Jonathan Glatzer Compares ‘The Audacity’ To A Tech ‘Peyton Place’

AMC showed off its latest drama series The Audacity last night with creator Jonathan Glatzer comparing the Billy Magnussen and Sarah Goldberg-fronted show to Peyton Place if it was set in a tech bubble.

Glatzer, who previously worked on AMC’s Better Call Saul and HBO’s Succession, spoke at the LA premiere of the eight-part drama.

“This is a night for gratitude. I think that’s probably the best approach. It’s either that or a full-on crazy coke fueled [night] and that’s not my bag,” he joked.

He said that Dan McDermott, Chief Content Officer and President at AMC Networks, called him with the idea of doing something in the tech world. “I said I’m not sure, but the people there seem really curious to me. What if we just expanded that and made it look almost like a Peyton Place inside of this bubble with psychiatrists, there’s a private school and there’s a guy from the VA,” he said. “I think the point of it was, tech affects all of our lives. It’s in all of our lives. It’s in all of our everything. To just do something that takes place in an office seemed much just very reductive. Seven and a half billion of us are users of tech one way or another, and they know it, and that’s where the story starts to go.”

The Audacity is set inside the bubble of Silicon Valley and takes on the warped dreams, outsized egos, and ethical lapses of the self-styled inventors of the future. In a world of jaded billionaires, psychiatrist-gurus, bio-hacked tech bros, AI labs and disillusioned teens being optimized in elite private schools, an audacious data-mining CEO (Magnussen) strives to turn insight and influence into profit and power. The darkly comedic drama confronts reality, privacy, and the delusions fueling our ever-changing world.

The series also stars Sarah Goldberg, Zach Galifianakis, Lucy Punch, Simon Helberg and Rob Corddry.

Goldberg plays a therapist, something that was familiar to Glatzer. “My mother is here. I did grow up in a house with a psychiatrist and a therapist and well, you’ll see some of that in this story. In no way is the part that is played so brilliantly by Sarah Goldberg with castrating Zionist kind of energy, based on my mom,” he joked.

The series launches on AMC and AMC+ on April 12. Glatzer serves as creator, writer and exec producer with Gina Mingacci as exec producer of the AMC Studios production.

McDermott called the series “timely, insightful and wickedly authentic”. He said that the company greenlight the series two weeks after receiving a draft script from Glatzer and it renewed it, as revealed by Deadline, ahead of its Season 1 premiere.  

“We knew we had something special,” he added. “We assembled a lineup of writers, directors and cast that is among the most talented ever to be assembled at AMC. The Audacity takes the audience on a deep dive into a world that is inventing the future as quickly as it’s reinventing itself, while the show features razor sharp writing, singular characters and a propulsive narrative that races through every corner of the Valley at breakneck pace. It never forgets that behind all the technology, the jargon, the billions of dollars, are fully dimensional people who have strength and flaws, and above all else, are deeply human.”