With every click and step tracked, everyone’s inboxes overflowing with spam, surveillance capitalism turning ordinary behaviour into profit and artificial intelligence rapidly reshaping society, whether we like it or not, living in the 21st century means feeling like no one and nothing can escape technology’s ever-expanding reach.
The Audacity understands. More than that, this sledgehammer-swinging and scalpel-sharp Silicon Valley-set tech-bro satire seizes that relentlessness and can’t-get-away sensation for itself. Tech’s greatest developments, wanted or not, are almost impossible to avoid; watching this SBS newcomer is just as compulsive.
Urgency, obsession, tenaciousness, influence: The Audacity’s off-screen mastermind Jonathan Glatzer knows these traits well, thanks to spending the last decade writing and producing on Succession and Better Call Saul, and also working on Bloodline and Bad Sisters. Now, for the first series that he has ever created, the Emmy, Peabody, PGA and WGA-winner slices into the inner workings of the ultra-rich Palo Alto enclave that’s reshaping human experience. As The Audacity depicts, when this patch of California sneezes, the world doesn’t just catch a cold — it changes forever.
Exploring the minutiae of Silicon Valley, as well as the tech industry’s impact, isn’t new in television, of course — whether a series skews comedic as Silicon Valley did, embraces 80s- and 90s-set period drama like Halt and Catch Fire, or is firmly a thriller as Devs is. The Audacity’s approach? Adopting bleak, dark comedy to cope with the dystopian implications. Glatzer also knows that nothing else would accurately match the times that we’re living in. Right now, any show about the outsized sway that tech and tech-bro billionaires hold over our present-day lives (plus the global havoc they’re causing and the potential existential threats inherent in the sector’s current love of AI) needs to both sink its teeth in cuttingly and serve up astutely cathartic laughs.
When The Audacity begins, Hypergnosis founder and CEO Duncan Park (Billy Magnussen) is no stranger to being the butt of the joke, not that he’d ever admit it, let alone be capable of handling anything but unfettered idolisation and worship. Sporting an ego as inflated as his beloved puffy vests, he’s navigating the collapse of a lucrative buyout, attempting to stump up new investment in his data-mining company and committing further to eradicating consumer privacy in the name of big bucks.
With his sense of entitlement also immense and his manic demeanour unceasing, Duncan has plenty to dig into, then, at his demandingly frequent sessions with his therapist Dr Joanne Felder (Sarah Goldberg). Unsurprisingly, his shaky relationship with his socialite wife Lili (Lucy Punch) and his weakening bond with their teen daughter Jamison (Ava Marie Telek) rarely make it as opening topics.
Also a regular on Dr Felder’s couch: spam pioneer Carl Bardolph (Zach Galifianakis), another entrepreneur and self-proclaimed genius who wants to be loved by all and sundry yet refuses, furiously so, to even consider reciprocating that affection or offering any respect. Felder is essentially The Audacity’s Dr Melfi, psychoanalysing uber-wealthy manchildren rather than a mob boss.
Examining the minds of tech’s elites might pay. Still, the costs are many; personally, in her marriage to fellow therapist Gary (Paul Adelstein) and as a mother to awkward high-schooler Orson (Everett Blunck). Ethically, too, as insider information flows in her direction, providing an illicit way to try to keep up, or at least better fit in, with her rich clientele.
The many ripple effects that figures like Duncan and their ecosystems cause, including on societal norms and the next generations, are crucial to the series. As it touches upon everything from aggressively targeted marketing and bio-hacking pseudoscience to all-seeing AI companions and "collegemaxxing", The Audacity so potently acts as a mirror to the modern world. About Palo Alto, Orson might be told that “the world there is not the world”, but everything in the series is a clear and perceptive reflection of reality with clever bite.
The Audacity further dissects the many moral concerns surrounding tech through Anushka Bhattachera-Phister (Meaghan Rath), a chief ethicist routinely disregarded by her colleagues, plus via her husband Martin (Simon Helberg), whose devotion to creating an empathetic chatbot for teenagers takes precedence over paying any genuine attention to his light-fingered daughter Tess (Thailey Roberge). Then there’s Veterans Affairs deputy undersecretary Tom Ruffage (Rob Corddry) and his offsider Jeffrey Carter (Andrew Bushell), who just want to trade government cash for tech’s assistance with digitising their records and helping returned military personnel. Alas, there’s no such thing as simply "doing good" to the likes of Duncan and Carl.
A Succession alum aiming his witty savaging of the one per cent towards tech bros. An exceptional cast, including Magnussen expanding beyond his scene-stealing work in a similar role in Made for Love, Barry’s Goldberg again demonstrating that she unpacks desperation with the best of them and Galifianakis swapping absurdism for menace with aplomb. Ripped-from-IRL detail and texture at every turn, to a so-recognisable-it’s-hilarious degree. Unflinching awareness that we’re inhabiting the type of technology-dictated hellscape that sci-fi has warned us about for decades. Each makes The Audacity a highly entertaining must-see, and a series keenly attuned to the present moment.
The eat-the-rich genre has long appreciated that laying bare reality, exposing and skewering its nightmares, and mining it for drama is only part of the task, however, and Glatzer knows that here, too. We can see the inspiration for The Audacity everywhere. We’re living it. Making sure that we’re at least laughing at the world’s current situation is The Audacity’s welcome gift.
Aptly, a second season is already on the way, greenlit before the first even premieres and coming to SBS at a later date — and undoubtedly set to plunge deeper into cannily lampooning tech’s stronghold on our existence.
The Audacity premieres Wednesday 15 April at SBS and SBS On Demand. Episodes air weekly on SBS starting Wednesday 15 April at 9.30pm.
