The Audacity Series-Premiere Recap: Breach of Trust

The Audacity
Best of All Possible Worlds
Season 1 Episode 1
Editor’s Rating ★★★
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“Best of All Possible Worlds” is now available on AMC+ ahead of its 9 p.m. ET broadcast premiere.

“You Agreed To This.” 

There are many more overt examples of Silicon Valley misbehavior sprinkled through the premiere episode of The Audacity, but the essence of Jonathan Glatzer’s tech-world satire may be in this digital billboard that appears on the side of the road. “You Agreed To This” is the apparent slogan for Spookle, one of those nonsense company names that sounds like it’s following a trend, like when dot-com media start-ups were adding “ist” to the end of words. In light of the chicanery that happens in the episode, the phrase also suggests a bit of victim-blaming for the harvesting of personal data. Like, hey, it’s your fault for not reading the terms and conditions on some stupid app before thoughtlessly clicking your life away. Now Spookle knows more about you than your mother.

Glatzer, who created The Audacity and wrote this first episode, has a sterling television résumé that includes scripts for Better Call Saul and Succession, and the tone of this first hour undeniably evokes the latter, with its sharp-tongued dissection of the rich and rapacious. It’s also an unmistakable West Coast echo of Billions, given how much time is devoted to ultra-elite power brokers manipulating the market and dancing around regulators while seeming like the most miserable people on earth. (Generally speaking, it’s comforting for viewers to imagine billionaires wallowing in misery, which is why Joyce Carol Oates’s Elon Musk tweets are such a delight.) What truly stands out about The Audacity, however, is how much it channels the hostility people feel toward the Palo Alto crowd in 2026. The gentle lampooning of the HBO series Silicon Valley a decade ago has curdled into seething, burn-it-down contempt.

And that’s a risk that The Audacity is courting in a premiere that doesn’t care yet about turning its satirical targets into antiheroes, which is what Glatzer was doing on Better Call Saul and Succession. So far, this is a show about two scam artists who have cheated their way into privilege and fortune and are currently paying for it through broken relationships and fucked-up kids who detest them. It is not necessarily Glatzer’s job to humanize his characters any more than he cares to, because that’s not a high priority for a satire. But it’ll be interesting to see if there are more layers to the show than fitfully amusing nastiness that defines it so far.

There’s no better description of Duncan Park (Billy Magnussen), the CEO of a data outfit called Hypergnosis, than “a dumb man’s genius,” the phrase an executive at an Apple-like company uses to help shut down acquisition talks with him. Duncan has not only been banking on the acquisition to happen, but he’s also been leaking rumors of the sale in order to boost company stock. This is a classic white-collar felony, of course, but as Duncan colorfully puts it, “Raising money off frothy numbers to sugarcoat the rotten apple is what built this town.” How can it be fraud if everyone does it? It’s not as if the SEC is looking over anyone’s shoulders. The only real threat is a whistleblower, like an outcast kid overhearing the whole criminal scheme from the floor below his mother’s office. But we’ll get to that in a bit. 

Duncan entrusts this information to his therapist, JoAnne Felder (Sarah Goldberg), who serves as a “performance psychologist” to Palo Alto tech CEOs who need to grouse about the ill effects of their professional sociopathy. (To that end, add The Sopranos to the list of prestige influences.) JoAnne isn’t subtle about plugging Duncan for details about the failed acquisition, asking him when he expects word to come out about it right after wondering how he’ll feel about it. Because of doctor-patient confidentiality, execs like Duncan are free to talk openly about corporate secrets, and JoAnne, who drives a BMW and enrolls her weird son Orson (Everett Blunck) into a private feeder school for Stanford, benefits from the inside information. The moment Duncan leaves her office, JoAnne is on the phone with her broker.

The episode builds to a scene when Duncan, having sniffed out JoAnne’s scheme, blackmails her into an even larger scheme to pump rival executives for business scoops. (That Duncan needs to use a God-like privacy-violating algorithm to discover a deception that was right there in front of him is one of the episode’s subtler ironies.) But Glatzer has an array of supporting characters to set up first and he gets it done with impressive economy, spinning out from Duncan’s calamitous personal life. His marriage to Lili (Lucy Punch) has grown so toxic that they’ve opened it up to other partners, with the proviso that they keep each other informed about who they’re bedding. Neither of them pays much attention to their daughter, Jamison (Ava Marie Telek), other than Lili fat-shaming the girl for grazing through the lemon squares at a pool party. 

