AMC's Latest Series Has the Potential to Put the Streamer Back on the Map

Jonathan Glatzer was a writer on two of the all-time greatest television series, Succession and Better Call Saul, as well as the underrated Bloodline. Audacity is his own creation, and he bring along with him writers from Mad Men, Damages, the first season of Beef, and even Twisted Metal. It is a stacked writers room to go along with a stacked cast of long-time character actors doing some of their finest work, Billy Magnussen (Road House), in particular, right alongside Barry’s exceptional Sarah Goldberg.

The series is essentially a collision between Succession and Silicon Valley, and like the characters in the former, these people are as thoroughly awful as they are compulsively watchable. Magnussen plays Duncan, a tech-billionaire has-been coasting on the fortune made by his former partner, desperate to claw his way back into relevance. Duncan wants to be a sociopath — he actually rages at a therapist who has the audacity to diagnose him as neurotypical, as if being told he’s perfectly normal is the cruelest possible insult. He’s keyed up, pathetically insecure, and yet somehow disgustingly arrogant: the tech-bro equivalent of Veep’s Jonah Ryan.

That insecurity tethers him to Joanne Felder (Goldberg), his therapist, who is nearly as frantic and unmoored as Duncan himself. Her clientele consists almost entirely of insecure tech billionaires, all competing for her validation, yet she can’t even effectively raise her son, Owen (Everett Blunck), a teenager with comically catastrophic bowel issues. Felder is also trading stocks on insider information gleaned from her clients — which Duncan discovers, because his latest venture is a freakishly invasive AI data-mining operation — and promptly blackmails her into connecting him with a major tech investor.

That’s where Zach Galifianakis enters. He plays Carl Bardolph, a billionaire who harbors a violent contempt for nearly everyone, rivaled only by his contempt for himself. Lucy Punch also stars as Duncan’s wife — a role that feels deliberately underwritten so far, which suggests something more significant is being held in reserve — and Simon Helberg plays a tech inventor blissfully oblivious to the fact that his wife is sleeping with Duncan, at least during the periods when she doesn’t find Duncan too pathetically unbearable to bother.

It’s a rich, volatile stew of characters, and while the series takes a couple of episodes to fully congeal, it soars by the third, which genuinely rivals some of the better Succession episodes. These people are so thoroughly rotten, and there’s something deeply, almost guiltily satisfying about watching the obscenely wealthy contend with miseries entirely of their own making.

But the whole enterprise is so sharply written, so carefully observed, and so thematically loaded that the nastiness feels earned rather than gratuitous. It’s far too early to know whether Audacity can sustain, much less build on, its early momentum — but AMC’s decision to renew it before the first season even aired starts to make a lot of sense: there’s real potential here for this show to put AMC back on the map in a meaningful way. It carries that dense, layered texture reminiscent of Mad Men, along with the go-for-broke freneticism of Succession, and after this latest episode, I think I might genuinely love it. I just hope it can find the audience it deserves.