Succession’s Failed Bid for Greatness
Warning: Abundant spoilers about the current season, and some f-bombs, below
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I like Succession, the show currently in its fourth and final season on HBO.
But I don’t love it.
There’s a lot to like. The acting is uniformly excellent, as is the unfailingly smart and salty script, which may feature the most creatively deployed vulgarity in television history. The subject-matter couldn’t be more topical—focusing on the Murdoch-like billionaire Roy family behind the media and entertainment conglomerate Waystar RoyCo, an obvious stand-in for the Fox Corporation. The show mixes high-level corporate intrigue, political gamesmanship, and interpersonal warfare in an inimitable way. It’s usually a lot of fun to watch, if also sometimes pretty unpleasant.
The current season may be the show’s best yet, with the drama enhanced by the surprise death in the third episode of Logan Roy (Brian Cox), the company’s founder and tormentor of its employees, his four adult children, and other family members. From the start of the series, the primary drama has been the one telegraphed in its title: With the boss nearing the end of his life, who will be tapped to run Waystar RoyCo and become Logan’s successor?
The three kids from Logan’s second of three marriages—eldest Kendall (Jeremy Strong), middle-child Roman (Kieran Culkin), and youngest and only daughter Siobhan, or “Shiv” (Sarah Snook)—each desperately want to win the competition for their father’s love and approval by being given the honor. Yet none of them proves worthy of it in the endless series of tests Logan puts them through (and has been putting them through, when not ignoring or outrightly abusing them, since they were young children)—and that makes them hate him and sometimes each other. Logan’s shocking demise understandably unleashes a flood of deeply conflicted feelings in all three, setting up what is sure to be a memorable string of episodes in the remainder of the final season.
If that description makes you want to watch the show, or reminds you of why you enjoy it, great. It’s certainly worth watching.
Yet Succession nonetheless falls short of the excellence it clearly aspires to. It’s good, even sometimes very good. But it isn’t great. And it’s worth exploring why.
Eternal Return of the Same Damn Thing
For one thing, the show’s main characters (above all the three grown children at the center of the familial drama) are utterly stuck in a loop of perpetual repetition. I couldn’t begin to summarize the plotlines of the show’s first three seasons, not because they are too intricate or forgettable but because the details don’t matter. We’ve been here before and we will be here again—that is the governing principle of these people and this world. One or more of the kids seeks Daddy’s love and attention while one or more of the other kids hatch a plan to inversely impress him with an act of business treachery. Sometimes the kids act in concert. Sometimes they’re at war with each other as much as they are with Logan. They come together, they lash out at each other, pretend not to care, then join forces and betray their father and each other in one way or another before doing it all over again. Wash, rinse, repeat, ad infinitum.
The smartest thing I’ve read about the show, a Sam Adler-Bell essay in the Nation mid-way through season 3, put this compulsive repetition in a psychoanalytic framework and made what is probably the best artistic case one could in defense of it. But in the end, I’m unpersuaded. The world of Succession is flatly static—a nightmarish enactment of Nietzsche’s eternal return of the same in a context utterly devoid of intimacy or trust and governed entirely by the need to fight for every inch of territory in a palatial Manhattan penthouse, like a Hobbesian battle of each against all where the consequence of failure isn’t violent death but a (merely) eight-figure trust fund and an embarrassing item on Page Six of the New York Post.
I have a hard time relating to any of it—and frequently find myself relieved when the episode I’m watching comes to an end, even though I usually enjoy it and am often eager to see the next one once a couple of days has passed. I suspect that’s because the closed, perpetual-motion-machine character of the world portrayed in the show is so compellingly rendered—and because hope for future progress springs eternal. I just can’t help expecting someone on the show at long last to liberate him- or herself from its merciless, grindingly repetitive logic.
But it never happens.
The Scorsese Comparison
That wouldn’t be a fatal limitation if the characters were somewhat less loathsome—but alas, they are exactly that loathsome and not one iota less.
Here I’m bound to provoke some angry reactions, because I’m going to justify withholding the highest accolades from Succession by comparing it to the work of one of America’s most acclaimed film directors, whose movies also have a history of leaving me a little cold. I’m talking about Martin Scorsese.
Now, I don’t want to be misunderstood: Scorsese is clearly a technical master of film, and he’s an extremely accomplished cinematic storyteller. Both are worthy of admiration, maybe even reverence. Yet Scorsese is also someone who has a tendency to make movies about awful human beings—and worse, about awful human beings who are one-dimensional in their awfulness.
Consider Raging Bull. As a piece of filmmaking—direction, acting, cinematography, editing—it’s an astonishing achievement. But to what end? To tell the story of an abusive, self-destructive, self-loathing, imbecilic boxer who’s incapable of introspection and self-understanding? Okay, sure. I can’t imagine a better film about Jake LaMotta. But did the world need a monumental act of artistic exertion devoted to Jake LaMotta?
This hardly describes every Scorsese film. And sometimes (I’m thinking especially of his masterpieces, Taxi Driver and Goodfellas) Scorsese’s unparalleled skills as a director and storyteller have enabled him to make movies that fully transcend the flatly appalling people who populate his films.
