Succession: A Profoundly Sad Nature Documentary 🌻
The premiere's got me feeling and pondering again
Last post, I wrote a Q&A with my friend Aparna about how our expectations for friendships have changed over time, especially in the digital age. Check out her answers to my questions, and then my answers to hers!
And I know I’m a day late here! It’s been a long, trying past couple of weeks as my roommates and I have been throwing ourselves around Brooklyn in search of a new apartment. If you know of any openings or have a ton of couch space let me know :)
Because of our relentless search, I’ve been unable to think enough about anything worth writing about lately. Anything besides the HBO drama Succession, that is. Season three premiered Sunday night, and the spoiled, conniving Roys are back to pushing each other into piles of shit over the next many weeks. I have some thoughts about this show. For those that haven’t watched it, be forewarned that there are mild spoilers in this! If you are sensitive to those then don’t read! If you’re not then proceed! It’ll be great!
Note: I read/watched several essays on Succession in the past week, all of which I’ve linked at the bottom so you can binge them freely.
On Succession’s Season 3 Premiere (Mild Spoilers!)
For the uninitiated, Succession is about a dysfunctional family led by aging patriarch Logan Roy, CEO of global media conglomerate Waystar Royco, as each vies for him to elect them the next chief executive. Part of the show’s surprisingly broad appeal is how the characters, mostly self-centered and opportunistic with rare moments of humanity and grace, use each other to gain advantage, which is often far funnier than you’d expect.
Last night, the season three premiere reminded me of everything I love about the show. The manipulation, the posturing, the backstabbing, all the political drama we’ve been groomed to enjoy since Game of Thrones and The Crown and all the rest. But there’s more to it than that, I realize. Sure, there’s a certain righteous thrill to watching protagonist Kendall take charge again, and sure, it’s cool to see Roman make some shrewd suggestions about how to handle their company crisis, but besides that, I find it hard to truly root for any of the characters. They’re all morally bankrupt, and the show wants you to know that. They’re a family, but they betray and backstab and use each other like political rivals because that’s how they were raised. My own loyalties change every other episode as characters either prove their competence or blunder unforgivably.
A friend of mine described the specific nature of the show’s entertainment as “watching a National Geographic documentary about the ultra-rich.” I have to agree with this. The DIY-style camerawork, the crash zooms on people’s reactions, the dramatic soundtrack, the way every sentence anyone utters is, in some way, an establishment of dominance, all contributes to this. Looking at it this way, Succession makes sense. It’s not a show about characters doing good or being sympathetic. It’s about spoiled people so invested in their own egos, so obsessed with holding power, that the only way to watch is from a slight emotional distance, like we’re trying not to enjoy a dogfight.
There’s a subtle but consistent undertone of satire throughout the show that cushions its low-stakes power plays. Nobody is good; everybody is purely self-interested. They are far more anti-villain than anti-hero—set up to be power-hungry brats with the occasional shade of human emotion to remind us they’re not animals. They wear suits and drive in fancy cars and use niche literary metaphors, but all that seems to do is cover up how emotionally stunted they are. The Roys are borderline despicable people (besides cousin Greg, maybe), but somehow, we watch, fascinated, because the lives they lead are so vastly different from both our own and from the relaxed glamor we might’ve imagined children of a media mogul would enjoy.
Another huge part of the appeal, at least for me, is the rewarding feeling of understanding the plot’s layered machinations. Characters don’t speak honestly. Everything they say is just a “move.” Parsing dialogue feels like deciphering code. In this way, the show feels completely familiar but completely foreign: yes, I know what it means when someone says, “Yes, that’s very kind of you, son,” and that line might initially ring as considerate and grateful, but in the context of the show, when Logan says this to his eldest son Connor, who nonsensically offers to take the blame for a company fiasco, it rings as hollow and patronizing—he might as well say, “Yeah, okay, now shut the fuck up, Connor.”
It feels silly to analyze Succession’s layered wordplay like this because that’s the whole point of the show. Breaking down characters’ motivations in this show is something done in secret, unspoken, because when you understand the show’s subtext, you feel like you’re in on something. You’re in on the show’s special diabolical language. You learn not just about characters, but about institutions and ideas. “This is how the wealthy play their games,” you might think after watching a few episodes of this show. It delivers some insight into, perhaps, how the real world works. But I think it’s important to pay attention to (and even call out) the characters’ ridiculously sideways manner of speech to remind yourself how scummy it is. Lying to get what you want, no matter how fanciful your language, shouldn’t be normalized—it should be called out, and the show does a fantastic job of tempting us into rooting for whichever scumbag has the silverest tongue.
