you can no longer watch due to one of the more cursed offspring of the romance between Rot Economy Valleythink and Hollywood\u2019s MBA era<\/a>), blackmailing therapist Sarah Goldberg at the end of The Audacity\u2019s series premiere. \u201cBest Of All Possible Worlds\u201d doesn\u2019t bother to feint toward any form of altruism (effective or otherwise) and its vision of Silicon Valley circa 2026. The valuations are fraudulent, the most innovative breakthroughs are immediately put to use for privacy violations, and the only customer anyone seems genuinely interested in is the U.S. military.\u00a0<\/p>\nWhat once felt like the gateway to a great big beautiful tomorrow has, in creator Jonathan Glatzer\u2019s gimlet-eyed dramedy, sucked all of the color from the present: Magnussen\u2019s Duncan Park is a master of an earth-and-neutral-toned universe whose only pops of fun and color are the paintings, guitars, and basketball hoop squirreled away in Duncan\u2019s cavernous home office\u2014trophies and status symbols, nothing more. The cynicism here trickles down to even the youngest residents: Speaking to newcomer Orson (Everett Blunck) at the lavish private-school fundraiser being hosted in her backyard, Duncan\u2019s daughter, Jamison (Ava Marie Telek), marvels at his smartphone. Why doesn\u2019t she have one, Orson asks. Doesn\u2019t every adult at the party make them? \u201cArms dealers don\u2019t give their kids land mines,\u201d she replies.<\/p>\n
The son of Goldberg\u2019s character, Dr. Joanne Felder, Orson is our eyes and ears into these privileged environs\u2014but even he can be compromised, as we see when he discovers that a hidden storage area in mom\u2019s 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 \u201cBest Of All Possible Worlds\u201d\u2014with Magnussen framed and speaking in such a way that you might mistake The Audacity for a mockumentary before the episode cuts to Goldberg\u2014Duncan has just royally botched his chances at being acquired by the show\u2019s Apple stand-in, the aptly named Cupertino. It\u2019s a botching and ensuing personal spiral that suits Magnussen\u2019s skillset: One of his generation\u2019s 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\u2019s outward appearance and status. He is, as we see this week, the type of guy who\u2019d take ayahuasca just to tell a vision of his dad (who\u2019s actually the colleague he occasionally sleeps with) \u201cI\u2019m rich.\u201d<\/p>\n
You can grasp Duncan\u2019s 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\u2019s mega-powerful algorithm dug up on Joanne for the mountains of the stuff she\u2019s collected from clients like Duncan and the still somewhat mysterious but loudly insecure and entitled Carl Bardolph (Zach Galifianakis).<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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 \u201cBest Of All Possible Worlds\u201d puts a lot of stress on the limits of doctor-patient confidentiality.) Ruffage\u2019s 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\u2019s also the links between Orson little \u201ca-ha\u201d moment in the basement and the algorithm\u2014developed by Duncan\u2019s employee Harper\u2014that blows the lid off Joanne\u2019s operation. (And before that, it confirms that Duncan\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I like how the wider implications of Harper\u2019s algorithm get underplayed in the moment: As the entire life of the Dutch CFO flashes before our eyes, it\u2019s mostly to underline Duncan\u2019s pettiness and jealousy. But you can still feel that torrent of images lifting the lid off Pandora\u2019s box\u2014this 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\u2019re introduced to a lot of characters with a lot of things going on, and it\u2019ll be interesting to see how the remainder of season one balances all of their storylines.\u00a0<\/p>\n
We\u2019ve barely scratched the surface with Bardolph so far\u2014he\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s portrayal of brain-fried AI mad scientist Martin Phister.\u00a0<\/p>\n
And that, to me, poses the biggest question for the remainder of The Audacity: How well will it manage its tone? The premiere isn\u2019t a neither-fish-nor-fowl situation, but it does feel like it\u2019s still figuring out how heightened it wants its Silicon Valley to be. The best gag in \u201cBest Of All Possible Worlds\u201d is a billboard for a local business whose tagline is \u201cYou agreed to this,\u201d 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 \u201cdelimited contours\u201d and \u201cquantbens.\u201d)\u00a0<\/p>\n
More frequently, the humor is dryer and darker, like Bardolph\u2019s guiding principle\u2014\u201cprofits will continue to grow forever\u201d 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 \u201chuman life is valuable, full stop. It\u2019s a cornerstone for us.\u201d That\u2019s not to say that a more grounded character like Anushka can\u2019t live under the same roof as Martin\u2013on The Audacity, they do, as husband and wife. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
I think that\u2019s where casting Magnussen comes in handy again. He sells Duncan\u2019s terror, anger, and conniving within this predicament of his own making, but can be utterly, convincingly silly at the same time. I\u2019m eager to see him put that to use opposite Goldberg, who was so good on Barry<\/a> (speaking of shows with tricky tones) and can already be seen here showcasing her aptitude for playing someone who\u2019s been backed into a corner and who wields self-righteousness like a deadly comic weapon.<\/p>\nStray observations<\/p>\n
\u2022 Hello! I\u2019m critic and recovering Twitter addict Erik Adams, and welcome to The A.V. Club\u2019s coverage of The Audacity.
\n\u2022 Another amusing character trait introduced in the premiere: Duncan\u2019s tendency for malapropisms like \u201cI don\u2019t know the stock\u2019s going to fall\u2014I\u2019m not Nosferatu.\u201d\u00a0
\n\u2022 Orson\u2019s bassoon rehearsal bleeding through the floorboards is a good foreshadowing of his snooping later on.
\n\u2022 Martin\u2019s been toiling away on Xander, \u201can autonomous companion for alienated teens,\u201d but as he tells visibly bothered, alienated teen Jamison while he scans her face, \u201cit has been a real slog to represent a genuine look of bothersomeness.\u201d
\n\u2022 My reaction to hearing Lucy Punch deliver her first few lines in the premiere: \u201cLet Lucy Punch be English!\u201d My reaction to watching interviews with Meaghan Rath after the premiere: \u201cWait, Meaghan Rath isn\u2019t English?\u201d<\/p>\n
Erik Adams is a contributor to The A.V. Club.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What a difference 12 years makes. When Silicon Valley debuted on HBO in 2014, its titular setting was…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":603590,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[64,63,134,427],"class_list":{"0":"post-603589","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tv","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-tv"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/603589","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=603589"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/603589\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/603590"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=603589"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=603589"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=603589"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}