The Audacity Recap: Privacy Notice

The Audacity

Vanitas

Season 1

Episode 4

Editor’s Rating

2 stars

Duncan believes he’s just pulled a brilliant move without realizing he’s leaving himself vulnerable to another of JoAnne’s clients.
Photo: Ed Araquel/AMC

“Vanitas” is now available on AMC+ ahead of its 9 p.m. ET broadcast next Sunday.

A satire like The Audacity does not necessarily need to be a plot machine, given that the main goal here is target practice, lampooning the excesses and depravity of Silicon Valley’s world-beating elite. But it does need at least one box that needs to be checked: The two main characters, Duncan and JoAnne, will collaborate to use the information gleaned from JoAnne’s therapy sessions with various tech billionaires to gain a lucrative edge in business. Now, there are good reasons for this inevitability to get kicked down the road, specifically for JoAnne, who doesn’t trust Duncan and doesn’t want to break the law, at least not so flagrantly. It’s one thing for her to nurse her own little criminal enterprise off her clients’ kvetching, but to scale the operation up in partnership with a reckless, narcissistic, and flagrantly idiotic tech visionary.

With the first season now hitting the halfway mark, however, the continued delay over putting their scheme into action makes it feel like the show is running in place. There’s a bevy of subplots around Duncan and JoAnne, but without the gravitational force of the two working together, however reluctantly, the other characters feel like they’re drifting around in the ether. And while the performances and the writing are still spackled with amusing barbs and observations about some of the grossest people in American life, The Audacity is missing a crucial forward momentum. We’ve gotten four hours into a story that has finished the set-up phase yet, and it’s starting to feel a bit stale, even for a series that isn’t — and needn’t be — driven by incident.

Nevertheless, this fourth episode does move the needle a little. For one, there’s a pressing reminder that JoAnne, while a well-paid and sought-after therapist, is a pauper and an imposter relative to her neighbors in Palo Alto. While she was able to arrange for Orson to get into the private Stanford feeder school where all the other rich kids go, his tuition is paid by scholarship, which makes him such a second-class citizen at the school that the administration was prepared to stick him in the dining hall indefinitely until his transcripts arrived. Now the kindly old landlord who rented them their house — even the cops in last week’s episode were flabbergasted that she and Gary didn’t own it — has died, and their fate rests in the hands of his daughter Beth, who isn’t as inclined to look past the value of a $7.5 million home. So now JoAnne faces the likelihood of her new landlord either jacking up the rent or selling the house out from under them, two options that would price them out of the neighborhood for good. In other words, she’s going to need a significant cash influx.

To that end, Duncan keeps pushing her to comply with his plan, starting with the late-night call that opens the episode with Duncan stark naked in the moonlight, extolling the therapeutic power of self-love. (That his wife Lili wants nothing to do with him is beside the point. Much like Tony in The Sopranos, therapy for Duncan has become the process of transforming himself into a more malignant and fully actualized narcissist.) “You tried to cut me off at the knees, but I grew new shins,” says Duncan, in a typically moronic soliloquy. “And now I am big enough to forgive you.” But the one edge that Duncan has is simply to keep JoAnne on the hook because she continues to be useful for him, even if she’s not deliberately feeding him information.

At a school function, Duncan finally succeeds in getting JoAnne to talk to him, but her efforts to funnel him to a different therapist lead inadvertently to his next big score. She tries to describe another client with similar issues, but her vague terms are not vague enough for Duncan to realize she’s talking about a board member at Smote, a company run by another vile tech oligarch named Orlando Lee. (Lee is known for pushing his employees so hard that he makes them wear astronaut diapers when they’re coding.) The buzz around JoAnne’s sessions is that Lee is about to be pushed out of the company, which will lead to a series of predictable market fluctuations. If a savvy person can take advantage and “ride the wave,” then he or she could make a lot of money off that information.

And so with that small nugget of gossip, the A-plot of the episode propels itself forward, elegantly linking up with Duncan’s tenuous new relationship to Carl Bardolph, who’s so eager to return to his old, ruthless, borderline psychotic self that he fires JoAnne to keep her from holding him back any longer. Now, in return for the $300 million investment that will keep Hypergnosis afloat, Carl expects immediate benefits from Duncan’s nefarious data-collection operation. This leads to a lively scene where Carl and his glowering right-hand man make an impromptu visit to Hypergnosis headquarters and demand a demonstration of Duncan’s snooping network. Harper obliges by showing him satellite footage of her machine, “Gnodin,” targeting a man with a coffee coupon notification on his phone and bragging that there’s a 72 percent chance of him using it. Carl is so disgusted by this benign invasion of privacy that he nearly walks out of the room.

While Duncan is able to reassure Carl that Gnodin can be used for far more insidious purposes, the scene is by far the most satirically potent in the episode, because it suggests that the algorithms that already lead consumers to products on the internet are merely the starting point for a darker stake in their personal information. Of course, because Duncan is a dum-dum, he doesn’t realize that Orlando Lee was once Carl’s protégé, leaving him entirely vulnerable to a man who already doesn’t respect him and would shiv him in the belly without giving it a second thought. That Carl ultimately decides to keep his mouth shut as Lee exits the company is a huge short-term win for Duncan, but it puts JoAnne in the precarious position of associating with one man who’s blackmailing her and another who just fired her as his therapist.

The end of the episode does finally feel like The Audacity is ready to deliver more fully on its premise, which will surely draw characters like Anushka, Martin, Lili, Gary, and Tom Ruffage closer to the center of the narrative, rather than feeling like they’re permanently relegated to the margins. But the show’s interest in shredding these awful creatures has started to feel too narrow in purpose. You can only spin your wheels so long before you have to move forward.

Anushka is feeling so insecure over her husband rejecting her help with Xander that she touts her full résumé, including a Rhodes scholarship, a philosophy doctorate from Oxford, and a book that was on the New York Times’ bestseller list for a week. But her desperation seems exposed at Cupertino, too, where Little Tim mocks her for her dim suggestion that psychotherapists be deployed to the company’s Guangzhou factory to cool down a labor crisis. “Well, they’re rioting now,” reports Little Tim, “so I guess the window for mindfulness has officially closed.”

“We love science/We love facts/Now we need a place to run some laps. Krypton, tungsten, molybdenum, and radium/Help us finance a brand-new stadium!” The nerds at Orson’s school are going to need an extra-large scoreboard to hold all the points opponents will be scoring on them.

• Lili hiring the wrong Black woman out of the two who spoke at an education conference in Aspen is completely in character. Yet as she and her hire, Beatrice Webb, are lounging in the mud baths at a Napa resort, waiting for a meeting with a wealthy donor named Pippa Tang, Lili makes it clear that she cannot be shamed about anything. “I don’t come from great wealth,” she admits, “but I practice radical acceptance and now being rich is second nature.”

• The small tungsten cube has been recovered. The fallout over the theft of the small tungsten cube will continue, however.

• The subplot around the VA using Hypergnosis technology to organize its data hasn’t borne much fruit, but there are some good jokes here and there about the government’s ancient technologies. This week, we learn about the MUMPS system, a pre-moon-landing software that’s so hard to access that engineers need to be brought out of retirement to use it.

• Orson’s deteriorating gut health leads to an appointment with an alternative “nutritionist” who could teach JoAnne a thing or two about bilking the ultra-wealthy. One appointment and a dodgy liquid that will straighten up Orson’s “microflora economy” costs Gary $1,962, which insurance won’t cover. (“They only cover phallocentric, Western-normative treatments.”)