Within the wake of reveals like “Succession,” “Business,” and “Billions,” it is smart for the massive cable networks to proceed mining information for novel methods to discover the absurdity and nihilism of immediately’s tech-fueled apocalypse. It’s an surroundings author Jonathan Glatzer is definitely aware of, having reduce his enamel on “Succession” and “Higher Name Saul,” in addition to a number of different high-profile status collection. With AMC’s “The Audacity,” he will get 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 comedian look on the vagaries of Silicon Valley. If solely the present had his pedigree’s degree of dedication or storytelling depth.
Set in Palo Alto and the glad-hanging, obscenely rich cohort contained inside, “The Audacity” facilities largely on Duncan Park (Billy Magnussen), the broccoli-haired tech-bro CEO of an organization known as Hypergnosis, within the early phases of a whole psychological breakdown. His firm is flagging, a possible acquisition simply fell via, and his spouse (Lucy Punch) and daughter (Ava Telek) clearly don’t respect him. However that doesn’t matter; together with his raveled hair, wide-eyed stare, and Magnussen’s patented mile-a-minute line deliveries, he’s a person obsessive about greatness, whilst he plumbs new depths of humiliation. He’s satisfied he’s neurodivergent, and that neurodivergence is a superpower; when an analyst later tells him his exams learn neurotypical, his thoughts merely received’t take up that. “Typical?” he balks. “That seems like a slur.”
The one reprieve he will get from his troubled thoughts is his therapist, JoAnne (“Barry”‘s Sarah Goldberg). She’s her personal sort of frazzled mess, battling her personal interpersonal (and monetary) troubles as she psychoanalyzes a bevy of Large Tech purchasers with their very own weird, self-mythologizing hangups (together with Zach Galifianakis, who presents one in every of his extra menacing, mercurial performances as a tech CEO vulnerable to anger points). It’s a dynamic not too dissimilar to Tony Soprano and Dr. Melfi in “The Sopranos”—a therapist and her unstable, unscrupulous consumer constructing a relationship whose boundaries are, let’s consider, suspect. And that’s definitely true by the tip of episode one, when the pair make a pact of mutually assured destruction involving a mix of predictive algorithms and securities fraud.
That’s simply one of many many plot threads “The Audacity” juggles in its eight-hour first season, which offers with almost a dozen main characters and their competing, or often collaborating, schemes to get wealthy off the again of the American taxpayer and their juiciest, most non-public information. On high of Galifianakis’ Carl Bardolph, whose flights of fury flip right into a feud with Duncan, we get Simon Helberg‘s soft-spoken Martin Phister, who fusses over an AI chatbot greater than he does his personal youngster; Rob Corddry as a put-upon Veterans Affairs undersecretary compelled to go hat-in-hand to Large Tech to assist the troops again dwelling (“We used to run the world. Now we hire server area from the assholes who broke it”); Meagan Rath’s naive, ethics-focused Hypergnosis exec (and Martin’s spouse) Anushka.
That is to say nothing of how Duncan, JoAnne, and Martin/Anushka’s antics have an effect on their kids, whether or not it’s Jamison’s obsessive school application-maxxing, or Joanne’s son Orson (“The Plague” standout Everett Blunck) falling prey to steroids and manosphere content material, or Martin’s kleptomaniac daughter Tess (Thailey Roberge). We see the myriad methods all of those blinkered narcissists fail their kids in a technique or one other, with the all-seeing eye of Large Information feeding into everybody’s basest instincts. The issue is, we don’t see a lot of those characters, younger or outdated, past their quirks and idiosyncrasies. “The Audacity” paints them as cartoonish, hypocritical buffoons, diamonds cast within the stress of Silicon Valley’s cruel pursuit of data and revenue.
That’s clearly Glatzer’s goal right here, and in that respect, “The Audacity” succeeds as a broad swipe throughout the bow of Large Tech. Right here, even well-intentioned concepts get warped into new inroads to the non-public psychology and spending information of thousands and thousands of innocents, all below the auspices of billion-dollar buyouts, mergers, acquisitions, hirings, firings, and reassignings, which type the spine of lots of the present’s plot threads. Sadly, the characters on the heart don’t get a lot of their psychology past the baseline existentialism that comes from a life spent pursuing cash, ego, or fame. It’s a narrative we’ve heard instructed earlier than, and higher, and “The Audacity” hardly offers these concepts the improve they want.
“Cheaters by no means lose, and losers, properly, losers by no means cheat,” Park blusters to a personality early within the season, and it speaks to “The Audacity”‘s easy thesis in a nutshell. Granted, it’s delivered with bluster by Magnussen, who retains the entire thing from collapsing in on itself via sheer power of his unnerving, enervating efficiency. His Duncan is a shallow, callow man, however a minimum of that feels purposeful, a being constructed completely of brittle ego and dumb luck who possibilities his manner into Large Tech superstardom and feels it starting to crumble round him. By the point the season ends, a whole lot of load-bearing columns in his self-regard will collapse; right here’s hoping that, within the second season that AMC has already greenlit, Glatzer and co. will work out the remaining bugs in “The Audacity.” Possibly then, it’ll be a killer app price investing in.
Entire season screened for evaluation. Premieres April 12 on AMC and AMC+.
