Comedies about Big Tech used to be funny. Now they’re just unsettling

The Audacity ★★★½

What do we owe the overseers of Big Tech? Should we be happily mocking the digital aristocracy, the men who sold the world, or finding the means to put them on trial? If you’re leaning towards the former, then this blackly comic dissection of Palo Alto privilege and pettiness will prove plenty satisfying. Set in America’s wealthiest enclave, where the rules that hold a society together are being steadily erased by profit expectations, this series successfully alternates scalpel satire and flatheaded farce.

The narrative runs to the mood of its characters, notably wealthy CEO Duncan Park (Billy Magnussen), whose latest company, data miner Hypergnosis, is not getting the lucrative buyout he anticipated. Entitled, erratic, and possessing a vulnerable ego – “I fear humiliation,” he declares – Duncan lacks not only grace and insight, but also a clear understanding of what fraud is. “I can Viagra the stock price,” he says, convinced that’s a good thing and not, you know, fraud.

It’s not entirely a surprise that the show’s creator, Jonathan Glatzer, has a CV that includes several episodes from the first two seasons of Succession. We watch scripted television in a post-Roy world, and The Audacity gets the snippy banter and bullying power down pat, although it doesn’t quite nail the tragic undertow. Duncan is demanding of everyone, including his therapist, Dr Joanne Felder (Sarah Goldberg). Helping him is a thankless task, which is why Joanne uses her patients’ admissions for a spot of insider trading.

The show smartly approaches these technocrats from varying perspectives. One that surprises is Tom Ruffage (Rob Corddry), an ageing bureaucrat with the Department of Veterans Affairs trying to get digital assistance for his agency’s dated infrastructure. Cynical as he is, Tom is from a different time and mindset than his those he’s (briefly) meeting with. The tech functionaries nod blankly when he explains about returned soldiers. Corddry traditionally plays blustery jerks, so Tom’s struggles to stay afloat are blithely bittersweet.

While the corporate machinations, with sides of infidelity and ayahuasca, drive the adult characters onwards, it’s the viewpoint of their children that slowly takes intriguing shape. Pampered but essentially ignored – they’re like product launches that couldn’t be recalled – these teenagers have their own world of private schools and therapists. Joanne’s son, Orson (Everett Blunck), is a new arrival, so extra bewildered. He’s even allowed a smartphone, which most tech parents ban. “Arms dealers don’t give their kids landmines,” notes Duncan’s daughter, Jamison (Ava Marie Telek).

The Audacity is not as enjoyably silly as Silicon Valley, its geographic predecessor. Even by 2019, when Mike Judge’s Emmy-winning comedy concluded, Big Tech still felt adjacent to everyday life, not underpinning it. We might be in a don’t-know-whether-to-laugh-or-cry moment, but it’s hard to get that laughter right. Glatzer mostly gets there, with some cutting anthropological detail and a cast who drag unsettling extremes to the surface – comic absurdist Zach Galifianakis plays a billionaire Palo Alto pioneer, Carl Bardolph, whose bitterness at society’s imagined ingratitude seethes with destructive fury.

SBS is doling out an episode weekly, and that’s probably the right prescription for medicine tinged with this kind of frisky bitterness. The back and forth between Duncan and Joanne keeps escaping common sense, so that the idiocy and the intrigue are intertwined. But with time to reflect, you can see what The Audacity wants to ultimately show us: the flawed people who’ve privatised our future.

The Audacity airs at 9.30pm on Wednesday, April 15, on SBS, and streams on SBS on Demand.

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