‘The Audacity’ review: Billy Magnussen and Sarah Goldberg Anchor AMC’s wicked but one-note Silicon Valley satire

since Vice President After its run ended in 2019, there was a recurring remark that HBO’s political comedy couldn’t work today. Our actual political landscape, where government officials add journalists to top-secret group chats or walk around in the wrong size shoes as a form of flattery, has far exceeded anything even the most crude jokesters could ever dream of.

In the same vein, one of the biggest mistakes that has plagued AMC The audacity It may be timing. Created by succession and You’d better call Saul alum Jonathan Glatzer, the series attempts to deliver a searing dark satire of corruption in Silicon Valley at a point when we are confronted with its most damaging manifestations every time we log in to find terrifying headlines about “AI psychosis,” or the latest racist rhetoric from the most dedicated X user in power. If the show’s cynicism rings true on the money, it doesn’t seem to show us anything we’re not all already aware of.

The audacityThe film’s plot is pungent enough to make your lips pucker. Set in the Bay Area, the series stars Duncan (Billy Magnussen), a startup executive on the verge of professional humiliation, and his therapist Joan (Sarah Goldberg), who copes with her relative poverty — by which I mean she and her husband, Gary (Paul Adelstein), make enough money to rent an $8 million house but not to buy one — by using information gleaned from her clients in the tech industry to engage in a bit of insider trading. When Duncan learned of her scheme, he was not so much insulted as excited, and he took the opportunity to blackmail her into passing on advice and contacts that might advance his career.

From there, The audacity It turns into a dizzying web of alliances, betrayals and reversals of fortune. Some involve predictable dealings, such as Duncan trying to attract a prickly industry legend (Bardolph, Zach Galifianakis) as an investor, or trying to fend off an unexciting government contract from an idealistic Iraq war vet (Tom Rob Corddry). Others get more personal, as when Anushka (Meaghan Rath), the chief ethicist at a giant Google-like corporation, and her eccentric inventor husband, Martin (Simon Helberg), have doubts about his work. A confusing and ultimately unsatisfying amount also revolves around what happens at Las Altas, the private high school that all of the characters’ children attend.

Through all these topics The audacity He throws himself headlong into some of the biggest hot topics in technology, including privacy and artificial intelligence, and into a strangely tepid subplot involving Joan’s son, Orson, played by the atmospheric Everett Blink, with an eye as cold as his characters. He paints a picture of a world in which everyone is a genius, yet no one seems to have even an ounce of self-awareness; Where everyone wants to take over the world but has no more interesting vision than trying to monetize every last bit of it. On the rare occasion that anyone thinks about trying to help people, things seem to end only one of two ways: soul-crushing humiliation, or a check big enough to make the sale seem worth it.

If this picture of the tech industry is unpleasant, it’s hard to say it’s not true. A line like, “Raising money from foam numbers to corral a rotten apple is what built this city. It’s not a scam,” sounds less like a sarcasm than a quote from a tech con artist’s sensationalist pitch (which will no doubt one day be made into a prestige limited series). maybe The audacity Rather, in her own way, she is trying to make a difference in the real world. It’s hard to hear these people bragging that “regulations are an intentional joke” or bragging about data-mining algorithms that “would make the Patriot Act red” without hearing an echo of John Oliver’s call to action.

But reversing reality is not the same as giving it a new, sharp, or even funny twist, and that’s a problem for us. The audacity So much so that many of the jokes could hardly be considered jokes at all in 2026. As with the modern theoretical version of Vice Presidentthere is a feeling that the truth is already beginning to play with the imagination. The same week I watched Duncan grumble about how much venture capitalists love sociopaths like him, I read a profile on OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who multiple sources described as one. As Joan tried to figure out whether a particular piece of information might be a reason to buy or sell a stock, I found myself wondering if she might not get more direct results from the prediction market.

The audacity Being a little behind the times would be less of a problem if – e.g succession (on which Glatzer wrote) or industry Before that, there are also events set in the dark corridors of power and inhabited by hateful and despicable people – the series manages to present characters that are rich, complex and vivid enough to want to follow them from chapter to chapter. But ironically or very appropriately for a show that features therapists so prominently, The audacity He seems to have psychoanalyzed his characters to the point of abstraction.

Although their energies are different, they almost all share the same basic motivations (money, power, status) and the same basic flaws (greed, arrogance, selfishness). Despite strong performances across the board — Magnussen’s maniacal glamor and Goldberg’s stony glare mesh well with each other, and Bardolph feels like a darker, more exhausting spin on the male children that Galifianakis outplays — they just feel like a collective composite of Silicon Valley rot, rather than a collection of separate souls. Individuals are not allowed much internal conflict, let alone development. The people at the end of the eight hour-long episodes are pretty much the people we’ve known all along.

As Joan lashes out at Duncan when he tries to scare her by releasing the most private details he’s gathered about her from his digital surveillance program, “Information is not insight.” Knowing something does not mean having something convincing to say about it. As an uncompromising deep dive into Silicon Valley’s identity, The audacity It sounds impressive, even depressing, and believable. But if you really want to see how silly and dirty things can get into the tech industry? You’re better off following the news in real time and waiting for reality to overtake it.