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

If I want to hear about how billionaire tech bros are making the world worse, I can turn on 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, a writer and producer on Succession and Better Call Saul, The Audacity takes a satirical sledgehammer to Silicon Valley. It tears into the tech world with cutting one-liners and a parade of ultra-wealthy, ultra-insecure “billionaire man children” who often feel frighteningly familiar.

What is The Audacity about?

Among those man children is Duncan Park (Billy Magnussen), the data mining CEO of tech company Hypergnosis. He’s a sleeveless vest stuffed with delusion and insecurity, a man who’s convinced of his own genius, yet still needs those around him to validate said genius.

His closest confidante is his strung-out therapist Dr. JoAnne Felder (Sarah Goldberg), who’s certainly not getting paid enough to hear about Duncan’s fraudulent activity. However, JoAnne’s record isn’t spotless either. Thanks to information from her sessions with Duncan and the other tech titans she treats, she’s picked up enough confidential information to get into some serious insider trading.

When Duncan discovers this, and when his own stock threatens to plummet, he blackmails JoAnne to help him out, resulting in a sharp, self-destructive spiral for both.

Billy Magnussen and Sarah Goldberg kill it in The Audacity.

Sarah Goldberg and Billy Magnussen in “The Audacity.”
Credit: Ed Araquel / AMC

There are few joys in television greater than watching two great actors have it out, and you’ll get plenty of that in The Audacity thanks to Magnussen and Goldberg.

So often a highlight in supporting roles, from Into the Woods to HBO’s short-lived The Franchise, Magnussen takes center stage with his usual full-throttle commitment to ridiculousness. His Duncan is someone you love to hate: smarmy, full of himself, and always ready 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 of the fact that she’s at the bottom of the Silicon Valley pyramid. That fuels Goldberg’s impeccable take on JoAnne’s building breakdown, as does Duncan’s blackmail and her strained relationship with teen son Orson (Everett Blunck). We’ve seen Goldberg play a woman losing control before, as Barry‘s Sally Reed. (Who could forget her Season 3 elevator tirade?) Here, she once again nails that same level of desperation, coupled with JoAnne’s more composed therapist persona. Watching her go from therapist mode to panicked mode is one of The Audacity‘s darkly comic highlights. Watching the two begin to merge is even better.

Magnussen and Goldberg’s chemistry is superb, with Duncan and JoAnne wrestling for power in increasingly ridiculous ways. An early season highlight? JoAnne preferring to drive her car off a road in order to avoid interacting with an oncoming Duncan. He pulls into frame with the goofiest smile on his face, acting like her bestie even though he’s straight-up using her car data to track her. He believes he’s living in a tech thriller, while JoAnne’s fully in a horror movie. That imbalance is a core part of why JoAnne-Duncan dynamic works so well, but it’s also proof of The Audacity‘s tech bros’ total delusion: They live so far above everyone else that they feel they can do anything.

The Audacity‘s Silicon Valley is downright sinister.

Simon Helberg in “The Audacity.”
Credit: Ed Araquel / AMC

The Audacity builds out a full, frightening world around Duncan and JoAnne. Disillusioned tech pioneers like Carl Bardolph (Zach Galifianakis) look down their noses at what Silicon Valley has become, all while trying to find a way back in. Parents like Duncan and his wife Lili (Lucy Punch) try to ensure their daughter Jamison (Ava Telek) gets into Stanford by any means necessary, hiring an elite team of coaches even though it makes her miserable. Elsewhere, inventor Martin Pfister (Simon Helberg) works tirelessly on perfecting an AI child, all while neglecting his own daughter Tess (Thailey Roberge).

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

Through the adults’ eyes, the Valley doesn’t seem so pretty either, despite the lavish mansions or luxury mud baths just a helicopter ride away in Napa. Instead of a tech heaven, it’s a surreal tech dystopia, one where a single algorithm can play God and package every bit of a person’s data for exploitation. It would almost feel like science fiction if this kind of data mining technology didn’t already exist, and that’s part of The Audacity‘s bleak appeal: making us laugh at ridiculousness that’s just one step removed from reality.

“The world there is not 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, that bubble has a major impact on the real world, and isn’t that a silly, frightening thing?

The Audacity was reviewed out of its premiere at SXSW. It premieres April 12 at 9 p.m. ET on AMC and AMC+.