W hat if Mike Judge’s cult hit sitcom Silicon Valley were remade as a dramedy and we had in the meantime come to appreciate tech and its titans as existential threats to humanity, I hear you ask. Well, wonder no more – the answer is here, and it is The Audacity. It comes at you in hour-long episodes, which rush past at breakneck speed and leave you panting and deeply unsettled in their wake. Rather like modern life itself, of course, except for the relief available while the credits roll, before the next chunk of horrors arrives.
The Audacity has a sprawling cast (especially in the opening episodes, which really are frenetic) but the figure around which most of the narratives move is Duncan Park (Billy Magnussen). He is the part-bullish, part-neurotic and wholly unbearable CEO of Hypergnosis, a data brokerage company he founded with a friend, who has since been struck by tragedy.
Duncan, who has not absorbed the key point of the Silicon Valley maxim and spends his time moving fast and breaking his own stuff, is in trouble. Hypergnosis was in acquisition talks with Cupertino (named after the location of Apple’s real-world headquarters and just possibly meant to evoke the behemoth) until Duncan leaked the news to boost his share price before the company valuation. That brought the deal to a screeching halt. He is now on the hunt for a play that will enable him to avoid the humiliation and (relative) poverty that will occur once word of the cancelled acquisition gets out.
Duncan’s wife, Lili ( Lucy Punch ), and daughters are weary of and maddened by him, and his therapist JoAnne (Sarah Goldberg) even more so. She is almost as gloriously hateful a character as Duncan, and that is before he gets the goods on her with an eye to blackmail. This feels like the right time to note that The Audacity’s creator, Jonathan Glatzer, was one of the writers on the first two seasons of Succession, the show that made “gloriously hateful characters” an art form.
JoAnne is married to Gary (Paul Adelstein), a slightly more ethical member of the same profession, though in the Valley this still means a lot of time spent administering ADHD tests to students in the hope that a diagnosis will buy them extra time on tests, and other such small corruptions. She shares custody of her son, Orson (Everett Blunck), with her equally unlovely ex-husband, and although she uses Orson’s birthday as her computer password, it’s not the right date.
Like most of the younger characters – including the Parks’ older daughter, Jamison (Ava Marie Telek), whose weight and academic results are ceaselessly monitored by her mother – Orson is a sweet child. Heartbreakingly resigned to his fate as an afterthought in his parents’ lives, he forms a growing friendship with Jamison’s little sister, embryonic kleptomaniac Tess (Thailey Roberge). The younger characters’ quiet endurance of, and resistance to, the chaos, greed and narcissism that surrounds them gives emotional heft to the show’s satirical thrust. Is gen z a reservoir of hope, or is youth just a brief period in everyone’s lives before the venality of the world – especially in its tech-aggravated modern iteration – gets to work? The bleakness of the latter gives us pause.
Add to the mix a potent turn from Zach Galifianakis as Carl Bardolph, another self-obsessed tech titan (worshipped for inventing “Bardolph’s Law”, a principle of infinite growth and profit “based on the logic of a cancer cell” that he once scribbled on a napkin while high); a genius coder called Harper (Jess McLeod), whose new algorithm may save Park or destroy the last vestiges of society; Rob Corddry as a rep for the Veterans’ Association, begging for a morsel of aid from billionaires; and about 700 supporting characters, twists, treacheries, good deals, bad deals and ayahuasca trips, with no clear way to distinguish what is satire and what is reportage – and you have The Audacity.
Once you’ve calmed down – and in later episodes, as the show gains confidence, it does too – it will fill both the Succession and Silicon Valley (sitcom)-shaped holes in your life. Unlike Hypergnosis, that’s an acquisition worth making.