While Duncan rages over Lili’s new affair with a Finnish CFO, he still hasn’t gotten over his on-again/off-again dalliances with Anushka (Meaghan Rath), the “Director of Ethical Innovation” at the company that’s refusing to acquire Hypergnosis. Anushka’s role on Duncan’s board led to her recusal from those negotiations, but he presses her for details relentlessly and seeks her intimate support. Someone as seemingly put-together as Anushka may not look like a candidate to mop up Duncan’s flopsweat, but her home life is a disaster, too, with a husband named Martin (Simon Helberg) who obsesses over his own chatbot and a mopey daughter named Tess (Thailey Roberge) who relieves her angst through clichéd outlets like kleptomania. 

Glatzer’s disdain spins out behind Silicon Valley, too. He’s got plenty left over for the wonderfully named Tom Ruffage (Rob Corddry), an undersecretary who’s poking around town in search of someone willing to help streamline the data at the VA, a government agency that’s notoriously bogged down by bureaucracy. Tom and his underling don’t even make it into Anushka’s office before her colleague, “Lil’ Tim” Kwan (Curtis Lum), likens Tom’s request to asking France to help his mother set up his printer. (“France but with, like, much, much, much more money than France.”) That leads to a hilarious scene where Duncan meets Tom at Anushka’s request, expecting access to a sensitive, vital Department of Defense operation, only to encounter “old urine-soaked vets with their weird hats and broken brains.” You’d think it would make Tom a pitiable figure, but he’s less interested in fighting for veterans than securing hotel-room luxuries. 

The wild card in this whole scenario is Orson, who the show positions as a lonely, uncool kid who’s been shipped to his mother’s home in the wake of his father’s (and her ex’s) hospitalization back east. While staying in JoAnne’s basement, Orson discovers a cellar that happens to sit on a thin floor below her home office, where he can overhear her sessions with patients. When Duncan coerces JoAnne into teaming up for white-collar crime, Orson picks up every word, which crushes him while also giving him a trump card he can play at any time. He seems like the type of kid who could do the right thing, but in the world of The Audacity, such nobility is hard to find.

Pixels

• One promising character disconnected from the plotting so far is Zach Galifianakis as Carl Bardolph, a client of JoAnne’s who made some untold fortune in the business, but has since turned into a bitter recluse. His complaint to JoAnne about public resentment of Silicon Valley sounds a lot like what bros of his ilk are thinking these days: “People act like we took something as if we didn’t build everything they touch. And we didn’t build it to be worshipped. We built it to work, and it does work. But where’s our parade? All I see are pitchforks and ingratitude.” 

• “Fahfa was a juggernaut in its time.” The low-hanging comic fruit of a show like The Audacity is coming up with great nonsense names for dead tech outfits. (See also: Aviato in Silicon Valley.)

• If we want to engage in a little moral relativism, JoAnne profiting off inside information from her clients seems like the fair cost of having to deal with their demands. When she tries to get off the phone with Duncan to talk to her son at the airport, he snaps, “I don’t care if he’s in a stranger’s van licking lollipops. You do not hang up on me.” 

• Shout out to this week’s invisible underclass, including the servant that Duncan falsely cans for ratting him out to his wife, the maid that has to remake Orson’s bed with “special sheets,” and the workers in Guangzhou who have apparently taken their own lives due to factory conditions. 

• Hypergnosis seems like a shambling operation, but Duncan has lucked into a trans coder named Harper (Jess McLeod) whose algorithm is so powerful that it can mine a person’s entire digital footprint in seconds. That’s useful for plot purposes (e.g. Duncan finding out about JoAnne’s side hustle), but the premiere gets a nice laugh about of his efforts to learn more about his wife’s lover. (His likes? Wheat beer, herring, and anal.) 

• Martin to the authentically miserable Jamison: “Can you hold that face? I’m building an intelligent entity, more of an autonomous companion for alienated teens, based on personal data ecosystems, but it has been a real slog to replicate a genuine look of bothersomeness.” 

• Hiring a Black headmaster based on her appearance at something called the Aspen Education Summit is perfect, as is Lili’s speech praising the woman’s “terrifically underprivileged upbringing in Chicago.” Don’t be surprised if this same great hire gets axed for showing any initiative at all in the job.