The Long Take: The High-Information Appeal of Succession
Just a week and a half late on this. Sorry! And of course, some spoilers ahead.
Succession has an aesthetic so generic that it looks like the Wonderbread of Prestige TV. The name, title font, cast and premise - a declining CEO looking for a successor within the family to run his media empire - do not set to stand out to millions of viewers per week, nor for that matter, tastemakers who are professional enough to recap an hour of television to get those people to watch that show. But creator Jesse Armstrong knows that what’s on the surface does not matter. Instead, it's the downfall of its empire’s natural upholders.
Succession has been a critical success and has been touted as one of the greatest shows of the current century. It’s a claim that I’m not totally on board with, but it’s a legitimate one. It plays on a template as old as television ever has been: dysfunctional families. The dynamic the show depicts is nothing new: Arrested Development, before them, and The Righteous Gemstones right after. So it won’t be the last in depicting these kinds of dynamics.
No one actor holds the lead role in the show, because everybody has equal billing and each character has proven to be deeply unlikeable. Kendall (Jeremy Strong), the caffeinated eldest son; Roman (Kieran Culkin), the foul-mouthed middle child and Shiv (Sarah Snook), the smirking young daughter, her husband Tom Wasbagan (Matthew MacFayden) and Greg Hirsch (Nicolas Braun), the distant cousin. Don’t forget Connor Roy (Alan Ruck), the forgotten child older than Kendall. Each has one goal: to succeed after their stubborn father Logan Roy (Brian Cox), the CEO of Waystar Royco, home of numerous theme park franchises and production studios, which includes the cable news channel ATN. For as brash and abusive Logan can be in using his powers, he is at least competent. Kendall cares so little about anything other than being on the top, Roman is lazy, and Shiv is often in vain about herself, that it’s costing her marriage with Tom, who is the underdog compared to her. And nobody cares about Connor that much. They believe that Logan is getting senile, hungry for power for the sake of it, and is out of touch with reality.
I wrote previously that the show is not a ratings hit and if you compare that to a free-to-air like The Good Doctor or Yellowstone, the latter of which shares a similar narrative template with Succession, then it’s pretty much tenfold. Data from Axios show that Succession inspires more critical coverage, but fewer viewers. It has a vocal fanbase, many of whom arrive from the select class of bureaucrats and journalists, with one person describing it as Arrested Development made for The Atlantic readers. HBO barely has an outsized hit outside of Game of Thrones and The Last of Us. So while the numbers are debatable, I’m interested in what is in fact, appealing to them beyond its template. The answer is that it boils down to its inherent qualities.
I’m being a bit misleading in labelling Succession the Wonderbread of Prestige TV. Look further and you’ll find that the lives of the family dynasty, putting aside their acerbic personalities, are quite dull. They shake hands and make deals, untangle every legal ramification possible, and network with people that are untouchable at places quite unvisitable. The latter is a privilege, but the former is a requirement for the Roy kids to prove to their father, professionally and emotionally. But none of them meets his criteria, because according to Logan, they aren’t serious people. The show began as a Kendall vs Logan affair and subsequently, more characters become involved. Some represent the rapidly malleable nature of media and technology, while others just weather it and figure out the right time to adapt. The rest of them just have the desire to connect with Logan, because it seems like a natural given.
Succession reminds me of a reality show, but without the contestants having the space to do a vox pop interview to say how they really feel. In that sense, it also works as a deadpan comedy. Jesse Armstrong is well known for creating Peep Show, the British comedy about two flatmates and their inability to mature and look after themselves. It’s enhanced by a mockumentary-esque camerawork that one would associate with The Office, but according to Jesse Armstrong, it is also more efficient to use. Much of it comes either from the foulmouthed observations that sound like corporate speak mixed with millennial snark, or just plain social awkwardness to show how much these characters fail upwards. As much of the recent trend of eat-the-rich pop culture demonstrates, this class of capitalistic competitors is fatally fallible. So much so, that Logan Roy tells his kids directly, “I love you, but you are not serious people.”
