Once upon a time, Hollywood’s favorite target for satirization and ridicule seemed to be … Hollywood. Robert Altman’s nearly prophetic “The Player,” 1974’s caustic “The Day of the Locust” and, of course, Seth Rogen’s sly award-winner “The Studio.” All socked it to La-La Land.
A new series debuting April 12 shifts the bullseye north to a place we know well: Silicon Valley.
The once highly regarded and pricey hub for tech dreamers and fledgling startups has devolved from a breeding ground for ingenuity and innovation — a place of hope — to something closer to an American nightmare. Industry billionaires and bold-print names once heralded as visionaries are now derided as self-absorbed quacks or even akin to a world-crushing Marvel superhero villain along the lines of Thanos. Hey at least the bald guy didn’t sic AI on us.
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Of course, this isn’t the first time the tech world has taken it on the chin. David Fincher’s slick, super-smart “The Social Network” icily autopsied Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook; while Mike Judge’s HBO comedy series “Silicon Valley” lampooned the South Bay’s startup culture of the 2010s.
More recently — and more seriously — directors Daniel Roher and Charlie Tyrell spotlighted the promise and the peril of artificial intelligence with “The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist.”
Now comes AMC’s eight-part series “The Audacity,” and hold onto your pocket protectors. Where other series and movies roasted Silicon Valley culture and the tech industry, “Audacity” creator Jonathan Glatzer charbroils the hell out of it.
And it makes for scathingly grand entertainment.
The unrepentant vitriol here should come as no surprise, given that Glatzer served as a writer and producer on the dark comedies “Succession” and “Better Call Saul.” Like those brazen series, “The Audacity” doesn’t let anyone off the hook. The result is a scathing takedown that will find techies throughout the Valley looking over their shoulders and speculating on who is who amongst the show’s motley collection of fictional backstabbers obsessed with growing their profit margin and amassing wealth and power.
No one is immune to the lampooning, even the dazed and confused sons and daughters who get sidelined and pawned off due to their parents’ ambitions, neuroses and desires to achieve greatness. Everyone gets chewed up in this culture.
Although filmed primarily in British Columbia, “The Audacity” nails and skewers the cultural landscape, from its techie jargon to its plot machinations to the region’s insane home prices. Glatzer and his team of writers (this is one of the best written series you’ll watch all year) deliver shout-outs to several South Bay cities, including Palo Alto, Milpitas and even Gilroy (though fans of the garlic-loving town probably won’t enjoy a certain fleeting reference
Of course, there is also a trip to Napa. Gotta have that.
Glatzer keeps you on your toes throughout and presents in this Silicon Valley chess set a huge cast of intriguing, messed-up characters. He also air drops you right into the action from the first episode, so don’t watch late at night.
At the apex of it all is the man-child Duncan Park (Billy Magnussen, channeling every known idiosyncrasy of tech titans we know). He’s the arrogant but insecure CEO of HyperGNOsis and is making moves to become the ultimate data miner. He’s also a mess, so much so even his therapist Dr. JoAnne Felder (Sarah Goldberg, doing exasperation quite well) would like to drop him. But he divulges, as do many of her patients, info about trades and takeovers that could become quite profitable to someone in the know. Duncan doesn’t understand the word boundary and is married to Lili (Lucy Punch) who’s more interested in her place on a Los Altos school board than she is with with him or their daughter Jamison (Ava Marie Telek) whom she derides for her eating habits and school work (she is determined to see her daughter go to Stanford).
JoAnne, meanwhile, fumbles with trying to be a parent to awkward teen Orson (Everett Blunck, so great in “The Plague”) who ventures into the manosphere since he’s often ignored, except by JoAnne’s more present husband, Dr. Gary Felder (Paul Adelstein).
There’s much more going with these people and that’s part of the problem with “The Audacity” — its own audaciousness. It takes time for all these fragments and backstories to tie together, but have patience. After a couple episodes, the colliding storylines deepen and finds Glatzer sharpening his instruments to carve further into the techie culture. That especially plays out with the entrance of the reclusive and insanely wealthy Carl Bardolph (Zach Galifianakis), the one responsible for making a mint off of spam. He’s unstable but also confident in his own narcissistic skin and is also a patient of JoAnne’s. His shaggy appearance, though, belies a calculating mind and a tendency to pounce and tear out your throat should it suit his purposes. Bardolph lingers on the plot back burner — at first.
Also figuring into the crammed narrative are the hyper-efficient Anushka Bhattachera-Phister (Meaghan Rath), director of ethical innovation at Cupertino — an Apple-like company with “Big Tim” (wink, wink) at its epicenter. She’s married to tech genius Martin (Simon Helberg) who is obsessed and devoted to his Artificial General Intelligence creation Xander. He spends more time with Xander than with his klepto daughter (Thailey Roberge) or his wife.
Two characters whose storylines appear at first to clash with everything else in the series involve Veterans Affairs representatives Tom Ruffage (Rob Corddry) and Jeffery Carter (Andrew Bushell). They enter the scene asking for some governmental help. Over time, that storyline gains more prominence, and again points to how all of us can get sucked into the profitable tech world.
Even more characters cluster in while the screenplay comments on topics of the day: driverless cars, tech responsibility and even California wildfires.
It’s a lot to stuff into one series and sometimes “The Audacity” does suffer from trying to do too much. But what it does accomplish is to deliver a solid right hook to the tech world and that hit proves to be acerbic, relevant and unbelievably on target, as are the performances from Magnussen and Goldberg. It’s a stinging portrait of an industry under siege by its own pioneers’ grand visions of who they are.
AMC certainly has confidence in “Audacity” and has already ordered a second season. In the meantime, we have eight episodes to savor this season while we wait for “The Social Reckoning,” the sequel to “The Social Network,” which will star Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg and is due in theaters Oct. 9.
In other words, the microscopic focus on Silicon Valley will continue as it serves as a magnet — realistically and metaphorically — for our hopes, dreams, concerns, fears and, yes, derision.
Contact Randy Myers at soitsrandy@gmail.com
‘THE AUDACITY’
3½ stars out of 4
Starring: Billy Magnussen, Sarah Goldberg, Lucy Punch, Zach Galifianakis, Meaghan Rath
Creator: Jonathan Glatzer
When and where: Debuts 9 p.m. April 12 on AMC and AMC+; with additional episodes debuting weekly on Sundays
