In the wake of shows like “Succession,” “Industry,” and “Billions,” it makes sense for the big cable networks to continue mining data for novel ways to explore the absurdity and nihilism of today’s tech-fueled apocalypse. It’s an environment writer Jonathan Glatzer is certainly familiar with, having cut his teeth on “Succession” and “Better Call Saul,” as well as a few other high-profile prestige series. With AMC’s “The Audacity,” he gets his first time at bat as creator and showrunner, turning his jaundiced eye from the Murdochs of the world to the Zuckerbergs in a twisty, darkly comic glance at the vagaries of Silicon Valley. If only the show had his pedigree’s level of commitment or storytelling depth.
Set in Palo Alto and the glad-hanging, obscenely wealthy cohort contained within, “The Audacity” centers largely on Duncan Park (Billy Magnussen), the broccoli-haired tech-bro CEO of a company called Hypergnosis, in the early stages of a complete mental breakdown. His company is flagging, a potential acquisition just fell through, and his wife (Lucy Punch) and daughter (Ava Telek) clearly don’t respect him. But that doesn’t matter; with his disheveled hair, wide-eyed stare, and Magnussen’s patented mile-a-minute line deliveries, he’s a man obsessed with greatness, even as he plumbs new depths of humiliation. He’s convinced he’s neurodivergent, and that neurodivergence is a superpower; when an analyst later tells him his tests read neurotypical, his mind simply won’t absorb that. “Typical?” he balks. “That sounds like a slur.”
The only reprieve he gets from his troubled mind is his therapist, JoAnne (“Barry”‘s Sarah Goldberg). She’s her own kind of frazzled mess, battling her own interpersonal (and financial) troubles as she psychoanalyzes a bevy of Big Tech clients with their own bizarre, self-mythologizing hangups (including Zach Galifianakis, who offers one of his more menacing, mercurial performances as a tech CEO prone to anger issues). It’s a dynamic not too dissimilar to Tony Soprano and Dr. Melfi in “The Sopranos”—a therapist and her volatile, unscrupulous client building a relationship whose boundaries are, shall we say, suspect. And that’s certainly true by the end of episode one, when the pair make a pact of mutually assured destruction involving a blend of predictive algorithms and securities fraud.
That’s just one of the many plot threads “The Audacity” juggles in its eight-hour first season, which deals with nearly a dozen major characters and their competing, or occasionally collaborating, schemes to get rich off the back of the American taxpayer and their juiciest, most private data. On top of Galifianakis’ Carl Bardolph, whose flights of fury turn into a feud with Duncan, we get Simon Helberg‘s soft-spoken Martin Phister, who fusses over an AI chatbot more than he does his own child; Rob Corddry as a put-upon Veterans Affairs undersecretary forced to go hat-in-hand to Big Tech to help the troops back home (“We used to run the world. Now we rent server space from the assholes who broke it”); Meagan Rath’s naive, ethics-focused Hypergnosis exec (and Martin’s wife) Anushka.
This is to say nothing of how Duncan, JoAnne, and Martin/Anushka’s antics affect their children, whether it’s Jamison’s obsessive college application-maxxing, or Joanne’s son Orson (“The Plague” standout Everett Blunck) falling prey to steroids and manosphere content, or Martin’s kleptomaniac daughter Tess (Thailey Roberge). We see the myriad ways all of these blinkered narcissists fail their children in one way or another, with the all-seeing eye of Big Data feeding into everyone’s basest instincts. The problem is, we don’t see much of these characters, young or old, beyond their quirks and idiosyncrasies. “The Audacity” paints them as cartoonish, hypocritical buffoons, diamonds forged in the pressure of Silicon Valley’s merciless pursuit of knowledge and profit.
That’s clearly Glatzer’s aim here, and in that respect, “The Audacity” succeeds as a broad swipe across the bow of Big Tech. Here, even well-intentioned ideas get warped into new inroads to the personal psychology and spending data of millions of innocents, all under the auspices of billion-dollar buyouts, mergers, acquisitions, hirings, firings, and reassignings, which form the backbone of many of the show’s plot threads. Unfortunately, the characters at the center don’t get much of their psychology beyond the baseline existentialism that comes from a life spent pursuing money, ego, or fame. It’s a story we’ve heard told before, and better, and “The Audacity” hardly gives these ideas the upgrade they need.
“Cheaters never lose, and losers, well, losers never cheat,” Park blusters to a character early in the season, and it speaks to “The Audacity”‘s simple thesis in a nutshell. Granted, it’s delivered with bluster by Magnussen, who keeps the whole thing from collapsing in on itself through sheer force of his unnerving, enervating performance. His Duncan is a shallow, callow man, but at least that feels purposeful, a being constructed entirely of brittle ego and dumb luck who chances his way into Big Tech superstardom and feels it beginning to crumble around him. By the time the season ends, a lot of load-bearing columns in his self-regard will collapse; here’s hoping that, in the second season that AMC has already greenlit, Glatzer and co. will work out the remaining bugs in “The Audacity.” Maybe then, it’ll be a killer app worth investing in.
Whole season screened for review. Premieres April 12 on AMC and AMC+.
