‘The Audacity’ Episode 1 Recap – Lifestyles of the Rich and the Stupid

Jonathan Glatzer’s TV résumé is tough to argue with, but it’s difficult to watch his Silicon Valley satire The Audacity and not feel like the most audacious thing is how nakedly it attempts to recapture the lightning-in-a-bottle success of Succession, albeit on AMC instead of HBO. Not that this is a rip-off, or anything quite so accusatory. Glatzer did, after all, work on that masterpiece of cynical rich people skewering, and its ideas remain as relevant now as they ever were. But it’s undeniable that Episode 1, “Best Of All Possible Worlds”, exists in an entertainment climate where everyone has seen its closest influences and needs to be reassured that it can at least be as good as them, if not necessarily better.

What’s also undeniable is that The Audacity couldn’t be arriving at a better time, at least in terms of overriding eat-the-rich sentiment and general apathy towards posturing Palo Alto tech-bros whose rapacious appetites are rivalled only by their disinterest in personal data protection. Its most reassuring thesis is that even the richest and most successful among us are not-so-secretly losing their marbles, circling a drain of financial and reputational ruin with such velocity that they almost all require a therapist – and, in an ironic twist, that the therapist they’re confiding in uses the insider information they’re unburdening themselves of to inform her own trading positions.

And thus, we have a premise. Duncan Park, the CEO of a weirdly nebulous company called Hypergnosis, which seems to hinge entirely on the efficiency with which a coder named Harper can use a bespoke algorithm to mine personal information, realises that his therapist, JoAnne Felder, is using her position as Palo Alto’s premiere “performance psychologist” to keep herself in a BMW and her eccentric, unhappy son Orson in a Stanford feeder school. Duncan is a criminal of the white-collar variety – he has been juicing the company stock price by leaking rumours of a pending acquisition – whom JoAnne manipulates into revealing details of his corporate secrets by leveraging doctor-patient confidentiality.

The Audacity isn’t very sneaky about Duncan and JoAnne being two sides of the same coin; on the contrary, Episode 1 is mostly just about the former catching up with the latter. Naturally, JoAnne never really suspects he will, since most of her clients are so self-interested that they barely notice she exists, but Duncan is more desperate than most, and can use his company algorithm to unethically unearth JoAnne’s side hustle. He’s not interested in exposing her, though, but instead using her privileged position to get the inside track on his business rivals and reverse his potentially calamitous fortunes.

That’s the main thrust of “Best Of All Possible Worlds”, and will obviously give the show its shape going forward, but most of the interesting stuff is to be found in Duncan and JoAnne’s equally spiralling personal lives. Another thing they have in common is general disinterest when it comes to their children. Duncan and his wife, Lili, barely pay attention to their daughter, Jamison, and JoAnne and her husband both fought in their separation to not have custody of Orson, whose status as a lonely oddball burden ironically makes him one of the most powerful characters in the show, since nobody ever notices that he’s there.

Duncan and Lili are seeing other people; him Anushka, the “Director of Ethical Innovation” at the company that he wants to acquire Hypergnosis but won’t, and her a Finnish CFO whose interests, according to Duncan’s algorithm, include wheat beer, herring, and anal. Anushka’s position seems to imply that even Duncan’s extramarital dalliances are strictly transactional. We also get a glimpse into her own home life, which is equally dysfunctional. Her husband, Martin, is building an “autonomous companion for alienated teens”, presumably because their daughter, Tess, is a goth kleptomaniac who visibly resents them both.

Much like how Duncan and JoAnne are positioned as unlikely contemporaries, so are Tess and Orson, although the only time we see them interact is when the latter spots the former stealing something from Duncan’s library and worries that he might be suspected as the thief. The Audacity concentrates power, at least of a kind, in the hands of its overlooked child characters by ensuring that they’re never paid any attention to. Their neglect makes them sleeper agents in a world they’re probably too young to understand, but are definitely old enough to resent. This most especially applies to Orson, who, at the end of the premiere, finds a room in JoAnne’s basement located directly beneath the thin floor of her home office, and thus overhears Duncan confronting her. He’s now one of only three people in all of Silicon Valley who is aware of a scheme to defraud most of its wealthy denizens, and he’s also the most likely to do the right thing with that information. The question is whether he will, or whether he’s so fed up with his circumstances that he’ll use it for something else entirely.

And Another Thing…

A couple of other notes and observations from The Audacity Episode 1 that didn’t fit into the recap proper:

• We’re also introduced to Tom Ruffage, an undersecretary who’s trying to streamline Veterans Affairs bureaucracy through a tech partnership, and failing miserably. It’s unclear how this guy fits into the broader plot, and indeed whether he’s serious about his ostensibly altruistic mission or is instead just enjoying Silicon Valley’s amenities.
• One of JoAnne’s clients is Carl Bardolph, an extremely fed-up tech billionaire who is appalled at ordinary people being snooty about Silicon Valley on account of people like him having “built everything they touch”. Again, not sure how he’s going to fit in, but a point is made about him being extremely wealthy, even by Palo Alto standards, so he’ll probably make a suitably fun mark for Duncan and JoAnne down the line.

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