Summary
The Audacity continues to reveal its characters are worse than we imagined in “Shine Brightly”, which is pretty much the point, even if the storytelling is becoming slightly muddled.
I’ve always hated the naive – and, frankly, entirely incorrect – idea that characters in stories have to be “likeable” or “relatable”. There are all-time-great stories exclusively about deplorable people, and the need to redeem or even humanise anyone isn’t mandatory. In a show like The Audacity, the awfulness is the point. It doesn’t work as well if you like anyone, because part of the fun is in plumbing the depths of their self-serving depravity. Episode 2, “Shine Brightly”, very much indulges in this idea. It even pretends it’s going to make characters more relatable before pulling the rug and making them look worse than before.
The best example of this is JoAnne investigating the supposed break-in of her cellar, which she doesn’t know was committed by Orson. Her worry about a potential intruder causes a spiral of paranoia that includes asking Orson to change all of her passwords. Her computer passcode is his birthday… or so she thinks. It’s actually the birthday of an old family dog, which is the day after Orson’s. She has been late in celebrating her own son’s birthday every year because she got it mixed up with a dead pet. Now that’s love.
And that’s also the point. Just when it seemed like JoAnne was showing a flicker of affection for the kid she fought not to have custody of, she reveals to barely be paying attention to his existence, which is how he ended up in that cellar in the first place. She’s not really concerned about an intruder; she’s concerned about a conspirator, someone who might know that Duncan confronted her about her darkest secret. Of course, she doesn’t realise that Orson is that person, and that if she paid more attention to him, it’d solve most of her problems.
As I pointed out in the premiere recap, part of what The Audacity is doing here is drawing very deliberate parallels between JoAnne and Duncan, even though socio-economically, she’s not in the same bracket. She rents the kind of house that her neighbors own outright; she’s having to commit crimes just to fund the same Stanford feeder school that everyone else’s kids get into as a matter of course. Well, should get into, anyway. Jamie’s SAT scores are nowhere near the level, so emergency measures are being deployed, some of which are fungally-enhanced, others more financially oriented. Either way, the idea of not going to Stanford isn’t really floated, and Jamie’s opinions on the matter aren’t considered.
I noticed that Duncan’s primary way of bonding with Jamie is letting her eat whatever she wants, since Lili is fastidious about fat-shaming her, which struck me as illuminating. It’s like even his ostensibly kind overtures are really just acts of petty rebellion. It’s another side to the idea of every parental relationship being built around the kids as an extension of their parents’ reputation or a facet of their scheming. There’s no wonder they’re upset.
And the kids are upset. They might represent the only consistent source of humanity in The Audacity Episode 2, which is otherwise built around the twin narrative prongs of JoAnne’s worsening paranoia, since she becomes obsessed with acquiring a gun for protection, and Duncan’s increasingly violating efforts to contact her, both through his algorithm and more direct means. Naturally, the two strands eventually intertwine, with Duncan worrying that JoAnne might be planning to kill him.
I think this is a red herring. “Shine Brightly” toys with the idea of its two main characters killing each other, but it never fully commits to it, and I think the bigger, funnier show emerges when they begin reluctantly working together instead. There are marks aplenty in Palo Alto – Carl Bardolph being the biggest, as I mentioned in the premiere recap – and both Duncan and JoAnne stand to benefit. The drama lives in how all their scheming will inevitably go wrong, and the lengths that both of them will go to – probably at the expense of the people they purport to care about – when that happens.
