

That leads into an opening episode where not just Richard, but everyone at Pied Piper has to think about the future. It's not yet clear who will be working for whom. The resident geeks at the Bachman house each have their own reactions to the sudden uncertainty.

Business manager Jared Dunn (Zach Woods) becomes more like a freakish butler to Richard than ever before by helping Richard get dressed for his new job. "I know you'll send for me one day," he says with pleading eyes. Erlich still dreams of being boss himself, in between bong rips. In one hilarious scene, programmers Dinesh and Guilfoyle (Kumail Nanjiani and Martin Starr) cut through the bullshit engineer-style, designing a new acronym to discuss their love-hate relationship with Richard. After all, it's just more efficient that way.

As for Richard, he starts exploring his options beyond Pied Piper, including considering an offer from a mustache-oriented startup.

Meanwhile, Hooli CEO Gavin Belson—who will lie, steal, and of course, sue, to defeat Pied Piper—has big personnel changes planned at his company, too. His first speech of the season is as grandiose, disordered, and heartless as fans would expect. "Failure is growth," says Belson, his employees gathered before him. "Failure is learning. But sometimes, failure is just failure."

The challenge for the series is to keep us rooting for a group of lovable losers even while it takes aim at the ridiculous personalities of Valley life. From what I've seen in the first episode, I'm hopeful Silicon Valley will manage to walk that fine line for at least another season. Whether it's Belson telling us that "failure is growth," the hoodie-wearing startup kids who really believe their video-enhanced mustaches will change the world, or Erlich explaining to Richard why he should aim to become a "decacorn," the show delivers jokes that are funny because they're funny—and then extra-funny because there's a part of you that says "man, that stuff actually happens."

Tough love

The show creators don't come from the world they're mocking, and producer Mike Judge hasn't hesitated to call out Palo Alto and its culture as a kind of dry, humorless, sausage-fest.

But Silicon Valley works because, as harsh as it is, there's a nugget of genuine admiration—maybe even love—for the geeks who make the gears turn. The show portrays a world where many are rich, nobody is poor, and the problems are all staggeringly first-world. Yet the show's underdog ethic, already on display in season three, makes the barbed humor go down deliciously.

The wealthy capitalists and lawyers of the Valley are hypocrites and egomaniacs, willing to dispose of human relationships like bad entries on a spreadsheet. And this show savages them, along with the sycophants who surround them. But the worker bees? They're flawed, but endearingly so, and they're also funny as hell. Take Guilfoyle and Dinesh. They're alternately obsessed with self-preservation, one-upping each other in pointless competitions, and getting laid. But in the same strip of California that gives non-neurotypical bosses the freedom to create whatever bizarre dreams they can afford to, Guilfoyle has the freedom to be an unrepentant Satanist. And the nerds have carte blanche to solve problems, however they damn well please.

Season three finds Guilfoyle and Dinesh trying to save their own skins and clashing with Richard. But just as in the earlier seasons, it may be the three coders who will be, even with their failings, American originals. It's their genius, even when twisted toward trivial ends, that's the only worthwhile form of intelligence in the Valley ecosystem.

"What do we do here?" asks Guilfoyle rhetorically in season one. "All those YouPorn ones and zeros streaming to your shitty little smartphone, every dipshit who shits his pants if he can’t get Skrillex in under 12 seconds? It’s not magic. It's talent and sweat. That’s what we do."