Succession and Better Call Saul producer Jonathan Glatzer has written for some legendarily complex and problematic characters in his career, but his new AMC show, The Audacity, presents an even more damaged crop of figures.
The new drama series follows Silicon Valley manchild Duncan Park (Billy Magnussen), the data-mining CEO of a tech company called Hypergnosis, who is delulu enough to think he’s an absolute genius. But when he discovers that his therapist Dr. Joanne Felder (Sarah Goldberg) has been patiently listening to his musings while insider-trading with information that he and others have provided in their sessions, it’s not long before the opportunistic Duncan decides he should get in on the game.
The Audacity is packed with infuriating tech bros who live up to the show’s title. “For years, I thought of audacity as a kind of superpower that we all have, but few of us actually employ because it involves crashing through norms of behavior,” Glatzer tells Den of Geek at SXSW. “Most of us are not bulls in China shops, but in Silicon Valley, it is kind of regarded as an attribute. There’s a lot of broken dishes around there, but that’s what they like: move fast and break things.”
Glatzer says the idea of audacity becoming an attribute fascinated him, so where better to explore it than in Silicon Valley, the beating heart of audacity in America? He’s also mindful that we’ve seen various tech titans onscreen before, so The Audacity expands its story to include tech and innovation’s wannabes and also-rans. “I wanted to meet their spouses, their kids, and their psychiatrists. And from there, it’s just putting them all into this bubble that is Silicon Valley and letting them collide with each other.”
