‘The Audacity’ Creator Breaks Down His Damaged Characters
Billy Magnussen and Sarah Goldberg in season one of ‘The Audacity’
Ed Araquel/AMC
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[This story contains some spoilers for the first two episodes of The Audacity on AMC and AMC+.]
The Audacity is not going to be the thing that breaks the grip big tech has on our lives. That’s not a judgment — it’s the belief of the show’s creator.
“It has been a revolution, and I also eagerly and willingly say they won,” Jonathan Glatzer told The Hollywood Reporter. “I can’t battle against that with satire. It’s just not going to work.”
What Glatzer does hope the Silicon Valley-set AMC series, which premiered April 12, can do is “hold up a mirror and just say, do we want this? Is this what we want? Because we are working at a human time scale versus the computers, we’re slower, right? It takes a while for the scales to fall from our eyes, but you’re starting to see much more of a pushback against tech.”
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The Audacity stars Billy Magnussen as Duncan Park, the CEO of a data-mining company who’s desperate to join the billionaire class; Sarah Goldberg as JoAnne Felder, a therapist who has Duncan and other tech CEOs as clients; Meaghan Rath as Bhattachera-Phister, an executive at a Google- or Apple-esque giant with personal ties to Duncan; and Zach Galifianakis as Carl Bardolph, a Silicon Valley legend and one of JoAnne’s clients. Rob Corddry, Simon Helberg, Lucy Punch, Paul Adelstein and Jess Harper also star.
Glatzer — whose previous TV work includes Succession, Better Call Saul and Bloodline — talked with THR about his research for the show (and why he eventually cut it off), why Goldberg’s character is so central to the story and what he hopes viewers see in the characters. AMC has already ordered a second season of the show; season one will run eight episodes. The interview below is edited and condensed.
Watching this show made me think of Mike Judge’s Silicon Valley. That was very funny and poked a lot of holes in in the culture of the valley, and it wasn’t that long ago, but it almost seems quaint now. What about this moment in that world did you really want to explore with The Audacity?
I had the same experience. I rewatched it just before I started writing this — I wanted to make sure I wasn’t stepping on any ground that had been covered so well by them. There were a few things where I was like, “Dammit. I was doing that and now I can’t.” But overall, it was actually heartening to see that it’s time to go back there and look at it through the lens of how we went from a time of hope and “We’re going to change the world” — there was a jauntiness to the whole enterprise, and it went from jaunty to jaundiced.
Everybody in tech, I believe, had the genuine desire to improve and to expand communication, to bring down walls keeping people from information and facts and knowledge, and to increase tolerance, and all of these things. Obviously a certain amount of that was lip service. But I believe that it was genuine. And then they realized that what they created, whether by design or intentionally, was something that didn’t help communication. It kind of separated us. There was a bifurcation. Tolerance to new ideas and to other people was significantly lessened, there was a tribalism that started to develop, and everything that they set out to do was kind of going in the opposite direction. But the thing was, they were making so much fucking money doing it. And I’m sure in their heads they were like, “Well, maybe this is what people want. And who are we to say how they should communicate with each other, or how they should love or hate each other?”
I think that’s really where we’re at now — tech has become so powerful. The ability to profile individuals and users is beyond anything that we can imagine. It’s quite terrifying when you get down into the details of how much we are being monitored — how we interact with each other, how we linger over one image versus another, how we shop, how we eat, how we masturbate, and all of it is being monitored. All of it is being logged. I do think that that once you kind of look under the hood and see what is really driving the profit centers of Silicon Valley — there’s the hardware, to some extent, but mostly it’s us. Mostly it’s pe