Prince of the Powers on the Air

In fairness to me this is less than 1000 words per season of "Succession"

So I watched “Succession” and I’m surprised by how much I’m loving it. Caveat spectator, all the characters are horrifying, they do harm that’s fractal, a dehumanization that ranges from self-harm to societal, so to like the show you kind of have to let go of your boundaries. Fortunately I’m good there!

“Succession” is ostensibly about the struggle for power within a family business. Logan Roy (Brian Cox), a Scottish emigrant to America, built Waystar Royco, but he’s aging now and increasingly infirm, and it’s time for him to name a successor—probably one of his four damaged, grasping children. So far, so Lion in Winter. Ultimately for me, three things set the show apart. One is its style, which I’ll go ahead and call cartoon realism. “Succession” is a brutal comedy but the wilder the caricature of dehumanizing wealth, the more accurate and devastating the emotional portrait. This is the comedy style I like best, cartoonish and yet exposing. There are so many scenes here in which absurd and/or horrifying situations play out with the real emotional dynamics of dysfunctional families or people wielding too much power, etc; the shock of recognition comes out of nowhere. The delightful trainwreck scenes and the gut-wrenchingly painful scenes are always the same scenes.

The second thing is the craft. I was hooked from the terrific opening credits, these sun-soaked bereft children menaced by pianos, as the strings shriek classily until they hit black ice and skid. The dialogue is sharp and tightly-packed, the actors are stellar, the bleak interiors make every scene a corporate wastescape, and although in season three the camerawork degenerates into too much shakycam, we get a lot of showy boxy close-ups and nice, weird, sad framing. (“Chiantishire” is a favorite episode in general, but I’ll call your attention to the headlights grabbing and releasing Kendall alone at the table after his confrontation with his dad.)

And the third thing is the theme.

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Who Will Survive… And What Will Be Left of Them?

What’s “Succession” about? This very fun parody theme song assumes the title of the show is correct and it’s about who will get “the kiss from Daddy.” Sam Adler-Bell, in an essay I liked but often disagreed with, argues that it’s really an Oedipal tale about which of the kids will kill Dad. (Also SA-B, people change. People change all the time! Ask people on the bus about how God turned it around for them! This idea that “people don’t really change” isn’t new, it’s in Agatha Christie, but it still seems so contemporary to me in its punitive thrust. Anyway.) But from my pov it is really about escape. All three seasons show Logan Roy’s children seeking his favor, for sure, but also seeking some alternative to him and to the only life they know. One of the most striking features of the show is the near-total absence of any alternative authority—you’ll notice that we never see Kendall in NA, for example. They have no teachers.

They all need a Tom to their Greg, but in the exact opposite socioeconomic and like spiritual direction.

There are lots of reasons to make Waystar Royco a media company, but that choice also underlines the theme of authority and trust. Where do you get your information about the world? Who shows you what is possible? “Succession” is a show about people with constrained imaginations desperately seeking a life they’ve never seen.

This is why season three didn’t feel repetitive to me the way it did to some. Yes, for real, the “kiss from Daddy” aspect of the show gets repetitive as Logan cycles through his children. And how many “existential crises” can one company face?! And yes, narratives do require consequences and we haven’t seen any yet. I like the children’s covert Hunt for Consequences, esp since it’s hidden underneath the also very real Hunt for Impunity, but at some point the story needs to hit something.

But season three showed the kids trying new escape routes. Kendall got three of them shut down on him! S3 happened to give us two of the potential escape routes I’d enjoy most, viz. moral regeneration and humiliating sexual deviance, but just in general I’m here for the Roy siblings scrabbling at the sweet sticky walls of the Venus flytrap.

Nor are viewers smarter than the characters when it comes to recognizing their repetitive patterns. The characters also know this about themselves! It’s depleting them, the way it depletes you and I when we consciously understand that we are caught in repetitive, compulsive behavior, and see no way out that we haven’t already tried.

Basically every single scene is either about someone being trapped more securely or about a possible escape route, and so far all of the potential escape routes have only led to deeper enmeshment. That’s partly because the characters have constrained imaginations, and partly because they’re afraid of loss. They’re trapped by self-protection and luxuries have become a nonnegotiable baseline for them, wealth as addiction with the usual increased tolerance to the drug of choice. They want escape without kenosis and lol good luck.

Prison is a super obvious escape route, which is why it works that nobody’s gone to prison yet. I really want somebody to go, and find out that prison too is not rescue (...because it’s abusive, because it’s not repentance, among other things); unsure the show has quite the political acumen needed to make that move though.

The Roys are a crystallization but what they’re crystallizing exists in more diffuse, less showy form on the high side of every power relation. While you’re recognizing things, perhaps you’ll recognize some of yourself! In spite of the show’s realism about familial dysfunction, the roles played by Tom, Cousin Greg, and Gerri show that at its core this is about wealth, power, aspiration; Logan is just the microcosm. (And I’ll yowl and hiss about Will Arbery in a moment but family as microcosm for structural sin is something we know he can do well!) King Henry in The Lion in Winter is your dad. King Lear is God. Logan Roy is like 55% an avatar of wealth/power, 40% your dad, 5% God.

From this perspective the siblings’ failure at the end of s3 isn’t that they failed to “kill dad,” but that they tried. They’d already failed to escape by the time they got in that car to go confront him.

