The Audacity, a pitch-black Silicon Valley satire from Succession writer Jonathan Glatzer, exposes tech-CEO greed and billionaire egos at the intriguing, measured pace of Better Call Saul. The show, which launches on HBO Max on Thursday, is packed with glorious one-liners.
A dystopia shaped by tech pioneers
The series traces much of our modern dystopia to a small number of men in Silicon Valley, whose products and platforms have reshaped the world more seismically than any political party. Their power-brokering has turned a collection of towns and villages south of San Francisco into a modern-day Camelot.
The show is interested in the perverse psychology of pioneers. The hero, Duncan Park (Billy Magnussen), is founder of data analytics company Hypergnosis. On the verge of being bought out by Cupertino, an Apple-coded corporate giant, greedy Duncan leaks the news to jack up the price. When the deal falls through, he becomes desperate to regain his reputation as a power player, morally bankrupt enough to break any law to do it. His plan involves blackmailing his therapist, and his hobbies include using a privacy-hacking algorithm, created for him by an exploited employee, to spy on his wife's boyfriend – a result of the open marriage Duncan himself suggested.
Everyone in the valley is shady
In this valley, everyone is shady. Therapist JoAnne Felder spends her days massaging the fraught egos of her billionaire clientele, yet has her own game going. Rival startup CEOs all vie for top spot on the podium of douchiness. The inane trappings of untethered wealth are satirised, from orthorexic diets to ayahuasca ceremonies, performative spending and pool parties.
There are stranger, more melancholy strands too. An eccentric inventor develops a digital 'friend' for alienated teenagers. A teenage misfit starts to live in wall cavities, his surveillance of others an eerie mirror of the adult world that has forsaken him. A reclusive CEO called Carl Bardolph, played by Zach Galifianakis, retired into generational wealth but misses the spotlight. Bardolph has a 'law' named after him, an ethos of infinite profit he once wrote on a napkin while on speed. “It was based on the logic of the cancer cell,” he explains to Dr Felder.
One-liners and a slow burn
The Audacity excels at one-liners. When Duncan's daughter expresses qualms about her “admissions consultant”, who games the system and guarantees her spot at a top-tier university, Duncan reassures her with a Trump-y aphorism: “Cheaters never lose. And losers – they never cheat.” When the Veterans Association comes to Silicon Valley looking for partnership, an executive dismisses them with relish, saying Cupertino helping the charity would be “like France helping your mother to set up a printer. Only we have much, much more money than France”.
Wit is a drug The Audacity mainlines, but the show is interested in longevity. Creator Jonathan Glatzer has written on Succession and Better Call Saul. Like the latter, this is a show content to work its hand slowly, building intrigue within a complex plot. The review notes it cannot yet say whether it lands all the pieces, but enjoys the wild-eyed performance from Magnussen, whose fair curls are piled atop his head, making him resemble a young Jerry Stiller or a fried doughnut.
