'The Audacity'

Ed Araquel/AMC

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Since Veep ended its run in 2019, it’s been a frequently repeated observation that the HBO political comedy could not work today. Our actual political landscape, in which government officials are adding journalists to top-secret group chats or running around in wrong-sized shoes as a form of flattery, has too far superseded anything even the most cutting jokester could ever have dreamed up.

By the same token, one of the biggest bugs plaguing AMC’s The Audacity may be the timing. Created by Succession and Better Call Saul alum Jonathan Glatzer, the series tries to deliver pitch-black satire of Silicon Valley venality at a point when we’re confronted with its most extravagantly noxious manifestations every time we log on to find horrifying headlines about “AI psychosis,” or the latest racist missives from X’s most dedicated power user. If the series’ cynicism feels right on the money, it doesn’t feel like it’s showing us anything we aren’t all too aware of already.

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The Audacity

The Bottom Line

Too real to be fun, not deep enough to be interesting.

Airdate: 9 a.m. Sunday, April 12 (AMC/AMC+)

Cast: Billy Magnussen, Sarah Goldberg, Zach Galifianakis, Meaghan Rath, Rob Corddry, Simon Helberg, Lucy Punch, Everett Blunck, Paul Adelstein, Thailey Roberge, Ava Marie Telek

Creator: Jonathan Glatzer

The Audacity‘s plot is one acrid enough to make your lips pucker. The Bay Area-set series is anchored by Duncan (Billy Magnussen), a startup CEO on the verge of professional humiliation, and his therapist, JoAnne (Sarah Goldberg), who copes with her relative poverty — by which I mean that she and her husband, Gary (Paul Adelstein), make enough money to rent an $8 million home but not to purchase one — by using info gleaned from her tech-industry clients to engage in a bit of insider trading. When Duncan catches wind of her scheme, he’s less offended than excited, seizing the opportunity to blackmail her into passing along tips and connections that might boost his career.

From there, The Audacity spirals into a dizzying web of alliances, betrayals and reversals of fortune. Some involve the expected wheeling and dealing, like Duncan trying to woo a notoriously prickly industry legend (Zach Galifianakis’ Bardolph) as an investor, or trying to fend off an unsexy government contract from an idealistic Iraq War vet (Rob Corddry’s Tom). Others get more personal, as when Anushka (Meaghan Rath), the ineffectual chief ethicist at a Google-like giant, and her oddball inventor husband, Martin (Simon Helberg), butt heads over her skepticism of his work. A confusing and ultimately unsatisfying amount also revolve around the goings-on at Las Altas, the private high school attended by all the characters’ offspring.

Through all these threads, The Audacity throws itself headlong at some of tech’s biggest hot-button topics, including privacy, AI and, in an oddly halfhearted subplot involving JoAnne’s son, Everett Bliunck’s Orson, the manosphere, with an eye as cold as its characters. It paints a picture of a world in which everyone’s a genius and yet no one seems to possess even a shred of self-awareness; in which everyone wants to control the world but has no vision more interesting for it than trying to monetize every last shred of it. In the rare case that anyone even thinks of trying to help people, things only ever seem to end in one of two ways: soul-crushing humiliation, or a check large enough to make selling out feel worth it.

If this picture of the tech industry is an unflattering one, it’s hard to argue it feels untrue. A line like, “Raising money on frothy numbers to sugarcoat the rotten apple is what built this town. It’s not fraud,” sounds less like a punchline than a quote from some juicy exposé of a tech scammer (which will undoubtedly someday be adapted into a prestige limited series). Maybe The Audacity is even trying, in its own way, to effect real-world change. It’s hard to hear these guys gloat about how “regulations are a deliberate joke” or boast about data-mining algorithms “that would make the Patriot Act blush” and not hear the echo of a John Oliver-esque call to action.

But reflecting reality isn’t the same thing as putting a fresh or sharp or even funny spin on it, and it’s a problem for The Audacity that so many of its jokes barely scan as jokes at all i

'The Audacity' Review: Billy Magnussen in AMC's Tech Industry Satire