The Audacity pours on the metaphors
"The secret to success: find something people do for free and charge them for it."
Zach Galifianakis in The Audacity (Photo: Ed Araquel/AMC)
The Audacity is still getting a feel for itself, but one thing’s for sure in its second episode: This show loves a metaphor. Locked doors, storage rooms, characters snooping around and fishing for answers: If there’s a service that Duncan Park, Carl Bardolph, and their Silicon Valley peers have turned into software, chances are The Audacity can find a way to symbolically represent it onscreen.
It goes beyond the stuff that’s integral to the developing saga of surveillance and privacy violation at the center of the show: In “Shine Brightly,” a motif of the physical world reclaiming things from its digital counterpart emerges. Father and daughter go out for burgers and shakes rather than summoning them via delivery app. (And if dad happens to run into a potential new business partner while they’re there, that’s just gravy.) The next, just-deserts turn in the VA plotline involves Duncan learning that some of the data the agency is paying him to handle is still kept on paper. Gary’s record collection plays a pivotal role in the beginning and ending of the episode—though he has much more respect for the original cast recording of Pippin than his digital-native stepson, who tries to saw through a painted-shut egress window with the LP.
It’s possible to read something into bassoon-playing classical snob Orson choosing to ruin an artifact of extremely ’70s, rock-influenced Broadway. But I feel like this theater-geek nod and the climactic needle drop its sets up are more about thematic fit. Pippin is also a satirical allegory whose characters seek control and purpose and whose privileged protagonist chases contentment by guilelessly flitting from one pursuit to the next. None of which is to say that Jonathan Glatzer & co. are going for a one-to-one thing here. There’s violence in the musical, but at no point does Pippin go on a wild goose chase for the person he lured into an unwilling partnership who he’s now convinced is trying to kill him. It’s just that there are some intriguing parallels between the two works that could help situate us in the world and among the characters that The Audacity is building.
Giving us something familiar to latch onto can help, too, and boy oh boy does “Shine Brightly” ever deliver on that front vis à vis JoAnne and Sarah Goldberg. After the premiere chronicled what we can reasonably assume is the latest in a series of Duncan Park panic attacks, my anticipation for the unraveling of his therapist was sky high. And I didn’t have to wait long: One unnerving conversation with Duncan and a broken window later, JoAnne is in tatters. Goldberg is in fine, back-half-of-Barry form here, couching armchair sleuthing, criticism of Orson’s eating habits, and landlord grievances in the same, sniffy tone during the scene with the police and melting down into a frantic, paranoid mess as JoAnne tears her office apart on the hunt for hidden microphones.
When JoAnne tries to persuade hapless, ponytailed Pat at the bank to wipe out her legally dicey stock purchases, Goldberg hits her dissembling peak. She has this way of projecting confidence while simultaneously showing the gears in her character’s head spinning—a little facial twinge here, a hand on the back of the neck there—that just cracks me up. All the cuts back to to flummoxed Pat and the writing of the scene pitch in, too. I’m all in favor of The Audacity making a running gag out of testing what, exactly, is covered by doctor-patient confidentiality.
Of course, with the emotional fireworks already going off in episode two, I have to wonder how The Audacity escalates from here. (I suppose it also gives Goldberg the opportunity to work in more varied gears as the season goes on.) “Shine Brightly” counteracts this rush to manic heights by taking a more leisurely approach to paying off the climax of “Best Of All Possible Worlds.” And it makes some weak choices in doing so: The A-plot this week is rooted in the sort of misunderstandings and dramatic irony that would immediately clear up if the characters involved would just talk directly to one another. Granted, JoAnne has a solid reason for not taking Dunacn’s phone calls, and from what little we know about Orson so far, he doesn’t seem to be the type who’d cop to throwing his mom’s client’s stolen tungsten cube through a window. It’s funny for Duncan to tail JoAnne to the library where she dumped her ill-gotten gains only to conclude—thanks to the raw data provided by Harper’s algorithm (dubbed “The Eye Of Gnodin” after some quick spitballing) and good old-fashioned snooping—that she was shopping at the gun store across the street. But the rest of “Shine Brightly” proves The Audacity is capable of cleverer—if somewhat cutesy, like Oliver pulling the Pippin move of closing the curtains at the end of the episode—material.
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