characters

Anyone who has spent any time in the digital agora will know the chilling feeling of seeing some supposedly secret thing about yourself suddenly reflected in a targeted advertisement. In a new Silicon Valley soap, “The Audacity,” Duncan (Billy Magnussen) founds a company called PINATA, for Privacy Is Not a Thing Anymore, which will allow subscribers to snoop at a deep level on just about anyone in the world; the war against the date eaters, the name suggests, is long since lost, and is none of your business, anyway.

Created by Jonathan Glatzer who has written for “Succession” and “Better Call Saul,” the series premieres Sunday on AMC, the network of “Breaking Bad,” “Mad Men” and an earlier tech-related series, “Halt and Catch Fire,” about the rise of the personal computer — shows that focus on difficult, sometimes amoral characters whose shenanigans might change the world, not necessarily for the better. “The Audacity,” though well made enough, is not in their league.

Duncan made his fortune as a co-founder of a community app something along the lines of Facebook (which, along with Mark Zuckerberg, doesn’t exist in this silicon reality — “If only,” do I hear you sigh? Or was that me?) Now he’s trying to sell his information-gathering startup to “Cupertino” (as in the home of Apple), “the most important tech company to ever exist,” and leaking rumors he imagines will be to his advantage. Duncan is not himself a creator, or particularly smart — he thinks it’s “Schroeder’s Cat,” for example — but does have a gift for selling; his “genius” late partner, Hamish — a suicide — did the real work. Now a new Hamish enters his life in the form of Harper (Jess McLeod, whose blonde bob may remind viewers of the brilliant coder played by Mackenzie Davis on “Halt and Catch Fire”) the creator of the “algo” mentioned above.

Despite his riches, Duncan is unhappy enough to be a patient of the series’ other main character, therapist JoAnne (Sarah Goldberg). (He also has an “ayahuasca guy.”) Most prominent among her other clients is Carl (Zach Galifianakis), a semi-retired industry legend who made his money from a spam platform and whom Duncan will spend much of this eight-episode season attempting to impress. “People act like we took something as if we didn’t build everything they touch,” Carl will complain to JoAnne. “Where’s our parade? All I see are pitchforks and ingratitude.”

Sarah Goldberg plays Joanne, therapist to Duncan and Carl (Zach Galifianakis) in “The Audacity.”

(Ed Araquel/AMC)

JoAnne conducts her business from her rented home, as does her child psychiatrist (second) husband, Gary (Paul Adelstein), one of the few figures in this roundelay you will be given no reason to dislike. (It’s an old house, to contrast it with the modernist leviathans inhabited by the overly moneyed class.) Sharing the place is her weedy, newly arrived 15-year-old son, Orson (Everett Blunck), sent reluctantly from Baltimore, where his father is being treated for cancer. Orson has embarrassing gastric issues and watches alpha-male videos in the basement, where he also practices the bassoon. (That he’s working on “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” in its way a story of runaway tech, might have some thematic meaning, though it does also have a killer bassoon part.)

Something Duncan says in a session with JoAnne leads her to unload some stock, like Martha Stewart in 2004, and Duncan, working this out, blackmails her into passing on inside information from her clients to him. “You think you know everything because you have information, but information is not insight,” says JoAnne, who has insight to spare, making herself even more valuable to Duncan, whose pronouncements are more in the line of “Cheaters never lose, and losers, they never cheat” and “Empathetic is just pathetic with a prefix — I am an apex predator.”

Anushka (Meaghan Rath), a power player who works for Duncan, is also a toothless director of ethical innovation on the board at Cupertino. She’s married to Martin (Simon Helberg), who is working on something he calls Alexander, or Xander — he would say “someone,” probably — “an intelligent entity, more of an autonomous companion, for alienated teens based on personal data ecosystems.”

He has less time for his own alienated teen, Tess (Thailey Roberge) — “Dad, eyes on me,” she says, as the family sits at a comically long dinner table, the parents looking at their phones — who has been expressing herself through low-level vandalism and thievery. “I hear you’re klepto now,” says Jamison (Ava Marie Telek), the daughter of Duncan and Lili (Judy Punch), whose body mass is under constant review by her mother. Seemingly, all the children of the Valley are being shuttled by their parents toward Stanford, where they will matriculate by hook or by crook.

Though Lili has been configured as shallow and spoiled, Punch (a great comic actor) injects her with some warmth and keeps her from being the joke she might have been. Galifianakis has a native oddball energy, though some of Carl’s assigned interests feel tacked on and out of joint — he’s involved with a fight club, where “control alt delete” serves for saying “uncle,” and, even weirder, has been made a World War Ire-enactor and military fetishist; it’s a point that exists only to make him receptive to Tom (Rob Corddry), the deputy undersecretary of Veterans Affairs who has come to Palo Alto looking for a partner to digitize truckloads of files that will in some way help to better their plight. (“Straightforwardly, what’s the quant ben for us?” he’s asked. Translation: “What’s in it for us?”) The series’ designated tragic figure, he’s granted a karaoke performance, with original lyrics, of Peggy Lee’s “Is That All There Is?”

