The Audacity is a fearless satire taking on Silicon Valley’s ‘egomaniac weirdos’. Its creator and stars talk ayahuasca ceremonies, mining kids for data – and punching CEOs
Showrunner Jonathan Glatzer wanted the tagline of his latest TV creation to be: “We’re so fucked.” He laughs. “Sadly it got rejected by the network. Hey, maybe I can use it for season two!” The show in question is The Audacity, his darkly comic drama about AI tech titans. Instead, it went with the more PG tagline “Move fast and break people” – a twist on “Move fast and break things”, the Facebook motto coined by Mark Zuckerberg. The Audacity promises to do for tech bros what Succession did for legacy media. Considering Glatzer is a former writer on Succession, that is no empty threat.
This acerbic and all-too-timely Silicon Valley satire follows CEO Duncan Park (played by Billy Magnussen), the obscenely wealthy founder of a data analytics company. He’s a self-proclaimed “inventor of the future” who also happens to be a morally bankrupt man-baby. “Duncan is worth about half a billion,” says Glatzer. “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.”