{"id":395040,"date":"2026-04-12T17:35:19","date_gmt":"2026-04-12T17:35:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/395040\/"},"modified":"2026-04-12T17:35:19","modified_gmt":"2026-04-12T17:35:19","slug":"the-audacity-review-unsympathetic-characters-fill-this-tech-drama","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/395040\/","title":{"rendered":"‘The Audacity’ review: Unsympathetic characters fill this tech drama"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Anyone who has spent any time in the digital agora will know the chilling feeling of seeing some supposedly secret thing about yourself suddenly reflected in a targeted advertisement. In a new Silicon Valley soap, \u201cThe Audacity,\u201d Duncan (Billy Magnussen) founds a company called PINATA, for Privacy Is Not a Thing Anymore, which will allow subscribers to snoop at a deep level on just about anyone in the world; the war against the data eaters, the name suggests, is long since lost, and is none of your business, anyway.<\/p>\n

Created by Jonathan Glatzer who has written for \u201cSuccession\u201d<\/a> and \u201cBetter Call Saul,\u201d<\/a> the series premieres Sunday on AMC, the network of \u201cBreaking Bad,\u201d \u201cMad Men\u201d and an earlier tech-related series, \u201cHalt and Catch Fire,\u201d<\/a> about the rise of the personal computer \u2014 shows that focus on difficult, sometimes amoral characters whose shenanigans might change the world, not necessarily for the better. \u201cThe Audacity,\u201d though well made enough, is not in their league.<\/p>\n

Duncan made his fortune as a co-founder of a community app something along the lines of Facebook (which, along with Mark Zuckerberg, doesn\u2019t exist in this silicon reality \u2014 \u201cIf only,\u201d do I hear you sigh? Or was that me?) Now he\u2019s trying to sell his information-gathering startup to \u201cCupertino\u201d (as in the home of Apple), \u201cthe most important tech company to ever exist,\u201d and leaking rumors he imagines will be to his advantage. Duncan is not himself a creator, or particularly smart \u2014 he thinks it\u2019s \u201cSchroeder\u2019s Cat,\u201d for example \u2014 but does have a gift for selling; his \u201cgenius\u201d late partner, Hamish \u2014 a suicide \u2014 did the real work. Now a new Hamish enters his life in the form of Harper (Jess McLeod, whose blonde bob may remind viewers of the brilliant coder played by Mackenzie Davis on \u201cHalt and Catch Fire\u201d), the creator of the \u201calgo\u201d mentioned above.<\/p>\n

Despite his riches, Duncan is unhappy enough to be a patient of the series\u2019 other main character, therapist JoAnne (Sarah Goldberg). (He also has an \u201cayahuasca guy.\u201d) Most prominent among her other clients is Carl (Zach Galifianakis), a semi-retired industry legend who made his money from a spam platform and whom Duncan will spend much of this eight-episode season attempting to impress. \u201cPeople act like we took something as if we didn\u2019t build everything they touch,\u201d Carl will complain to JoAnne. \u201cWhere\u2019s our parade? All I see are pitchforks and ingratitude.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"A <\/p>\n

Sarah Goldberg plays Joanne, therapist to Duncan and Carl (Zach Galifianakis) in \u201cThe Audacity.\u201d<\/p>\n

(Ed Araquel\/AMC)<\/p>\n

JoAnne conducts her business from her rented home, as does her child psychiatrist (second) husband, Gary (Paul Adelstein), one of the few figures in this roundelay you will be given no reason to dislike. (It\u2019s an old house, to contrast it with the modernist leviathans inhabited by the overly moneyed class.) Sharing the place is her weedy, newly arrived 15-year-old son, Orson (Everett Blunck), sent reluctantly from Baltimore, where his father is being treated for cancer. Orson has embarrassing gastric issues and watches alpha-male videos in the basement, where he also practices the bassoon. (That he\u2019s working on \u201cThe Sorcerer\u2019s Apprentice,\u201d in its way a story of runaway tech, might have some thematic meaning, though it does also have a killer bassoon part.)<\/p>\n

Something Duncan says in a session with JoAnne leads her to unload some stock, like Martha Stewart in 2004<\/a>, and Duncan, working this out, blackmails her into passing on inside information from her clients to him. \u201cYou think you know everything because you have information, but information is not insight,\u201d says JoAnne, who has insight to spare, making her even more valuable to Duncan, whose pronouncements are more in the line of \u201cCheaters never lose, and losers, they never cheat\u201d and \u201cEmpathetic is just pathetic with a prefix \u2014 I am an apex predator.\u201d<\/p>\n

