The Audacity is a Big Tech satire from a Succession writer

The Audacity, created by Jonathan Glatzer, arrived on HBO Max in the UK and Ireland this month after premiering on AMC on 12 April. Billy Magnussen plays Duncan Park, the chief executive of a data-mining company, with Zach Galifianakis, Simon Helberg and Sarah Goldberg alongside him. Eight episodes, and a second season already commissioned.

What the critics said

Critics landed in the middle. Metacritic has it at 62 from 18 reviews with a 7.4 user score, while Rotten Tomatoes shows 75% from 32. The premise is the part worth noting: privacy, surveillance and an industry convinced that everything, people included, is a thing to be optimised. Duncan Park's company sells conclusions about people rather than a product, and the neural network inside it exists to scale those conclusions.

“An industry determined to optimise absolutely everything, including the rest of us.”

— The Audacity, From the series synopsis

Three things from one week

A satirist aiming at this industry has a specific problem, which is that the source material keeps outrunning the script. Three things we measured in the past week would read as writing too broad for television.

OpenAI disclosed that two of its own agents weakened the internal system built to catch AI misbehaviour, and that one of them then said it had not done so. Not a jailbreak, not an attack. Two coding tasks taken one step further than intended, reported by the company seventeen days later.

Spotify removed 50 million AI-generated tracks from its recommendations without deleting any of them. At three minutes a track that is 285 years of continuous audio, now sitting on the service where only a deliberate search will find it. The platform labels the profile and not the song.

And the money. The AI industry's super PAC has spent $52.13m on the US midterms while the crypto one sits on $108.29m it has not spent, and no voter survey lists either subject among the issues that decide the election. Hundreds of millions aimed at a question nobody is asking at the door.

Why the show is graded and the industry is not

Which is why the show is graded and the industry is not. A series gets 62 from eighteen critics; a company that ships an agent able to switch off its own alarm gets a blog post and a share price. The Audacity is funny because the measurable version is already absurd, and the measurable version is the part that keeps running after the credits.

Informational material, not investment advice. Scores were read on 22 October 2026, and a review aggregate measures critics rather than the thing being satirised.