Meanwhile, Tom and Greg have genuine chemistry together because they are first and foremost, outliers and it rests on the fact that they are outsiders. They are more awkward than the Roys would ever be, but it makes their experience more palatable because of it. Technically, Tom is still wealthy but is resting on the circle to impress not just Logan Roy, but anyone with who he is negotiating within ten feet. It’s this behaviour that is the core of his anxieties and crumbling marriage with Shiv that he unleashes against Greg, who is socially weaker than him.
A show with a focus on wealth and media wouldn’t be appealing if it wasn’t for the topical satire that surrounds the facade of meritocracy. The Roys are compared to the Murdoch family with ATN being an analogue to Fox News. With Logan’s leadership, according to his estranged brother Ewan, he’s responsible for climate change denial, the silencing of women within his company whenever they felt sexually harassed by his colleagues, and the withering of liberal democracies. It’s a stance that you can easily detect, and while Succession demonstrates that it can be consequential, it does have a knack for minimising our expectations. It isn’t the Aaron Sorkin Variety Hour or the dreaded Adam McKay Soapbox, as we have seen in the pilot where it was one of the only times we see the most blatant portrayal of class conflict that’s narrowed between the rich and the poor. In the show’s latter half, we finally see Kendall rebelling against Logan, ready to expose him as the monster he has experienced first-hand. One episode shows Kendall sabotaging his family members once they become indicted as top executives, and just when you thought he will exercise his powers, the impact becomes nothing, when other people don’t profess to like him, turning him into an emotional mud puddle.
The show’s greatest strength meant demonstrating how incapable these characters would do anything, but such relativism meant that bigger events mattered less. Season 3 addresses the presidential election with Logan choosing to pick a hard-right candidate to win over Shiv’s pick of a moderate politician. Eventually, that person won and once ATN called the election, aligning with the campaign, it allowed Shiv to act uncomfortably around the Roys. Watching it, I wondered where the stakes are coming from and where was the buildup. What is supposed to be the tradeoff here? This felt like watching Resistance fanfic, where characters become caricatures, losing much of their human element. The Roys are central to the issue of the day and it's their adjacent role that complements its pre-conceived audience’s fear. Whether it’s Kendall forcibly closing down a media venture he previously acquired in front of several staff employees that rings too true for journalists, or the Senate hearings that attempt to hold the family into account as a sense of wish casting. Come for the political masturbation, stay to see Roman finally beat the chicken on a skyscraper somewhere.
Personally, I wouldn’t compare the Roys with the Murdochs, cos they remind me of another media empire, exclusively local in Australia. This family was the Packers, particularly its well-known patriarch Kerry, and his son James. Kerry Packer was the CEO of Nine Entertainment, a conglomerate that holds the Nine Network, one of the country’s first television studios, and many Fairfax newspapers. He was also known for conceiving World Series Cricket, which commercialised the sport from multiple-day Test matches into games that last up to one night, allowing the network to have more lucrative broadcast rights. James, meanwhile, runs several companies that have gone straight to the ground but have been known for living a playboy lifestyle, dating the likes of Miranda Kerr and Mariah Carey. At the moment, Crown Entertainment, the biggest casino conglomerate in the country owned by James, is facing licensing issues in two states, further experiencing its twilight.
Together, Kerry and Logan share many similarities with James and Kendall respectively. Each has been a tyrannical patriarch who ran companies like one-man dictatorships while raising businessmen that have been underwhelming. But crucially, each has a fractious relationship. Abuse is something that runs in the family and it’s a fundamentally tragic aspect, particularly within dynasties. I’ve read two biographies of each man, and what I understood is that they want to escape the shadow of being the next in line. The Nine of then is not the same as what I know about Nine now, which is defined by its lack of innovation and inspiration.
I think that’s why Succession has the audience that it has. It may not speak for “Real America”, whenever someone likes to expose the show for its low ratings, but it does reveal the brutalism of its elites, as it withers away towards millennials with little understanding of running a business, because that is a license they hold. It is also the nature of niche shows, shown exclusively on cable channels and streaming platforms, only driven through online word of mouth and a relentless algorithm. It has its audience because while it looks like a capital-I Important piece of media, it manages to not be incredibly partisan.
Succession doesn’t look like your average HBO show; it doesn’t even have the nudity and violence you associate with one. But it still has an edge that a lot of people (including myself) will take over most shows on that same channel. The egos are bruised, but ultimately you can’t break a Greg with a Tomlette.