Some of the most popular American “prestige” TV shows have a similar formula of exploring a foreign world so realistically you forget that some parts of it are messed up. The Sopranos explores the lives of the New Jersey mafia with a mixture of realism and psychology that makes you sympathize with murderers. Game of Thrones, while set in fantasy times, ultimately is about powerful families violently squabbling over land while Armageddon threatens from the North. The Wire delves into the various crumbling institutions of Baltimore, including the surprisingly complex drug organizations, the inept police department, the decay of blue collar work, the corruption of City Hall, the failure of the school systems, and the rat race of public journalism. We learn how these organizations work not through a textbook or an essay but through the experiences that characters face within them. It’s the same with Succession—the Roy family (and those orbiting their cancerous aura) shows us what it means to live within a brutal system of astronomical wealth.
Adam McKay, who executive-produces Succession, has also made Vice and The Big Short, both of which were movies that looked at Dick Cheney’s rise to power and the 2008 housing crisis respectively. His style is unique; sure, there’s a lot of smoke and mirrors in his movies, like the weird A24-ish montage sequences and flamboyant musical choices in Vice, and hiring models to explain economic concepts like CDOs in The Big Short, but in neither movie does this feel gimmicky, even though it should. The rest of the movie underneath these style choices is pure, textbook fact. He wraps plain sequences of ideas with colorful presentations to attract the audience’s attention—if only our high school teachers could’ve done the same!—and something similar happens in Succession. The cinematic way the show is shot, the borderline hyperbolic characterization of certain characters (Kendall being a coked-out rap-loving bro, Greg being a nervous wreck, etc.), and the sweeping score—Nicolas Britell’s goddamn legendary score!—dress up what are essentially multimillionaires needlessly fighting each other for power as a satirical drama. This show doesn’t actually mean anything, in the end. It shows us the inner workings of a corrupt international conglomerate and shines a light on the flaws of runaway capitalism, but it’s nothing we didn’t know before.
Yet, as I watch this show, I find myself occasionally rooting for these characters, wondering who’s going to be the next CEO of the company, how a character’s move is gonna play out, and then have the rug pulled out from under me as even a mild “win” feels sour. There’s no righteousness in this show. There’s no Jon Snow to fight the White Walkers, no Jimmy McNulty or Omar Little or Cutty Wise to fight through the systems surrounding them, no Jesse Pinkman to break free from a criminal life. In Succession, there’s just the game, and there’s us, watching these rich bitches enact their psychodramas all over each other, hoping that some of them will win before, ultimately, remembering that nobody will ever win in this show. Nobody can escape the abusive game of wealth.
There’s a moment in the premiere when Kendall comes back into his own, re-energized after going rogue in the press interview, and he’s firing on all cylinders. He’s wheeling and dealing on the phone, hiring lawyers and PR managers, and he’s smiling again. I feel excited, thrilled even, to see somebody who’s been down for a large part of the storyline come back to life with a fiery vengeance. But that thrill quickly goes away. As his energy comes back, so does his ego. He’s arrogant and inconsiderate, and he talks over everyone. He doesn’t care about the cause he’s fighting for (which has to do with the continued exploitation of sex workers in Waystar’s cruise division); he just wants to get back at his dad. Even though his actions are good, even if his intentions are somewhat good, he’s stuck being the same insecure powermonger he’s always been. He’s trapped in this game, and there seems to be no way out.
Can’t wait for next week!
If you haven’t seen the show, here are some quotes from the episode to give you an idea of how it rings;
“I can’t have weevils in the flour sack.”
“I need a sealed unit. I need a clean jar.”
“Let one hundred flowers bloom.”
“This may not be the nicest thing to say about your son, but maybe we chop him up into a hundred pieces and toss him into the Hudson.”
“You okay in there, buddy? You looking for a vein?”
Other Things Of Note
This Vox essay on how Succession appears to explore the effect of wealth on people when it really explores abuse.
This video essay on the coercive nature of power in Succession:
This other video essay on whether or not being rich is worth it through the story of Succession:
Yet another video essay on the toxic culture of success that Waystar Royco preaches in Succession:
And yes, the last video essay on how words (read: “complicated airflow”) are constantly used in this show just to signal one’s own intentions when making a move.