Jonathan Glatzer spent four seasons learning how to make the rich sound ugly. Now, he’s doing it to the tech sector. His new series The Audacity arrives on HBO Max with the specific mandate of turning the valley’s arrogance into art, and the comparison to Succession is immediate and unavoidable.
The Heir and the Algorithm
At the centre of the storm is Duncan Park, played by Billy Magnussen. He is the self-styled “inventor of the future” behind a data analytics firm worth roughly half a billion dollars. Glatzer, the show’s creator and a former Succession writer, describes Park as a morally bankrupt man-baby whose ambition outstrips his talent. “He’s worth about half a billion,” Glatzer says. “Naturally, that’s not enough. He desperately wants to be a billionaire and ascend to what we call ‘God Mountain’. But he’s no God.” Park’s trajectory mirrors the Roy family’s dysfunction: he is perpetually scheming, perpetually insecure, and surrounded by yes-men who enable his worst impulses. The show’s tagline, “Move fast and break people,” is a deliberate inversion of Facebook’s original motto, setting the tone for a series that takes no prisoners.
Baroque Insults and Binary Bias
The dialogue is the show’s sharpest weapon. Glatzer admits he wrote with a specific ear for the way tech billionaires talk over one another, piling on the baroque swearing that Succession fans will recognise instantly. Magnussen’s Park boasts about keeping investors “moist” and “Viagra-ing the share price to keep it up.” But the satire extends beyond mere profanity. Zach Galifianakis appears as Carl Bardolph, a billionaire who “basically created spam” and disrupts markets purely out of boredom. Galifianakis notes the eerie detachment of the tech elite, observing that a small group of math-minded men are effectively designing the futures of billions. Glatzer expands on this, pointing out that hiring algorithms often codify bias, filtering out anyone who didn’t attend the right universities or who isn’t a man. The result is a workforce that is overwhelmingly white or south Asian, a detail the show treats as both absurd and dangerous.
Red Ink and Ruined Ground
If Succession was about media empires, The Audacity is about the physical infrastructure of the internet. The series does not shy away from the environmental cost of generative AI. Glatzer is blunt: “Generative AI is environmentally ruinous. Datacentres are tremendous suckers of energy. Worryingly, it doesn’t take too many rampantly ambitious entrepreneurs to fuck up an entire planet for the rest of us.” In one early scene, Park is warned about his platform’s carbon footprint and simply shrugs, “I’ll sponsor a penguin.” The joke lands because it is darkly plausible; the show suggests that for the tech elite, ecological catastrophe is a problem to be solved with a branding exercise, not a crisis to be taken seriously.
Already Renewed
The most telling sign of The Audacity’s confidence is its speed. The second season was commissioned before the first episode had even aired, a move that speaks to the industry’s appetite for Glatzer’s particular brand of bite. With a cast that includes Magnussen, Galifianakis, and a supporting turn by Lucy Punch as Park’s beleaguered wife, the show is positioned to be the defining satire of the AI boom. It channels the same ruthless examination of wealth and power that made Succession a global hit, but updates the target for a moment when the realest threat may not be a media mogul, but a line of code.
Family Fractures and Digital Despair
The narrative scope expands beyond the boardroom to explore the domestic fallout of tech excess. Duncan’s wife, Lili, played by Lucy Punch, and his daughters are depicted as weary and maddened by his behavior, illustrating how the “tech bro” mentality permeates the household. This dynamic mirrors the Roy family’s dysfunction in Succession, where personal relationships are secondary to corporate maneuvering. In The Audacity, the chaos extends to Duncan’s therapist, JoAnne, portrayed by Sarah Goldberg. She is described as almost as gloriously hateful a character as Duncan himself, noting that she even gets the goods on him with an eye to blackmail. This relationship highlights the show’s commitment to creating complex, morally ambiguous figures rather than simple villains.
The series does not shy away from the darker implications of its setting, introducing characters who serve as foils to the main antagonists. Among them is Gary, played by Paul Adelstein, a slightly more ethical member of the same profession involved in administering ADHD tests to students. This subplot touches on the theme of small corruptions within the industry, suggesting that even those attempting to operate with integrity are complicit in the system’s broader issues. The show posits that in Silicon Valley, ethical conduct is often a matter of degree rather than absolute principle.
Amidst the high-stakes corporate warfare, the younger generation offers a counterpoint to the adult narcissism. Orson, played by Everett Blunck, is introduced as a sweet child who is heartbreakingly resigned to his fate as an afterthought in his parents’ lives. His quiet endurance provides emotional heft to the satire, grounding the absurdity of the wealthy adults in the reality of their impact on the next generation. He forms a growing friendship with Jamison’s little sister, Tess, played by Thailey Roberge, who is described as an embryonic kleptomaniac. These interactions suggest that while the adults are consumed by greed and ambition, the children navigate the fallout with a resilience that the show treats with both sympathy and gravity.
Sources
- ‘The tech bro fight club is real!’ The titans of AI get the Succession treatment in a wild new TV show
- Succession (TV series)
- The Audacity review – cracking TV packed with even more gloriously awful people than Succession
Photo: Xuthoria (CC BY-SA 4.0)