Much of the action has to do with characters buying and selling various enterprises, or failing to, and creating and breaking and creating alliances, and it ceases to matter after not too long awhile what person or which company does what. Much less of it has to do with people being people. The cast is very good and the dialogue good enough, but because few of these characters are developed beyond a handful of identifying characteristics, it’s a generally cold, dispassionate watch. As to Duncan, the nominal star of the show, it doesn’t matter whether he’ll win or lose — there’s not enough to hang on to. Past being unlikable, he’s unsympathetic, and worse, for all his noisy behavior, uninteresting. JoAnne, though her journey is more twisted, doesn’t fare all that much better.

To signal that he has considered these things, Glatzer gives Anushka, who has had a revelation, a speechy little speech to voice the thoughts already on your mind. “When was the last time we saw tech help? … Truth be told, what have we actually made better? Did we spread knowledge? No. People used to occasionally agree on truth. Are we more tolerant of those different from ourselves? Please. Absolutely blew it on climate. Data centers emit more greenhouse gas than all of air travel. And have we made made the lives of our children better? Probably, no. But we can have Q-tips at our door in an hour. Huzzah.” So true.

We also get a reminder, from Harper, to check the box that keeps a website from selling your information. It’s good advice.

More and more Gen Zs and Millennials are hiring UK holiday homes in order to dress up together, away from the scrutiny of their parents, partners and society at large

“It’s difficult playing at your house. You’re trying to get in the mood to slay a vampire, and then someone’s boyfriend comes in to get a snack.”

It’s a problem we’ve all had. Or at least, those of us who are among the growing number of British Dungeons and Dragons players who are swapping sunbeds in Lanzarote for a cottage in the Lake District, and trading their piña colada for a couple of D4s and an orc costume.

Driven by “cosy crime” hits such as The Traitors and Agatha Christie adaptations, one in four Brits and half of Gen Z have booked a staycation specifically to host a murder mystery, games night, or TV-themed weekend with friends or family, according to an exclusive cottages.com study.

An early adopter of this trend is young Millennial Georgia Johnson, who has just celebrated a decade of leaving the boyfriends behind in London and heading to somewhere secluded to roll dice.

“We’ve been to Valencia twice, a place in Kent, a friend’s house in Bath and up to the Lake District,” the North London DnD player explained.

For Georgia and her costume-clad pals, getting away from it all really helps to set the mood.

“One time, we knew we were going to have a fortune telling, so we put out loads of tarot cards and dice and had a candlelit session,” she explained.

“Cottages.com has spooky castles and chapels you can stay in, and a button that shows you a nearby pub. Generally, you get up, DnD, have lunch at a pub, come back, more DnD, then around midnight it can get a bit silly and hazy. At the moment, we are playing Curse of Strahd, which is modelled on Dracula. We are hoping to go to Whitby to finish the game. We want candles lit and spooky music.”

For the uninitiated, it’d be easy to overlook the ubiquity of role-playing games like DnD, or consign them to the ‘80s fad bin’ only recently revived by a starring role in Stranger Things.

In fact, they’ve been growing in popularity for years and continue to reach new peaks. 52 years after its invention, DnD has 13.7 million active players. One study suggests that interest in tabletop role-playing games has increased by roughly 85% since 2020. This purple patch extends to Nottingham-based Warhammer, which was worth £4.7bn at the end of 2024.

For many gentler souls, such games are a fantastic way of expressing oneself creatively. Among Georgia’s clan is Ben, an office worker during the week who dons a moustache and becomes “officer of the post” Derbert Clifton-Brown at the weekend.

He is joined by creative Kash, who has purchased ears specifically designed for people of colour, and Oliver, who likes to paint himself green.

Before the crew started travelling to play, Georgia’s mum walked in on them in the act. “She said she would’ve rather found us having an orgy,” the 33-year-old said.

Another great RPG lover is James Mackenzie-Thorpe. Not only has he travelled across the UK to enjoy weekend sessions with his friends, but he has also brought dozens of DnDers to a unique tourist attraction.

“My first day working at Kents Caverns I heard some colleagues talking DnD. I asked if I could play, but there was no work group. Later on, I woke up from a dream and thought I should write an adventure set in the caves. So I wrote it and played it with a group of five, in the caves. It went really well. Then another group. Then we decided to do it for the public. Now, for three years, I’ve run DnD in the cave for the general public,” James explained.

Kents Caverns are a network of prehistoric caves in Torquay, Devon, that lie beneath the hotel that inspired Fawlty Towers. James takes tours by day and hosts quests by night.

And he puts a lot of effort into it, paying for maps to be professionally painted and bringing rechargeable lanterns to light up the skull-lined caves.

“It’s been a tremendous amount of fun. You never know what you’re going to get with each group. We’ve had people travelling from Cornwall and Somerset. One group had been playing with each other online during Covid. They had never met in real life before they came and played with me in the caves. They booked an Airbnb and stayed together,” he said.

For James, the real joy of DnD comes in seeing people express themselves freely, which traveling to a cottage or heading underground can help some do.

“We have a young member who has been four or five times to play in the caves. They’re non-binary and are just starting to come to terms with that. To see everyone really take that person in hand, to really help that person come out of their shell, it makes me really proud,” he said.