The Audacity Review: AMC's Silicon Valley-Set Dark Comedy Bites Off More Than It Can Chew

While the sinister and dystopian happenings within the tech industry have become a ubiquitous part of the daily news cycle, film and TV writers were mining it for storytelling purposes long before Elon Musk did a stint in the White House. The Social Network was released in 2010, while HBO's Silicon Valley aired its first episode in 2014. The tech industry may be a bubble, but, as Jonathan Glatzer's new AMC series The Audacity aims to make clear, the decisions being made within it are permanently affecting the way we live our lives. It isn't lost on me that each time I start a new paragraph in the Google Doc I'm using to write this review, an auto-generated prompt imploring me to let the system's AI "help me write" pops up. (I will not!) A tech-focused show is extraordinarily of the moment; it makes complete sense that it's being released when it is. But "now" isn't enough to make a complete eight-episode story, which is where the very funny, very well-acted Audacity unfortunately flounders.

Set in Palo Alto, The Audacity revolves largely around Duncan Park (Billy Magnussen), the desperate, striving, and insecure CEO of a company called Hypergnosis, which is working on a piece of data-mining technology that Duncan knows is revolutionary. Even so, the company is flagging after Duncan's own excitability caused an acquisition to fall through, his marriage is deteriorating, and absolutely everyone he encounters hates him, including other people in his field, like Zach Galifianakis' volatile tech elder Carl Bardolph, whose hair-trigger temper Duncan activates like no one else. (Their first meeting ends in Carl stabbing Duncan's hand with a fork, just to shut him up.) No one wants to listen to Duncan's self-aggrandizing, motor-mouthed speeches, including his therapist JoAnne (Sarah Goldberg), but she has no choice in the matter; he's paying her to listen. JoAnne has personal problems of her own, not least of all that Duncan's surveillance technology led him right to the insider trading she's been engaging in, using the revelations made to her in sessions with her tech bro clients. The unscrupulous Duncan uses that information to blackmail JoAnne, and the two eventually convince themselves that their illegal acts are mutually beneficial, falling into a sort of folie à deux.

6.9

The Audacity

at AMC

Like

• Billy Magnussen and Sarah Goldberg are so good at this
• The comedy works really well

Dislike

• There's just too much going on for it to feel cohesive

Duncan and JoAnne together form The Audacity's most intriguing relationship and story. The problem is that individual stories aren't all created equal. The show seems to occasionally forget about Rob Corddry's out-of-his-depth Veterans Affairs representative trying to worm his way into Big Tech with the goal of helping former troops, while Simon Helberg's Martin spends much of the series entirely disconnected from the other characters as he throws himself into creating a highly advanced AI chatbot. You get the sense that Glatzer was almost too overwhelmed with angles to choose from, which is how an ambitious show like this one comes to be. Glatzer previously wrote and produced on Succession, but The Audacity lacks Succession's sharp teeth, and its focus is too scattered for the story it actually seems to want to tell, about how the ruthless pursuit of money and power affects the next generation.

The Audacity attempts to play out that idea through its trio of teen characters, which works less often than it doesn't. I found myself looking away from the screen in disinterest each time the show sent JoAnne's manosphere-curious son Orson (Everett Blunck) off on a solo adventure or devoted any amount of time to Duncan's daughter Jamison's (Ava Telek) college application process, or when it periodically remembered that it was trying to establish Martin's daughter Tess (Thailey Roberge) as a rebellious kleptomaniac. The kids can't quite support their own stories, nor does the show seem capable of diving deep into the psychic damage that growing up within the Silicon Valley bubble can do to a developing brain. The teens are only as interesting as their parents; Goldberg is excellent as a loving but far-flung mother, and Martin ignoring Tess as he tirelessly fine-tunes his AI creation is consistently successful as a beat of dark comedy. When they're sent off on their own, as kids with parents who don't have it in them to pay attention frequently are, the young actors don't even seem to know what they're doing there.

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The Audacity knows its subjects are blustering blowhards ("I don't come from great wealth either," says Lucy Punch's Lili, "but I practiced radical acceptance, and now being rich is second nature") and has a blast prodding at them. It's often incredibly funny, full of odd one-liners ("Every time NPR plays someone's music, they're dead"), and quick gags (Orson's middle name, it's revealed, is Barack). Its biggest issue is that it's just too busy. The show is overrun with plotlines and clearly has so much it wants to say about so many different corners of the tech industry, but it treads water for about six of its eight episodes before the individual stories really start to converge.

The show's greatest strengths are its pair of leads, Magnussen and Goldberg. They're both marvelous here, leaning fully into their individual talents for teetering on the perpetual edge of a nervous breakdown. (Few actors have done that better than Goldberg on Barry, one of the best performances to never win an Emmy in recent history.) Magnussen's indefatigable performance is so much that it can often be exhausting just to watch such a delusional man try to exist in the world, even one he's painstakingly constructed for himself. An early episode finds Duncan absolutely bowled over when he learns that his claims of his own neurodivergence are actually completely unfounded. ("Typical? That sounds like a slur.") Goldberg's JoAnne is just as desperate, but she's actually making real attempts at holding it together for the sake of her son and her reputation, making it extra shocking when she genuinely breaks. (An early episode finds her peeling recklessly out of a school drop-off line just to escape Duncan.) When The Audacity narrows its focus to the mutually assured destruction happening between those two characters, it becomes really good television.

While it takes a while to get to its point, the first season wraps up relatively promisingly, and the series has already been renewed for a second season. It's easy to see how The Audacity could grow into a truly astute show as it continues, but as a viewer, you can't help wishing it made itself worth investing in during its early stages.

Premieres: Sunday, April 12 on AMC+ with two episodes, followed by a new episode streaming each Sunday, and new episodes airing on AMC Sundays at 9/8c
Who's in it: Billy Magnussen, Sarah Goldberg, Zach Galifianakis, Simon Helberg, Lucy Punch, Rob Corddry, Meaghan Rath
Who's behind it: Jonathan Glatzer (creator)
For fans of: Laughing at our current moment while also being very sad about it
How many episodes we watched: 8 of 8