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I’d Lay You Badly, But I’d Lay You Gladly

Look, I was down for this show the moment Kendall’s ex-wife said to his face that she was looking for a partner who, unlike him, “won’t snort coke off the kids’ iPads,” and he takes a beat and then makes himself say, “That’s fair.” And she’s like, just kidding!, but one of this show’s tics is that they all say that compulsively and they’re never joking… love this tic in general and specifically love when it’s rubbing somebody’s face in the classic addict fear that somebody will tell us who we really are.

There are some things I don’t love. “Succession” is shockingly good at recognizable caricatures of a certain stripe of casual right-wing rhetoric. Cf Connor’s introductory scene, where he tells his little niece, I own all the water rights here and so when disaster strikes and water becomes expensive I’ll make a killing! But I’ll always share my water with you, honey…. In s3 the accuracy wobbles, I’m guessing because of consultant Will “Heroes of the Fourth Turning” Arbery, I detect his hand behind the name-drops of “integralism” and “aristopopulism.” Those aren’t things! You don’t ever need to treat integralism as a real thing! But the real weakness is in the show’s attempts at caricatured left-wingery. Nothing the Bernie Sanders cartoon says feels real or recognizable in the way that Roman’s “my racism is probably ironic but also ironic racism is a pretty racist thing to do” shtik does. The wealthy progressive media moguls in “Tern Haven” felt real because they suck, the matriarch dehumanizes her domestic help because she needs them to play the role of Not A Servant But A Friend, etc, but the attempts at actual economic populism ring false to me.

Also some of Kendall’s s3 heel-face-heel turn was a bit too obvious (“Your value is in your teats!”, yes, I get it, you’ve turned into your father), even though I love the overall arc there. And how long has it been since we had any clarity on whether Kendall’s actually using drugs?

But here are some things I love.

# people signing documents without reading them, as a sign of trust and/or total lack of self-respect, and/or, ideally, trying to convince somebody they trust them and also totally lack self-respect. This is in “Succession” for the same reason I put it in Punishment. In fact there are several things that are in “Succession” for the same reason they’re in Punishment, but don’t worry, we’ll get to Roman in a moment.

# Sarah Snook as Shiv Roy. Gosh what a face. She’s the one who wears the veneer of sincerity with the most sincerity. Snook conveys so much intelligence and, also, so much childlike… vulnerability, delight in the wrong things. Like a child she gets grabby, and like a child she’s always being blindsided. Every little cock of the head or twitch of that broad face, with its unearned sweetness, is about the difference between intelligence and wisdom. Just because you can keep it together doesn’t mean you have order in your soul.

# Snook’s also, you know, an exceptional wearer of pants. Whoever does her tailoring for this show knows which end the bread is buttered on and that’s all I have to say about that.

# And while we’re on Shiv, s3 was extraordinary in that Shiv drifted around a lot, but we also saw so much of her damage and got to see just how feral she’d go for Daddy’s kiss, so to me, it didn’t disappoint or do her dirty.

# Roman’s (Kieran Culkin) swaggery walk; Roman’s nervous arpeggio hands. But mostly Roman’s constant weird sideways cringing… he’s like a fainting goat on amphetamines

# Roman’s uhhhh sexual issues. No judgment! I’ll always respect a man who puts it out there, just summoning a tsunami of self-loathing in the teacup of his trousers—we’ve all been there—but gosh, let’s revisit the “dog pound” story with new eyes, shall we?

# There’s not much sex in this show, but the sex there is tends to be weird, awkward, and—therefore—unexpectedly hot. The sex on “Succession” is always desperate, both in the sense of “ridiculous” and in the sense of “emotionally raw.” Two great tastes that taste great together!

# The very well-timed Senate hearings episode—all the kids get to step up (except lol Connor, always forgotten on the tarmac of my heart) and act with real competence, and it’s in the service of one of the company’s most blatant evils.

# All the Christian references in “Mass in Time of War,” starting at the title but also “Mt Athos,” “plastic Jesus,” “the Kingdom of Heaven,” imho to underscore how Kendall has turned his “escape pod” into an armored carapace of self-will. He thinks he’s found a moral synergy that can work to the benefit of his soul’s shareholders.

# Connor (Alan Ruck aka Cameron from Ferris Bueller (!)): smarmy, dopey, entitled; also the only person who cared for his younger siblings, in acts of love for which they repeatedly punish him, this show knows how family damage works.

# On Tom, I can’t improve on Adler-Bell: “I have not tired of watching Matthew Macfadyen’s Tom Wambsgans desperately purge his pent-up aggression on Cousin Greg; Macfadyen’s ability to play these menacing, sadistic scenes with a palpable air of sweetness, almost love, is revelatory each time.”

# re the show’s politics, imho the moments when the camera calls your attention to the low-level workers are always important. E.g. the people taking out the garbage when Kendall is sobbing in the dirt.

# On an intellectual level, as like an intricate working object, I love how good this show is at giving every single action both a sincere and a manipulative motive. Cf. Roman openly asking for love when the substantive point on the table is the possibility that he’ll be CEO one day. So he’s manipulating, it’s a play, but it’s also, you know, who wants Logan’s love more transparently than Roman?

# The theme of shame vs/as shamelessness. “We don’t get embarrassed,” which is a kind of strength, and therefore a character defect.

# Oh God, Roman fully explaining the reasoning behind his father beating him with a shoe for ordering lobster. Realism.

Share your thoughts below, or wherever, at 2200 words I think it’s obvious I’m in too deep with this show….

“The world of water—my crown” by Snap, under a Creative Commons license.