Jonathan Glatzer’s new Silicon Valley soap, The Audacity, premieres Sunday on AMC with a story built around tech money, data theft and the people who decide they are entitled to both. Billy Magnussen plays Duncan, a founder who made his fortune as a co-founder of a community app similar to Facebook and now wants to sell his new information-gathering startup to “Cupertino.”
The startup is called PINATA, short for Privacy Is Not a Thing Anymore, and it is pitched as a company that will let subscribers snoop at a deep level on just about anyone in the world. That makes Duncan one of the show’s central engines of menace, and one of the few people in its orbit who says the quiet part out loud. In a session with therapist JoAnne, played by Sarah Goldberg, something he says pushes her to unload some stock. Later, Duncan blackmails her into passing on inside information from her clients.
That pressure point matters because JoAnne does not work in a corporate tower or a polished office suite. She runs her business from her rented home, where her child psychiatrist husband, Gary, also works. Paul Adelstein plays Gary, while Everett Blunck plays their 15-year-old son, Orson, who was sent reluctantly from Baltimore while his father is being treated for cancer. Orson has embarrassing gastric issues, watches alpha-male videos in the basement and practices the bassoon there, which gives the house a lived-in awkwardness that sits far from the clean, self-mythologizing world Duncan is trying to sell.
Glatzer, who wrote for Succession and Better Call Saul, sets the eight-episode season in a place where wealth and surveillance are inseparable. Zach Galifianakis plays Carl, a semi-retired industry legend who made his money from a spam platform, and he gives voice to the show’s grievance when he says, “People act like we took something as if we didn’t build everything they touch,” and later, “Where’s our parade? All I see are pitchforks and ingratitude.” The series is squarely in AMC territory, the network behind Breaking Bad, Mad Men and Halt and Catch Fire, and it shares their taste for difficult, sometimes amoral characters.
The tension is that The Audacity is sharp enough to understand how Silicon Valley talks about disruption, privacy and power, but it does not quite rise to the level of AMC’s best-known dramas. That leaves it looking like a well-made entry in a familiar lane rather than the kind of breakout that changes the channel’s reputation. Still, Sunday’s premiere gives AMC a new show about the cost of knowing everything about everyone, and Duncan may be its clearest proof that the people selling that future are the ones least fit to run it.
