During the first episode of the new AMC dramedy The Audacity, we kept asking ourselves why we would want to spend time with more tech bro a-holes. We already laughed at them in Silicon Valley and got annoyed at them in shows like WeCrashed and Super Pumped: The Battle For Uber. How was this going to be any different? We found that out at the end of the first episode.
THE AUDACITY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: A man uncomfortably driving his electric Hummer into Palo Alto. Then we see him telling his therapist “More than physical pain, I fear humiliation.”
The Gist: Duncan Park (Billy Magnussen), the founder of data mining company Hypergnosis, talks to his therapist, Joanne Felder (Sarah Goldberg) about how his company was about to be acquired by Cupertino, the Silicon Valley behemoth (and a not-so-veiled rename of a certain tech giant named after a fruit). But the deal fell through, and he’s trying to figure out how to save face and not tank his company’s market cap. It doesn’t help that he leaked the potential acquisition to the press.
In a panic, Duncan calls Anushka Bhattachera-Phister (Meaghan Rath), who works for Cupertino but is on the board of Hypergnosis, to find out what went wrong. Duncan also wants Joanne’s attention seemingly 24/7, and Sarah struggles to advise him that their professional relationship has boundaries. When he seeks her advice on his plan to pump up the stock price of his company, she says it’s fraud, which sends him into a spiral.
Joanne and her husband, Dr. Gary Felder (Paul Adelstein), pick up their teenage son Orson Stern (Everett Blunck), who has been living with his father on the east coast. He’s enrolled in an elite school, but we can tell he doesn’t want to be there, and he hasn’t been around his mom and stepdad all that much in the past few years.
Tom Ruffage (Rob Corddry), the undersecretary of veterans’ affairs, has been going to companies in the valley to try to get them to manage the data backlog at the VA. When he meets with Anushka and Tim Kwan (Curtis Lum) at Cupertino, “Little Tim” (“Big Tim” is the CEO) barely pays him any mind.
As Duncan continues to freak out, he invites Anushka to “comfort” him before a party being thrown by his wife Lili Park-Hoffsteader (Lucy Punch). She finds him in the middle of an ayahuasca trip, but word still gets back to Lili, who takes advantage of their “arrangement” to get revenge.
Anushka’s husband, Martin Phister (Simon Helberg), is developing an AI “digital friend”, as she calls it, and seems to be more involved in that than being a husband or parent. A previous-generation valley bigwig, Carl Bardoph (Zach Galifianakis) bemoans to his therapist, Joanne, about how people hate tech bros so much.
After being frustrated with Sarah trying to instill boundaries, Duncan uses a data mining algorithm developed by Harper (Jess McLeod), a programmer at his company, to find out exactly what Sarah is doing with the information he and her other patients give her.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Created by Jonathan Glatzer, The Audacity feels like a cross between Silicon Valley and Succession, the latter of which Glatzer wrote for.
Our Take: There were definitely funny moments in the first episode of The Audacity, and Glatzer and company give their characters plenty of chances to hang themselves with their own arrogance. But everyone on the show, including Sarah, seems to operate under a cloud of narcissism that seems to be endemic in the valley. To say that pretty much no one on this show is likable is an understatement.
But then Duncan uses his data mining algorithm to blackmail Sarah, and that’s when the purpose of the show falls into place. This isn’t just going to be a series of arrested-development dudes whining about their stock price and boasting about how they’re going to change the world; this story has potential to actually go somewhere. Sarah is forced to leak info from her other clients to Duncan, and it’ll be fun to see what he does with the info and how resistant Sarah is going to be to helping him.
Still, there is a potential that Glatzer and company are going to get distracted by the other storylines they started in the first episode. They loosely tie together because they’re all a part of the very cutthroat Silicon Valley community, but we’re trying to envision how they fit together otherwise and just can’t see it yet.
Performance Worth Watching: We’ll give this to Rob Corddry as Tom Ruffage, who is a complete outsider to this world, hates dealing with these privileged jerks, and has an air about him that isn’t defeat, but definitely resignedness.
Sex And Skin: None in the first episode.
Parting Shot: Where does the pilot leave us? Hanging off a cliff, or running for the hills?
Sleeper Star: Orson is seen in a section of the house that was off-limits, right under his mother’s office, where he overhears some hurtful information. The housekeeper comes to the door, then closes and locks it.
Most Pilot-y Line: When Duncan talks to Harper about her data mining algorithm, he asks, “So, how godlike is this? Omni-science? Semi-deity omni-science?” And she corrects him: “Omniscience.” We guess it’s an indication that Duncan is tech smart but not smart about anything else.
Our Call: STREAM IT. While we’re still not sure The Audacity is going to be an ultimately satisfying show to watch, we are interested enough in the plot between Duncan and Sarah to keep watching.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
