“Audacity is a superpower that we all possess,” says Jonathan Glatzer. In his work on TV shows like Better Call Saul and Succession, Glatzer has created plenty of characters with that particular power.
“It is simply just the willingness to crash through norms,” he tells me. “Calling someone a bull in a china shop used to be a kind of an insult, and now it’s like, ‘Nah, be a bull in a china shop.’”
That’s true in a lot of parts of the world these days, Glatzer admits, but particularly prevalent in Silicon Valley, the setting for Glatzer’s new series that’s called — what else? — The Audacity. The eight-episode AMC and AMC+ drama airs its season finale tomorrow and has already been picked up for a season two, promising more chaotic adventures for both the tech bros who think they’re saving the world and the people — wives, children, even therapists — caught up in their specific kind of mania.
We’ve seen the tech world skewered on television before, of course. But as Billy Magnussen, who plays megalomaniacal tech CEO Duncan Park, puts it, “Silicon Valley was an optimistic show. Our show is going, ‘Well, these people were optimistic until you saw greed, power and money infiltrate it all. That toxicity just seeped into these people.’”
In a live taping of the Prestige Junkie podcast in Los Angeles, presented in partnership with AMC, Glatzer, Magnussen and co-star Simon Helberg talked about how the world of The Audacity came together as a very different kind of tech-world satire. “It’s just the perfect ground for the most high-stakes situations, because it really is a life-or-death decision at every moment for these people,” says Helberg. His character, Martin, starts off as one of the more sympathetic ones in this world, quietly developing an AI chat program that even his wife thinks is kind of silly. As with so many things involving AI, though, it eventually starts to look like Martin’s invention could be the most dangerous of all.
These self-styled tech geniuses, Helberg continues, “are deciding not just their own fates, but all of us, as well as how we communicate and how we interact with culture. And then we meet them, and they’re not capable of communicating or really contributing to culture. I think that is funny in the darkest way.”
The Audacity is, in fact, very funny, mining humor from everything from corporate tech speak to the many physical indignities Duncan endures, taking advantage of Magnussen’s gift for physical comedy. Zach Galifianakis plays a veteran tech genius who prefers to lie on the floor in starfish position during therapy sessions, while his therapist, played by Barry’s Sarah Goldberg, gets caught in a road rage incident sparked by a stalled self-driving car. It’s all part of Glatzer’s goal to bring these characters down to the petty, human level where the rest of us exist. “These guys are just as likely to get hit by a bus as anybody,” Glatzer says. “They’ll probably push someone else in their way first, but their chances are just as good.”
Hear much more from Glatzer, Magnussen and Helberg on today’s special bonus episode of the Prestige Junkie podcast, and thanks again to AMC for making this event possible.