Anushka (Meaghan Rath), a power player who works for Duncan, is also a toothless director of ethical innovation on the board at Cupertino. She\u2019s married to Martin (Simon Helberg), who is working on something he calls Alexander, or Xander \u2014 he would say \u201csomeone,\u201d probably \u2014 \u201can intelligent entity, more of an autonomous companion, for alienated teens based on personal data ecosystems.\u201d<\/p>\n

He has less time for his own alienated teen, Tess (Thailey Roberge) \u2014 \u201cDad, eyes on me,\u201d she says, as the family sits at a comically long dinner table, the parents looking at their phones \u2014 who has been expressing herself through low-level vandalism and thievery. \u201cI hear you\u2019re klepto now,\u201d says Jamison (Ava Marie Telek), the daughter of Duncan and Lili (Lucy Punch), whose body mass is under constant review by her mother. Seemingly, all the children of the Valley are being shuttled by their parents toward Stanford, where they will matriculate by hook or by crook.<\/p>\n

Though Lili has been configured as shallow and spoiled, Punch (a great comic actor) injects her with some warmth and keeps her from being the joke she might have been. Galifianakis has a native oddball energy, though some of Carl\u2019s assigned interests feel tacked on and out of joint \u2014 he\u2019s involved with a fight club, where \u201ccontrol alt delete\u201d serves for saying \u201cuncle,\u201d and, even weirder, has been made a World War Ire-enactor and military fetishist; it\u2019s a point that exists only to make him receptive to Tom (Rob Corddry), the deputy undersecretary of Veterans Affairs who has come to Palo Alto looking for a partner to digitize truckloads of files that will in some way help to better their plight. (\u201cStraightforwardly, what\u2019s the quant ben for us?\u201d he\u2019s asked. Translation: \u201cWhat\u2019s in it for us?\u201d) The series\u2019 designated tragic figure, he\u2019s granted a karaoke performance, with original lyrics, of Peggy Lee\u2019s \u201cIs That All There Is?\u201d<\/p>\n

Much of the action has to do with characters buying and selling various enterprises, or failing to, and creating and breaking and creating alliances, and it ceases to matter after not too long awhile what person or which company does what. Much less of it has to do with people being people. The cast is very good and the dialogue good enough, but because few of these characters are developed beyond a handful of identifying characteristics, it\u2019s a generally cold, dispassionate watch. As to Duncan, the nominal star of the show, it doesn\u2019t matter whether he\u2019ll win or lose \u2014 there\u2019s not enough to hang on to. Past being unlikable, he\u2019s unsympathetic, and worse, for all his noisy behavior, uninteresting. JoAnne, though her journey is more twisted, doesn\u2019t fare all that much better.<\/p>\n

To signal that he has considered these things, Glatzer gives Anushka, who has had a revelation, a speechy little speech to voice the thoughts already on your mind. \u201cWhen was the last time we saw tech help? \u2026 Truth be told, what have we actually made better? Did we spread knowledge? No. People used to occasionally agree on truth. Are we more tolerant of those different from ourselves? Please. Absolutely blew it on climate. Data centers emit more greenhouse gas than all of air travel. And have we made made the lives of our children better? Probably, no. But we can have Q-tips at our door in an hour. Huzzah.\u201d So true.<\/p>\n

We also get a reminder, from Harper, to check the box that keeps a website from selling your information. It\u2019s good advice.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Anyone who has spent any time in the digital agora will know the chilling feeling of seeing some…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":395041,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[174874,174871,9779,174873,174869,93,174876,47560,61,174872,60,174877,174878,174875,2096,563,25499,174870,282],"class_list":{"0":"post-395040","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tv","8":"tag-amoral-character","9":"tag-audacity","10":"tag-carl","11":"tag-child-psychiatrist","12":"tag-duncan","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-halt","15":"tag-hamish","16":"tag-ie","17":"tag-inside-information","18":"tag-ireland","19":"tag-late-partner","20":"tag-lili","21":"tag-orson","22":"tag-people","23":"tag-review","24":"tag-series","25":"tag-therapist-joanne","26":"tag-tv"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/395040","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=395040"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/395040\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/395041"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=395040"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=395040"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=395040"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}