‘Succession’ swoops to conquer
Image courtesy of @Succession
I’ve been trying to do this for a while now, and struggling mightily to pin down an angle, because Succession is far too many of my favourite things. It’s And Sons, a fairly recent, fairly obscure novel by David Gilbert about a fledgling literary patriarch, whose sons all try and fail in different ways to live up to the legend of their father’s career. I imagine Succession is the cinematic split between shooting a small movie in the old Brooklyn and a supermassive one in post-Star Wars California. (For public consumption, Kodak’s official website says the series is shot on 35mm film; which I figure is both a pain-in-the-ass and an honour to have to edit.) By way of its creator Jesse Armstrong, who is British, Succession is all of the things I grew up loving about the BBC: the quick quip, the dry eye-roll, the deliberately false elegance of Blackadder and The Thick of It — rampant kitsch disguised as high art.
You will hear lots of people call Succession ‘Shakespearean’, for the way it makes a theatre stage of all the rooms that host its corporate skirmishes, for how many different players get to detonate its bespoke F-bombs. But really this is a strong, occasionally violent shout for television as the dominant art-form of our time. Binge or no binge, when the prestige hour looks and sounds like this, it is The Great American Novel. A Beatles tour, I guess, and all of its frenzy. Something we ought hold our collective breath for, ’til some other network or streaming service offers to merely entertain us.
I have paused breathing several times during Succession’s third season, which has been interesting to watch at the tail-end or jumpstart of weeks in which I’ve consumed The Sopranos copiously. I’ve taken notes in a shorthand I’m not sure I can actually read, trying to understand what truly great TV shows have in common. I suppose it’s the theme of family, because as a concept that’s reliably volatile. You place it at the centre of your creative endeavour and plot and twist seem to blossom from it at will, in a twin corolla.
The Roys of Succession seemed to be mere Murdoch impersonators in season one — though I doubt either James or Lachlan has ever made plays as spirited as Kendall Roy’s, to dislodge old Rupert from atop the thorny throne of right-wing news. Over the course of a season, Siobhan has evolved from the liberal darling we could root for into a spitting image of her dad — the week-to-week sensation of which reminds me what it’s been like to despise and yet affect towards Anthony Soprano. Connor is the Roy whose careless banter you try several times to slip away from, when the Roys invite you to a fundraiser; and young Roman is the one you slip away to do psychedelics with in the stables. Each season of Succession has laughed in the face of its predecessor, recalibrating brand new boiling points. Each one must be rewatched and regarded as a masterpiece in its own right, even though season three is where each of these characters, all of these Roys, grab at the arc because they demand more from it.
Image courtesy of @Succession
Stakes rise and swoop with such extremity in Succession it’s a wonder my computer doesn’t give me vertigo. For most of season two we were tucked away into bed every episode for a lesser-scaled, largely comedic story about foiled ambition, before Kendall blew the doors off in the season finale. He disclosed the company’s complicity in sexual abuse claims that WayStar RoyCo had hitherto buried beneath a lifetime of feeding an electorate the news it wanted.
We’ve soared to such dangerous heights these past couple months. The Roy kids have been at war with one another. Suave casuals have circled like vultures above the north tower. Washington has had to step the hell in, again. The terribly thin barriers we all suspect exist between politics and news and business have been exposed, by misplaced dick pics and expensive ego trips. Maybe what Succession and Mad Men and The Sopranos and The Wire have in common, these four premier series of our time, is that bomb at centre-stage; be it a large news organization, or the mob racket, or the drug trade, or the never-ending quest for identity and, with it, vainglory. All you have to do to write one of the great television shows of all time is design a hell of a bomb, and repeatedly elevate and compromise its most frequent negotiators — or distract them with canny outsiders, or the promise of love.
The spoilt brats that want to take over their dad’s company, in Succession, are too heinous for me to relate to for longer than ten minutes of each episode. I did not go to school with people like these, nor run into them at rare co-minglings of the middle class and the one-percenters. And yet their concerns and obsessions speak a level of emotional truth that makes most other TV shows (if they’re not The Sopranos, or Mad Men, or The Wire) feel utterly disingenuous.
I spoke of canny outsiders just now, but perhaps dismissed the connective tissue they bring as mere distraction. I was referring to the takeover bids or overtures for Waystar RoyCo made by the hedge-fundy Stewy Hosseini (Arian Moayed), the sleepy billions of Josh Aaronson (Adrien Brody), and the weird zen-quest of tech-douche Lukas Matsson (Alexander Skarsgârd). There’s my guy Cousin Greg, who more than once has connected one room, one battlefront, one theatre stage to another by playing the seemingly clueless eavesdropper. Quite crucially there’s Tom Wambsgans, who’s married his way into the dynasty and who in a job application the other day I said has the balls for the chief executive role. Maybe I can’t pick a standout performance because Veep was the last time I saw an ensemble complement one another so, every man and woman and personal assistant on cue with the rapier.
If Succession is a game of chess, it would be the kind where each season’s checkmate is swayed by a late influx of Monopoly money. If capitalism were a long scroll of sheet music, Succession is exactly what it would sound like.
