‘The Audacity’ Creator Breaks Down His Damaged Characters

[This story contains some spoilers for the first two episodes of The Audacity on AMC and AMC+.]

The Audacity is not going to be the thing that breaks the grip big tech has on our lives. That’s not a judgment — it’s the belief of the show’s creator.

“It has been a revolution, and I also eagerly and willingly say they won,” Jonathan Glatzer told The Hollywood Reporter. “I can’t battle against that with satire. It’s just not going to work.”

What Glatzer does hope the Silicon Valley-set AMC series, which premiered April 12, can do is “hold up a mirror and just say, do we want this? Is this what we want? Because we are working at a human time scale versus the computers, we’re slower, right? It takes a while for the scales to fall from our eyes, but you’re starting to see much more of a pushback against tech.”

The Audacity stars Billy Magnussen as Duncan Park, the CEO of a data-mining company who’s desperate to join the billionaire class; Sarah Goldberg as JoAnne Felder, a therapist who has Duncan and other tech CEOs as clients; Meaghan Rath as Bhattachera-Phister, an executive at a Google- or Apple-esque giant with personal ties to Duncan; and Zach Galifianakis as Carl Bardolph, a Silicon Valley legend and one of JoAnne’s clients. Rob Corddry, Simon Helberg, Lucy Punch, Paul Adelstein and Jess Harper also star.

Glatzer — whose previous TV work includes Succession, Better Call Saul and Bloodline — talked with THR about his research for the show (and why he eventually cut it off), why Goldberg’s character is so central to the story and what he hopes viewers see in the characters. AMC has already ordered a second season of the show; season one will run eight episodes. The interview below is edited and condensed.

Watching this show made me think of Mike Judge’s Silicon Valley. That was very funny and poked a lot of holes in in the culture of the valley, and it wasn’t that long ago, but it almost seems quaint now. What about this moment in that world did you really want to explore with The Audacity?

I had the same experience. I rewatched it just before I started writing this — I wanted to make sure I wasn’t stepping on any ground that had been covered so well by them. There were a few things where I was like, “Dammit. I was doing that and now I can’t.” But overall, it was actually heartening to see that it’s time to go back there and look at it through the lens of how we went from a time of hope and “We’re going to change the world” — there was a jauntiness to the whole enterprise, and it went from jaunty to jaundiced.

Everybody in tech, I believe, had the genuine desire to improve and to expand communication, to bring down walls keeping people from information and facts and knowledge, and to increase tolerance, and all of these things. Obviously a certain amount of that was lip service. But I believe that it was genuine. And then they realized that what they created, whether by design or intentionally, was something that didn’t help communication. It kind of separated us. There was a bifurcation. Tolerance to new ideas and to other people was significantly lessened, there was a tribalism that started to develop, and everything that they set out to do was kind of going in the opposite direction. But the thing was, they were making so much fucking money doing it. And I’m sure in their heads they were like, “Well, maybe this is what people want. And who are we to say how they should communicate with each other, or how they should love or hate each other?”

I think that’s really where we’re at now — tech has become so powerful. The ability to profile individuals and users is beyond anything that we can imagine. It’s quite terrifying when you get down into the details of how much we are being monitored — how we interact with each other, how we linger over one image versus another, how we shop, how we eat, how we masturbate, and all of it is being monitored. All of it is being logged. I do think that that once you kind of look under the hood and see what is really driving the profit centers of Silicon Valley — there’s the hardware, to some extent, but mostly it’s us. Mostly it’s personal data that is, in fact, the profit center. Silicon Valley, the show, doesn’t deal with any of those issues.

I was really interested in how the show uses JoAnne’s therapy practice as a way into meeting and exploring some of the other characters. Where did that idea come from? And it also seems to me that a lot of these guys in real life probably would not see a therapist unless they were court ordered to or something like that.

There are a lot of life coaches out there, and a lot of in-house psychologists at companies. It is more pro-business perhaps than traditional therapy is. But anything that they overhear is optimizing or worked well for so and so billionaire can turn into a fad or a desired thing very quickly. These two, JoAnne and her husband Gary [Adelstein], are kind of the go-to therapists in this community. I don’t think that somebody like a Zuckerberg is walking through their door, but I do think that a lot of these guys have daddy issues. A lot of them have anger issues. I think a lot of them have stuff that traditional therapy is still the best avenue for.