But I’m not convinced Succession manages that rare feat.
Daddy Dearest and His Damaged Kids
To begin at the top, Logan Roy is a uniformly horrible person who emotionally and (in the case of Roman, at least) physically abused his children, and he behaves similarly to everyone around him, both family and top executives. He’s clearly the source of the Lord of the Flies ethic that permeates all the relationships in the show. (That became indisputable in the most horrifying episode of the series—the one in season 2 when Logan forced members of his extended family and senior executives at the company to take part in a sadistic and humiliating hazing ritual called “Boar on the Floor.”) We’re led to assume Logan possesses (or once possessed) some kind of brilliance as a businessman that enabled him to build a sprawling media empire now worth many billions of dollars. But we never really see evidence of it and never really gain an understanding of what drives him.
Instead, Logan just vulgarly barks commands and insults, tests the judgment of familial and corporate underlings about various matters, always implying he knows the best answer already, which inspires their terror, prompting a look of contempt and an amusingly creative insult from Logan in reply. His overriding character trait is a pervasive meanness.
In the two episodes of the current season prior to his death, the writers clearly tried to give him a bit more emotional depth. In one scene, Logan mumbles to his bodyguard (and, absurdly, “best pal”) about the nothingness he believes awaits us at our demise. In another, he expresses love to his kids (though when he does so, they and we have ample reason to suspect it’s some form of manipulation). And that’s about it for the humanized Logan Roy.
The three principal adult children, meanwhile, are identically damaged, each of them fearing their father and continually scrambling to prove themselves worthy of the maximally conditional paternal love that’s always been denied them—while also continually acting out to hurt the old man back.
Kendall, the oldest of the three, enacts his oedipal urges most explicitly over the arc of the show, attempting to throw various wrenches into his father’s business plans, and even doing his best to get him in serious legal trouble for covering up a scandal at the company, while also struggling with drug addiction and thoughts of suicide. Roman goes along with some of his older brother’s schemes to hurt their father while contending with sexual dysfunction and exploring kinks with Gerri Kellman (J. Smith-Cameron), the general counsel of the company who is twice his age. Shiv, meanwhile, mainly attempts to wound her right-wing father by keeping him at a distance and betraying him politically through her work and support for left-leaning candidates and causes.
It's pretty interesting. But it’s also pretty inert. The characters are all broken in the same way, they display that brokenness in slightly different ways, and that’s about it. No one get markedly better or worse over time. No one learns anything significant and makes a change. They’re all just Sisyphus pushing their nearly identical rocks up their nearly identical hills every damn episode.
Oh, and all the kids are morons.
“You’re Such Fucking Dopes”
Look, I get it: It’s comforting in a populist way to think that not only are the richest and most powerful people on the planet no smarter than we are but actually stupider. And I’ll admit that observing Elon Musk’s public persona over the past year lends some credence to that supposition. Still, I have a hard time believing that the transparently vacuous, blustering bullshit that emanates constantly from every member of the Roy family is an accurate portrayal of the way senior executives at multi-billion-dollar conglomerates talk and think. I mean, in the second episode of the current season, we watch the three principal adult children talk themselves in the space of a minute or so into increasing their bid for a media company they want to buy by about 20 percent (a couple of billion dollars) for no good financial reason at all. They simply want to boost their chances of stealing it away from their father, they don’t know what he’s bidding, and so they pick a random large number and go with that.
As I said, morons.1
But don’t listen to me. In a scene portraying what turns out to be the final time Logan Roy sees his children in person before dying, he implores them not to scuttle a deal to sell Waystar RoyCo by demanding a higher price than what he thinks the purchaser is willing to pay. Their response? Oh yeah, Dad? You can’t know that. You’re full of shit.
To which Logan replies with a statement that, for me at least, was pretty cathartic. Speaking to them collectively, his eyes moving from one to the other as he slowly pronounces the words, he declares, “You’re such fucking dopes. You’re not serious figures. I love you, but you are not … serious people.”
And here’s the thing: Logan is absolutely, indisputably correct—more generally, but also in terms of this specific business deal. (We know this because the prospective buyer explicitly told Kendall in a phone call earlier the same evening that he would back out if they raised their price.)
I submit that a multi-season drama about the struggles, triumphs, failures, and sufferings of real, well-rounded human beings should not leave me feeling this way about most of the major characters. I didn’t feel that way about the people portrayed in Mad Men. Or The Sopranos. Or The Americans. Or Breaking Bad. They had flaws. Some were annoying, or stupid, or evil. But they seemed like real people—their world a real world. Our world. The characters and the world portrayed in Succession do not. They look and feel and sound like caricatures created and deployed to make some kind of overly broad satirical point about billionaires that will flatter the presumptions of the show’s audience.
As I said at the start, that doesn’t make Succession bad. It’s good! Most of the time, I enjoy watching it. I laugh. I shake my head in wonderment at the characters and their repetitive schemes and often ridiculous dramas and dilemmas. (“Dad won’t let us use the helicopter to get to the meeting!”) I admire the acting and direction. But I don’t really care about these people. Because I don’t really believe they’re people at all.
And that means the show can’t be considered truly great.2
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