A cutting dark comedy about the über-wealthy, The Audacity seems like a natural extension of creator Jonathan Glatzer’s work on Succession. But while that pedigree has been widely promoted, it’s not a comparison that does AMC’s series any favors, as it struggles to skewer its targets with the same level of depth or accuracy as the HBO series.
The Audacity revolves around Duncan Park (Billy Magnussen), an unscrupulous tech CEO who looks and acts like most of the other unscrupulous tech CEOs who’ve graced the screen in recent years. He dresses in a business-casual style, works in an office that’s more like an adult creche, and talks a mile a minute, alternating between brutal insults and ingratiating niceness. He tries hard to present himself as an intellectual and rarely succeeds.
The best depictions of the tech billionaire crowd—including those in Succession and Jesse Armstrong’s Mountainhead— capture both the complexity and the depressing simplicity of these self-pronounced geniuses. They’re human beings just like us but also aliens whose words are a mix of technobabble, business jargon, and edgelord philosophies. They lay claim to the grandest of ambitions while their actions reveal motives that are meager and mundane. They’re laughable but also existential threats. And satirizing them effectively is a hard mark to hit.
Magnussen’s wild eyes convey a self-confidence that’s almost a form of mania, but Duncan is ultimately one-dimensional—a generic caricature of a modern tech bro. When asked, in the opening episode, whether he’s more worried about his company’s stock price or his dick, he exasperatedly replies, “They’re the same!” He’s text without subtext, a vaguely unpleasant guy who doesn’t represent any greater truth about human nature or modern culture.
It’s the same case with the other thought leaders and social media moguls in Duncan’s orbit. As with Magnussen, some of the performances are very good. Zach Galifianakis gives an uncharacteristically inward, extremely angry turn as a revered Silicon Valley elder named Carl Bardolph, while Simon Helberg is oddly endearing as Martin Phister, a soft-spoken, A.I.-obsessed nerd who seems to find computers much easier to relate to than people.
But we’ve seen these characters before, and The Audacity seems to have little idea of what makes them tick. They aren’t complex enough to be even fleetingly sympathetic or odious enough to root against, so watching them squabble simply isn’t all that entertaining.
It doesn’t help that The Audacity often seems to be trying to bend our sympathies in peculiar directions. There are moments when Duncan is positioned as a truly tragic figure, though there’s nothing to warrant this. And the series presents Martin’s A.I. pet project, a therapeutic chatbot designed to help struggling teens and traumatized veterans, in an uncritically positive light that feels gallingly out of touch with the current moment. The idea that human needs can be better met by algorithmic gizmos blindly regurgitating information from the internet is exactly the sort of empty techno-optimism that a series like The Audacity is ostensibly built to deconstruct.
The show’s eight episodes are also drowning in plotlines. There are schemes involving buyouts, takeovers, looming divorces, school board politics, and omniscient data-gathering algorithms, with the main characters all playing musical chairs as their interests align and conflict. The Audacity plays out more like soap opera or a full-blown farce than a grounded satire, with most of its developments driven by chance, coincidence, and misunderstanding.
Further plotlines concern the teenage children of Martin, Duncan, and JoAnne, all of whom attend the same high school. These eventually evolve into a thematically relevant look at the way these youngsters are failed by their parents and the tech ecosystems that their parents are getting rich off, but it takes up a lot of the show’s oxygen by the time we get there. JoAnne’s son, Orson (Everett Blunck), in particular seems to spend episode after episode wandering around in wide-eyed uncertainty, as if he’s unsure exactly what he’s supposed to be doing in this story.
In the end, watching The Audacity feels a bit like attending a TED Talk by one of Silicon Valley’s more charismatic executives. There are some laughs to be had and lots of half-formed notions thrown out, but it rambles on for much too long, and you walk away feeling unsure of what you were supposed to take away from any of it.
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