The impetus for it came from growing up in a house that is basically that house. My mother was a therapist. My stepfather was a psychiatrist. I could hear the sessions as I was growing up, and when you’re 15 and you’re rebelling against your parents, and you’re hearing them give life advice to strangers, you can hear how canned it was. That was my response to it [at the time], that this all sounds very inauthentic. I don’t cast aspersions on therapy in general, but there is also a bit of a faith-based aspect to therapy, that this is a sacred space. What you say in here is completely private, and that is the professional nature of doctor-patient confidentiality. In the meantime, there’s a 15-year-old listening in, eating his Honeycombs and going “Ooh that’s weird” [JoAnne’s son Orson, played by Everett Blunck, eavesdrops on her sessions in the series]. That was me. So applying that to this high-stakes environment seemed like a really interesting idea, plus the idea of privacy and the illusion of it being an ongoing theme.

JoAnne commits what seems like a pretty serious ethics violation in trading off the things she hears from her clients.

I think that she feels, probably rightly, she has helped these people make more money, make better decisions, perhaps saved people’s jobs along the way, and she’s still getting an hourly wage for it. Where’s the justice in that? Money is the ultimate barometer for success, and she ought to be getting a piece. She ought to be getting an agent’s fee of some kind. That really eats away at her, and in this environment with this ethos, it’s not a leap for her to say, “My God, the amount of money that I could make with the knowledge that is coming to me daily, if I just invested smartly based on this information. Yes, it’s insider trading, but it’s also, I am helping them make more money. I am directly helping them make more money.”

What kind of research did you do for the show? Did you talk to people currently or formerly in the industry, listen to the many podcasts tech CEOs do?

I spent time up there, spent time with some of these people. Then I cut it off at some point, because I did not want to be an expert in this world. I felt like, particularly with a satire, you need to be the one outside looking in. There’s a coziness that starts to develop with your subject if you’re not careful. It’s like Almost Famous — “These are not your friends.” There was a point at which I was like, I got it. I’m good. I got what I need, and now, hopefully what I will apply to these characters is not specific to them being creatures of tech, but simply creatures of life and humanity, and the trials and tribulations of being one of 7.5 billion. You’re just another person at the end of the day. That really was the guiding principle for making the tech aspect of it the backdrop. The foreground was these characters, and to constantly humanize them. And in some ways, I suppose inasmuch as I wanted to send a message to the Silicon Valley community, it’s that we’re all human. You’re just as likely to walk around with your fly down as anybody else.

That leads nicely into my next question, which is whether you think there will be people in the show that that the audience empathizes or sympathizes with. For me, it came down to the kids in the show who are being messed up by their parents and Tom [Corddry], who’s at least trying to make things better for the VA.

Yeah, and Gary, the psychiatrist, is a good guy. Carl, Zach Galifianakis’ character, we’re always talking about it being this pendulum swing — he wants to leave a legacy of good, but he’s also a hungry, hungry hippo. He’s not just a product of the valley. He’s one of the authors of that ethos, because he was there early on. But that desire, that fork in the road that a lot of these guys who are the tech titans come to where it’s like, I could either leave a legacy of good, or I could go Dr. Evil.

I do think that if you’re writing or you’re acting, you have no choice but to regard your characters as fully formed humans whose ambitions are informed by their insecurities, whose desire for profit is to fill some unfillable hole. It’s not like I’m fishing for the audience’s sympathy, necessarily. But it is important.

If you have issues with what tech has come to, if you have issues with how AI is being empowered by these guys to take over, and if you have issues with the $3 trillion that they’re putting into the data centers to superpower a technology that is not fully understood and hasn’t really proven its greatest ambitions — cancer still exists. They haven’t cured that yet. Climate change is still a thing, and they’re just making it worse. If all of that is a splinter in your brain, you might be reluctant to want to humanize characters who seem to be representing that world. But it’s the only way forward to humanize them and to remind them of their humanity, to remind them of their mortality.