All season it’s been a question of is she or isn’t she? Will she or won’t she? Poised, beautiful, and always ready with a techbro-destroying one-liner, Meaghan Rath plays Anushka Bhattachera-Phister, the stifled Chief Ethics Officer at a thinly-veiled Apple analogue, who also sits on the board of a Palantir-like data algo company called Hypergnosis. Like all of us living through the age of algorithmic everything, she’s often screaming into the wind, shrugged at or straight-up ignored by those in power around her. The bros ignoring her aren’t exactly thriving either. They question their own competence, spiral into self-doubt, and seem tortured by the inevitability of their own corruption, their every action leading to chaos or worse.
Created by Succession and Better Call Saul producer Jonathan Glatzer, The Audacity isn’t just a satire of today’s ruling tech class. It’s a darker, Trump-era update to the Obama-era optimism spoofed a decade ago in HBO’s Silicon Valley. Things are weirder now—our world, our politics, our sense of the future—and The Audacity perfectly captures the universal helplessness we all feel. It scratches that Industry-meets-Succession itch, while throwing in a dash of White Lotus-style class anxiety and wealth absurdity.
The series delights in the kind of complex machinations that made Industry, Billions, and Succession must-watch TV. The CEO of Hypergnosis spends the first few episodes covering up the failed acquisition of his company by Cupertino, the Apple-like firm Rath’s character works at. He digs up dirt on possible new suitors (partly by blackmailing his psychotherapist, whose other clients include the Valley’s top magnates). And then, just as he’s about to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, Rath’s character decides she’s had enough. The duplicity. The sacrifice of public good. The willingness to abandon core values in pursuit of market cap. It’s too much for her. With one call, she sends Hypergnosis’s stock price—and its founder, her now former BFF—into a terminal spiral.
But Meaghan Rath’s character is relatable because she’s all too human. “Anushka wants to do good. Genuinely. She’s an ethicist,” explains Rath.
Reclined in a pillow-festooned banquette at Maxwell Social in Tribeca (where this photoshoot took place), Rath clearly enjoys peeling apart the complicated layers of her character. “She’s more adjusted than the rest of the cast. But it’s really just how she gets on in the world. She has to put on this corporate face, but it’s disturbing to her. In a sense, deep down, she knows there’s no ethics in this world.”
The tech billionaire who scoops up Hypergnosis at fire-sale prices knows Rath’s Anushka is the one who sent the stock tumbling. In the latest episode, he calls her out of the blue to come for a meeting and offers her the acting CEO role. She says no, and he counters by pushing her to convince him that this fictionalized Palantir should shift moral gears. That the company and he personally could stand to benefit by leveraging the algo's oracle-like powers to do good. Rath's character takes the job, and the episode ends. But the trajectory feels clear. Sure, she’ll try to do the right thing. But she’s human. Money and power corrupt everyone. She’ll put up the good fight. But in the end? We’ll see.