The Audacity Recap: Trust Fund Babies

The Audacity
Shine Brightly
Season 1 Episode 2
Editor’s Rating ★★★
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“Shine Brightly” is now available on AMC+ ahead of its 9 p.m. ET broadcast next Sunday.

There’s the briefest moment in the second episode of The Audacity where something in the general vicinity of human warmth is shared between two characters. Freaked out over the one-two punch of Duncan’s insider trading proposal and the subsequent “break-in” through the window in her cellar, JoAnne enlists her tech-savvy son, Orson, to change all of her passwords to keep any possible intruders at bay. When he asks for the login to her computer, she tells him it’s his birthday, which surprises him. Maybe the mother who neglected him as he was growing up actually does care and has kept him so front-of-mind that she’s done the thing that so many parents do and made his birthday an easy-to-remember, easy-to-hack password.

Only it doesn’t work. The date is for an old family dog’s birthday, the day after his, which explains why she’s been so consistently tardy in acknowledging his birthday over the years. In other words, he’s a notch below a dead Dachshund in his mom’s loved-one rankings. 

Two episodes into The Audacity, the main impression is how deeply the show detests Silicon Valley. That small flicker of humanity gets blown out like one of nonexistent candles on Orson’s nonexistent birthday cake. Even JoAnne’s ostensible concern for her child’s safety in their home — a rental home, as a cop points out, which exposes her as a pauper and an imposter in this town — has more to do with her feeling vulnerable over Duncan’s knowledge of her insider trading rather than her fretting about a violent intruder. While you can still squint and see JoAnne’s desire to rebuild her relationship with her son, her preoccupation with money and business is overwhelming, which more or less puts her on par with the other adults in Palo Alto.

The parents in The Audacity care deeply about their kids getting into Stanford, which isn’t the same as caring about their kids’ future, which would be secure regardless. (To quote the great Gary Gulman, “A trust fund is this very expensive way to tell your children you don’t believe in them.”) In maybe the funniest scene in the episode, Duncan’s wife Lili has assembled an entire college-enrollment team around Jamie to chart her path to Stanford, which isn’t looking good with a sub-1300 SAT score that isn’t even good enough for such downscale institutions as Duke or Carnegie Mellon. There are some ideas pitched about how to improve her intellectual aura for interviews (“Low-key favor, could you try these glasses on?”). But it’s generally agreed upon that more dramatic measures are necessary, like diagnosing her as neurodivergent or simply cutting the college a $2-$3 million check for its endowment. Anything to keep the family from looking like failures to their neighbors/rivals.

Naturally, the kids are sensitive enough to their parents’ machinations to feel psychologically broken by them. Jamie makes a poignant plea to her father that she can get into a good school without cheating, which troubles him because not cheating is “loser” behavior. Tess responds to her parents’ neglect through antisocial behavior at school, first by glitching out a self-driving car by gluing a traffic cone onto the hood, and then by tucking a driving trophy into her back. Meanwhile, Orson continues to cast himself as a teenage phantom of the opera, lurking in dank spaces where he can pick up on secrets and spy on people from the shadows. After listening to his mom’s incriminating therapy session from the basement, he finds another hiding place at school after his transcript issues land him in the dining hall indefinitely. His interest in Tess appears to be setting up a future alliance of disgruntled outcasts.

In the grown-up world, the plotting has gotten a little clunky, leaning too much on misunderstandings and coincidences. Orson’s use of Duncan’s stolen tungsten cube to break himself out of a locked cellar leads to some confusing police work — why would items from inside the cellar, like Gary’s Pippin cast album, be understood as tools for breaking into the house? — while setting up JoAnne’s deranged obsession with getting a gun for protection. (Chekhov’s gun, clearly.) JoAnne’s paranoia is matched by Duncan, who responds to her ghosting him by having his algo-developer Harper follow her with her God-like, eye-in-the-sky technology. When this leads him to a parking lot near a library, where she’s gone to “muddy” her shady investment winnings by betting on a certain loser, Duncan sees the gun shop on the other side of the lot. Does she intend to kill him rather than do business with him? Is that why she’s been dodging his calls?

In the end, JoAnne gets what she wants from Gary, whose strong initial resistance to having a gun (“I’m not living in a home with an instrument of death”) melts away from the guilt he feels over inadvertently revealing Duncan to be his wife’s client. The amusing twist there is that his small ethical lapse doesn’t bother Duncan or JoAnne, but they get to take advantage of it anyway — Duncan by using an impromptu neuro exam to give his corporate minion access to Gary’s phone, JoAnne by getting a flower-patterned handgun tucked into a tasteful gift bag. The Audacity seems to be setting up a deadly confrontation between them, but there’s still some chance JoAnne can be coerced into playing ball with Duncan. If they target the right rich-guy client, like the mopey Carl Bardolph, they can beef up their investment portfolios. That is, if they don’t kill each other first.

Pixels

• That pesky little tungsten cube has been on quite a journey since Tess boosted it from Duncan’s office. Orson discovered the cellar by whipping through his bedroom wall and then used it again to break himself out when he got locked in it. Meanwhile, Duncan wants to fire the housemaid/nanny Thelma for stealing it, forgetting that the poor woman has watched Jamie since infancy. (“What about the hot one when you were young, with the shorts?” “That was Thelma.”) The cube resurfaces once more when Duncan slips it into the case where Tess took the trophy, his signal to her that he’s been watching. 

• At the “dumb house” where Duncan takes Gary for his neuro exam, we learn that Duncan once had a partner who was clearly the brains of the operation, responsible for the successful app that made his fortune. But the man hung himself, most likely due to Duncan tormenting him relentlessly like a jock pranking a nerd in an ‘80s campus comedy. “You can still make out where he carved his goodbye,” Duncan tells Gary, pointing to the word “SORRY” above his head. 

• It’s become a running joke that JoAnne isn’t actually good at the job she’s bilking CEOs for doing. In session with Carl, she goes gun-shopping on her phone while suggesting a “mnemonic” call STOP, in which the “S” itself stands for “Stop,” an acronym so lazy and useless that he flies off into a rage. (His mnemonic for her is START, as in “Start Throwing things At Retarded Therapists.”) 

• In Silicon Valley, being “on the spectrum” is such a plus that Duncan himself craves the diagnosis. Savants are “good at telling you how to shop and talk and stuff.” 

• Last week, I worried that Dr. Webb (Rukiya Bernard), the newly installed headmaster at the kids’ snooty private school, would eventually get in hot water by trying to introduce reasonable reforms. But by sticking poor Orson in the educational purgatory of the dining hall, she seems to be fitting in just fine. 

• Duncan continues to be annoyed at Anushka for pushing Tom Ruffage and VA business over the Hypergnosis for their data needs. On the one hand, she wisely suggests to him the value of all that private information. On the other hand, the VA is keeping it on paper and old floppy disks that they want trucked to his office. 

• Some good fatherly advice from Duncan: “The only real cheating is when you cheat yourself. Cheaters never lose. And losers, they never cheat.”