The Audacity reboots Silicon Valley satire for a darker tech world

The son of Goldberg’s character, Dr. Joanne Felder, Orson is our eyes and ears into these privileged environs—but even he can be compromised, as we see when he discovers that a hidden storage area in mom’s basement allows him to snoop on the patients she and his stepdad, Gary, treat from their home. Duncan, meanwhile, is our entry and focal point, the CEO of data analytics firm Hypergnosis. As we learn from the session that opens “Best Of All Possible Worlds”—with Magnussen framed and speaking in such a way that you might mistake The Audacity for a mockumentary before the episode cuts to Goldberg—Duncan has just royally botched his chances at being acquired by the show’s Apple stand-in, the aptly named Cupertino. It’s a botching and ensuing personal spiral that suits Magnussen’s skillset: One of his generation’s most severe cases of Character Actor With Leading Man Physique Syndrome, the nerviness Magnussen so naturally projects as Duncan creates an amusing tension between the confidence and capability implied by the character’s outward appearance and status. He is, as we see this week, the type of guy who’d take ayahuasca just to tell a vision of his dad (who’s actually the colleague he occasionally sleeps with) “I’m rich.”

You can grasp Duncan’s place at the middle of the Silicon Valley food chain when you see him fail to turn on the megawatt charm necessary to woo a contract out of anyone higher ranked than the Deputy Under Secretary Of Veterans Affairs, Tom Ruffage (Rob Corddry). On the contrary, those contradictions lend themselves well to the sort of desperation and manipulation he demonstrates at the end of the premiere, when he trades a fraction of the dirt an employee’s mega-powerful algorithm dug up on Joanne for the mountains of the stuff she’s collected from clients like Duncan and the still somewhat mysterious but loudly insecure and entitled Carl Bardolph (Zach Galifianakis).

The Audacity is a little too eager to telegraph this aspect of its story: In this environment of extreme wealth, nothing is more valuable than secrets. It’s why Duncan and Joanne make an easy team, blackmail or no: He traffics in unwittingly surrendered personal information; she has a clientele that pays her to keep their secrets. (To a point: The script of “Best Of All Possible Worlds” puts a lot of stress on the limits of doctor-patient confidentiality.) Ruffage’s lowly state is the result of a costly hidden truth: He slept with the son of a general, an indiscretion that not only got him fired from a cushier position but sets up a string of humiliations in the premiere. There’s also the links between Orson little “a-ha” moment in the basement and the algorithm—developed by Duncan’s employee Harper—that blows the lid off Joanne’s operation. (And before that, it confirms that Duncan’s wife, Lili, played by Lucy Punch, did indeed sleep with a Dutch CFO at a Napa Valley mud bath.) These are two discoveries by lower-status characters that make much more powerful people much more vulnerable. 

I like how the wider implications of Harper’s algorithm get underplayed in the moment: As the entire life of the Dutch CFO flashes before our eyes, it’s mostly to underline Duncan’s pettiness and jealousy. But you can still feel that torrent of images lifting the lid off Pandora’s box—this is going to become a much bigger deal, affecting many more people, down the line. I think that goes hand-in-hand with the ambitious scope The Audacity shows off in its premiere. We’re introduced to a lot of characters with a lot of things going on, and it’ll be interesting to see how the remainder of season one balances all of their storylines. 

We’ve barely scratched the surface with Bardolph so far—he’s the character who feels the most caricatured by the end of the first hour. The broad outlines of his session with Joanne are a contributing factor: He’s a worst-case scenario Silicon Valley narcissist, bemoaning the lack of appreciation for his undefined, earth-shattering contributions one minute, then complaining about an invasive display of fandom the next. Another factor: Galifianakis is giving the most comedy-forward performance on the show, challenged only by Simon Helberg’s portrayal of brain-fried AI mad scientist Martin Phister. 

And that, to me, poses the biggest question for the remainder of The Audacity: How well will it manage its tone? The premiere isn’t a neither-fish-nor-fowl situation, but it does feel like it’s still figuring out how heightened it wants its Silicon Valley to be. The best gag in “Best Of All Possible Worlds” is a billboard for a local business whose tagline is “You agreed to this,” but jokes like that are used sparingly and mostly to highlight how out of place Orson and Ruffage feel. (See also: Head-spinning jargon like “delimited contours” and “quantbens.”) 

More frequently, the humor is dryer and darker, like Bardolph’s guiding principle—“profits will continue to grow forever” being rooted in the behavior of cancer cells, or Cupertino director of ethical innovation Anushka Bhattachera-Phister (Meaghan Rath) punctuating a meeting about factory-worker suicides by saying “human life is valuable, full stop. It’s a cornerstone for us.” That’s not to say that a more grounded character like Anushka can’t live under the same roof as Martin–on The Audacity, they do, as husband and wife. It’s just that calibrating the reality in which they do so will be tricky. The fact that Glatzer is a veteran of Succession, which faced similar questions early on, but eventually righted the ship, gives me some hope.

I think that’s where casting Magnussen comes in handy again. He sells Duncan’s terror, anger, and conniving within this predicament of his own making, but can be utterly, convincingly silly at the same time. I’m eager to see him put that to use opposite Goldberg, who was so good on Barry (speaking of shows with tricky tones) and can already be seen here showcasing her aptitude for playing someone who’s been backed into a corner and who wields self-righteousness like a deadly comic weapon.

Stray observations

• • Hello! I’m critic and recovering Twitter addict Erik Adams, and welcome to The A.V. Club’s coverage of The Audacity.
• • Another amusing character trait introduced in the premiere: Duncan’s tendency for malapropisms like “I don’t know the stock’s going to fall—I’m not Nosferatu.” 
• • Orson’s bassoon rehearsal bleeding through the floorboards is a good foreshadowing of his snooping later on.
• • Martin’s been toiling away on Xander, “an autonomous companion for alienated teens,” but as he tells visibly bothered, alienated teen Jamison while he scans her face, “it has been a real slog to represent a genuine look of bothersomeness.”
• • My reaction to hearing Lucy Punch deliver her first few lines in the premiere: “Let Lucy Punch be English!” My reaction to watching interviews with Meaghan Rath after the premiere: “Wait, Meaghan Rath isn’t English?”

Erik Adams is a contributor to The A.V. Club.