Since HBO’s “Silicon Valley” ended in 2019, TV has been without a timely tech industry satire, even as tech became an ever-more-dominant force in everyone’s lives and an even richer target for ridicule. AMC’s new series “The Audacity” aims to take up the satirical mantel of skewering the industry’s fecklessness and hubris, but its focus on 2010s-style Silicon Valley broligarchs feels dated upon arrival in the era of AI.
But even though it doesn’t hit target metrics as a tech industry satire, it’s still fairly effective as a more general “rich people are messed up” character-driven dramedy.
“The Audacity” is the first series created by Jonathan Glatzer, an Emmy-winning writer who previously worked on “Succession” and “Better Call Saul.” “Succession” is an obvious influence on “The Audacity,” which goes heavy on witty insults and mockery of corporate-ese (“Our position has always been ‘human life is valuable, full stop’”). The show primarily follows Duncan Park (Billy Magnussen), the unstable CEO of Silicon Valley data-mining company Hypergnosis, and his wealth-envious therapist JoAnne Felder (Sarah Goldberg). Duncan is trying to juice his company — and its stock price — by any means necessary, and JoAnne is insider trading on confidential information her rich clients tell her during their sessions. When Duncan finds out what JoAnne is doing, he tries to leverage her into sharing what she knows. Their ongoing dance, a sort of will-they/won’t-they with white collar crime, is the show’s most entertaining and fleshed-out plot thread — though it moves more slowly than it should, because the show has too many other characters to service.
In addition to Duncan and JoAnne, characters with arcs include Anushka Bhattachera-Phister (Meaghan Rath), Hypergnosis board member and idealistic Chief Ethicist at Apple-esque tech company Cupertino; Martin Phister (Simon Helberg, playing a very different type of nerd than the one he played on “The Big Bang Theory”), Anushka’s mopey husband who is developing an AI chatbot; Carl Bardolph (Zach Galifianakis), a cantankerous billionaire who’s one of JoAnne’s clients and becomes Duncan’s frenemy; Lili Park-Hoffsteader (Lucy Punch), Duncan’s status-obsessed wife who’s on the board of their daughter’s elite private school; Tom Ruffage (Rob Corddry), a harried and bemused Department of Veterans Affairs deputy trying to hire a company to help him modernize the VA’s systems; and four other characters this paragraph is getting too long to name.
The show is overstuffed with drama, and would have been better served by a more judicious character development schedule — maybe some of these plotlines could have been saved for the second season already in the works, and stress-tested for coherence a bit better (some late-season choices made regarding Galifianakis and Corddy’s characters are baffling). None of the other stories are as compelling as Duncan and JoAnne’s, and you may find yourself itching to get back to them whenever they’re not onscreen.
That being said, the other characters and plotlines are plenty enjoyable, thanks to punchy dialogue and strong performances. Glatzer has smart insights into the minds of the hyper-wealthy — Galifianakis’ character says that at some point, every person as rich as him has to decide whether they want “humanitarian legacy or planetary reach? Do we want to save the world or control it? Heal or conquer? Both have their charms, but I will tell you this: most of us go Dr. Evil” — and the talented cast elevates the well-written but inconsistent material. Rath is a standout as a well-meaning but complacent idealist caught between her genuine desire to help people and the cold power of the almighty dollar, and it’s great to see Galifianakis do his comically volatile thing again.
Leads Magnussen and Goldberg, meanwhile, are truly terrific. Magnussen shows off tremendous range as Duncan moves from brash to pathetic to competent to sociopathic. And when it comes to making viewers empathize with deeply unsympathetic characters, “Barry” veteran Goldberg is one of the finest actors working today.
But for all its positive qualities, “The Audacity” has a serious problem with its satire. That’s partially beyond its control, due to how quickly the tech world has changed since it was ordered to series in 2024, and partially a failure to recognize and anticipate that its satirical targets would feel stale by the time the show came out. All of the energy in the tech sector has shifted into AI. The ways that AI will/already are disrupting everything — and how companies will survive and profit from it — is the only thing the tech industry is talking about. That conversation is happening in San Francisco, not down the Peninsula in Silicon Valley, and the people having it are much younger and scrappier than the tech titans of “The Audacity.” It’s not that AI isn’t part of “The Audacity” — Martin’s chatbot is like a self-aware ChatGPT with a mouth that talks — but the show is out of touch with how important AI has become. It would be like “The Studio” trying to satirize contemporary Hollywood while talking about Netflix as if it were still a DVD rental company.
Part of what made “Silicon Valley” so successful was its verisimilitude. Former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo was a consultant. The product the Pied Piper guys were making was realistic for their resources and technical ability. “The Audacity” doesn’t have that same handle on the material. Duncan’s CTO Harper (Jess McLeod) singlehandedly develops a surveillance algorithm that’s so powerful, it would put Palantir out of business if it were real. Martin’s chatbot is unrealistic in its degree of sophistication and the design of its user interface. Duncan drives an electric Hummer, an unpopular vehicle, and not a Cybertruck, the preferred mode of transport for tech douches. (Maybe that’s an intentional choice showing that Duncan is out-of-step with what a modern tech CEO is supposed to be, or maybe it isn’t.)
Taken individually, these seem like nitpicking gripes, but all together they build to a sense that the writers don’t understand the world they’re satirizing. They didn’t have a Dick Costolo. They were focused on character to the detriment of other things. The show they ultimately made is funny and well-acted and observant about the ways people inflict pain on each other, but doesn’t meet the moment in which it exists.
“The Audacity” premieres Sunday, April 12 on AMC and AMC+. The premiere also airs at 9.m. ET/PT on Samsung TV Network.