‘The Audacity’ tears Silicon Valley a new one: Review

If I want to know how billionaire tech bros are making the world worse, I can turn to the news. If I want to hear about how billionaire tech bros are making the world worse and at least laugh about it, I can watch The audacity.

Created by Jonathan Glatzer, writer and producer on Succession And You better call Saul, The audacity takes a satirical hammer to Silicon Valley. He tears apart the tech world with cutting one-liners and a parade of ultra-rich, ultra-insecure “billionaire kids” that often feel awfully familiar.

What is The audacity about?

Zach Galifianakis and Billy Magnussen in “L’Audace”.
Credit: Ed Araquel/AMC

Among these man children is Duncan Park (Billy Magnussen), the CEO of data mining at the technology company Hypergnosis. He’s a sleeveless vest filled with illusion and insecurity, a man convinced of his own genius, but still needing those around him to validate said genius.

His closest confidante is his exhausted therapist, Dr. JoAnne Felder (Sarah Goldberg), who certainly isn’t paid enough to hear about Duncan’s fraudulent activities. However, JoAnne’s track record isn’t impeccable either. Using information gleaned from her sessions with Duncan and the other tech titans she deals with, she has gathered enough confidential information to engage in some serious insider trading.

When Duncan discovers this and his own actions threaten to plummet, he blackmails JoAnne into helping him, leading to a self-destructive spiral for both of them.

Billy Magnussen and Sarah Goldberg kill it The audacity.

Sarah Goldberg and Billy Magnussen in “L’Audace”.
Credit: Ed Araquel/AMC

There are few joys in television greater than watching two great actors go head-to-head, and you’ll have plenty of them in The audacity thanks to Magnussen and Goldberg.

Very often a strong moment in the supporting roles, In the woods to HBO’s short-lived The franchiseMagnussen takes center stage with his usual full-throttle commitment to ridiculousness. His Duncan is someone you love to hate: smart, full of himself, and always willing to keep digging deeper into a hole if it means he’ll get what he wants. Magnussen channels each of Duncan’s flaws with glee, and the result is cringe comedy gold.

While Duncan believes he’s on top of the world, Goldberg’s JoAnne is all too aware that she’s at the bottom of Silicon Valley’s pyramid. This fuels Goldberg’s impeccable take on JoAnne’s apartment building breakdown, as does Duncan’s blackmail and his strained relationship with his teenage son Orson (Everett Blunck). We’ve seen Goldberg play a woman losing control before, like BarryIt’s Sally Reed. (Who could forget her elevator tirade from Season 3?) Here, she once again nails the same level of desperation, coupled with JoAnne’s more sedate therapist persona. Watching her go from therapist mode to panic mode is one of the The audacityThe dark and comic highlights of . Seeing the two start to merge is even better.

The chemistry between Magnussen and Goldberg is superb, with Duncan and JoAnne vying for power in increasingly ridiculous ways. A highlight of the start of the season? JoAnne prefers to drive her car off the road in order to avoid interacting with an oncoming Duncan. It fits into the frame with the the craziest smile on his face, acting like her best friend even though he directly uses her car’s data to track her. He believes he is living in a technological thriller, while JoAnne is fully immersed in a horror film. This imbalance is one of the main reasons why the JoAnne-Duncan dynamic works so well, but it’s also evidence of The audacityThe total illusion of the Tech Bros: they live so far above everyone else that they feel they can do anything.

The audacityToday’s Silicon Valley is downright sinister.

Simon Helberg in “L’Audace”.
Credit: Ed Araquel/AMC

The audacity builds a complete, frightening world around Duncan and JoAnne. Disillusioned tech pioneers like Carl Bardolph (Zach Galifianakis) look down on what Silicon Valley has become, while trying to find a way back. Parents like Duncan and his wife Lili (Lucy Punch) try to get their daughter Jamison (Ava Telek) into Stanford by any means necessary, hiring an elite coaching staff even though it makes her unhappy. Elsewhere, inventor Martin Pfister (Simon Helberg) works tirelessly to perfect an AI child, while neglecting his own daughter Tess (Thailey Roberge).

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For the show’s ensemble of teenagers made up of Orson, Jamison, and Tess, estrangement from their parents is the norm. In their eyes, Silicon Valley becomes a nightmare place to grow up.

To adults, the valley doesn’t seem so pretty either, despite the lavish mansions or luxurious mud baths just a short helicopter ride from Napa. Instead of a technological paradise, it is a surreal technological dystopia, in which a single algorithm can play God and aggregate every bit of a person’s data for exploitation. It would almost sound like science fiction if this type of data mining technology didn’t already exist, and it’s part of The audacityThe dark appeal of: making us laugh at a ridiculousness that is only a step away from reality.

“The world there does not exist THE world,” Orson says of Silicon Valley. He’s right. It’s a bubble bursting with big net worths and bigger egos. But, The audacity reminds us, this bubble has a major impact on the real world, and isn’t that a silly and scary thing?

The audacity was revised upon its premiere at SXSW. It premieres April 12 at 9 p.m. ET on AMC and AMC+.