Succession TV Show Review

They should have called it Temporarily Embarrassed Billionaires

Long form entertainment for people with a short attention span

I do not understand the good press succession has been having. I do not understand why people have been telling me "yeah it runs on a bit but it pays off at the last episodes". I would like you all to explain yourselves, why you would lie to me like this.

We called it "the Greg show" in my household, as an ironic snarky joke they would make in the show, but that does actually cut to the heart of the matter. It is a sitcom disguised as a ten episode drama series. It’s Seinfeld with ominous strings instead of a funky bass and a laugh track. None of the drama or character arcs come together, its not "about" anything. It's just the Roy family show. What are they up to this week? And at the end of every episode the status quo is restored. The overarching storyline(s) of the seasons and the show in its entirety are inconsequential and never truly important.

There is no plan or vision, but a room of tv writers going "okay so what would be cool to do next". In old school X-files terminology it's pure monster of the week episodes, and no plot episodes.

I feel like a total idiot for paying attention to the plot, the corporate business moves, why character X has to convince character Y of A, because it never matters. It is deliberately written with deliberate ambiguity at all levels, to make it available to the people who don't pay attention and don't bother to understand the business moves, but can only operate on a simple "good guy bad guy they have to win the big meeting to win the money and become ceo", vibes and social cues. You are not, ever, rewarded for paying more attention than that. I don’t think it’s a good idea for the entertainment I am watching to make me feel like a total idiot for paying attention to it.

It is, in a phrase, long form entertainment for people with a short attention span. It is intentionally ambiguous at every level, to create the "vibe" of long form complexity, while being de facto, short form moment-to-moment Sitcom entertainment.

The dramatic tension does not start with an inciting incident, and the progressively increase until a climax and release. Rather every story-line goes like this: there is an inciting incident! And then it is immediately and gradually inflated until it becomes a non issue. At the end of season 4 I was barely paying attention because it has just been fake outs and red herrings for 35 hours, and I had no more investment in anything, because it was just the same thing over and over again.

The children are scheming to become CEO. A crisis happens that forces them to put their scheming aside to protect from an outside threat. No conflict ever comes to a climax, there are no consequences, and no character development, it is all just deflated and forgotten about.

Kendal kills a guy by being incompetent and childish. He spends a season moping about it. The interesting and dynamic and EASY writing choice is to do something with that. Here's the easy Kendal storyline:

Season 1: proud but bad heir apparent overlays his hand bt trying to assassinate (corporately) his father and become emperor. He fucks up and kills a waiter and has to come crawling back to daddy to save him. So far so good.

Season 2: he is a broken man who has to eat a big piece of humble pie, his ambition ruined because he was too proud and too stupid. He works as a loyal henchman for his father, but now, freed from his petty desires to be liked by black people and podcasters and have liberals think he's cool, he is actually an efficient operator. By following his dad unquestioning, and not trying to scheme and plot against him at the same time, he actually learns to be a ruthless Businessman. Where before he failed through everything, now he has middling success.

Now, what they do in the show is this: for no reason Kendal just kind of tries to oust his father again, and the instant he does, he reverts back to his old self. No lessons learned, no character growth. He is back to being a total retard who wants primarily to be a celebrity. Tension is instantly deflated. You have no real belief that he might get him this time, because there is no change in the character.

Writing wise, that is putting deliberate effort into doing nothing. Preventing something interesting from organically growing out of what you've made. The easy, lazy, and interesting thing to do, that makes a better product, is just this:

He fucking learns his lesson and locks in. You can make him fight his dad again, that's fine, but either way you just make him a) more mature, because he accepts responsibility for killing a kid, and b) make him use the lessons he's learned from being a loyal depressed henchman, to do, whatever you want him to do next. Fight his dad or be loyal to him, whatever, but his year of being sober, brooding, ruthless enforcer, has CHANGED him and he now understands that being locked in is more important than having hipsters think he's cool.

This is just a small example of something I find running through the whole thing, at every level, from business plot to character arcs, to the politics. Intentional ambivalence.

The writing relies on the same kind of ambivalence that I talked about in the Nosferatu review. Nosferatu relies on the audience to fill in the blanks, and is written for an audience who "know what a vampire is", and so doesn't explain anything. It overtly states it's themes, but covertly obscures it's lore. And it fails, because we don't live in a world where people have shared priors any more, we don't agree what a vampire is. Can he turn into a bat? Is he undead or just a kind of disease? Is he supernatural or a biological fast zombie?

This principle is everywhere in succession. Very pointedly in the political context: it relies on the audience to fill in the blanks about what a Trump or a fascist is. The writing itself never commits to anything, but is specifically, overtly ambiguous so as to not alienate either side of the isle. The result is a show for people who are uncomfortable with moral introspection.

For most of the run time I kept saying, "I don't know if the writers are in on the joke". I don't know if the writers are in on the joke, of having Shiv express sincere "muh democracy Trump is a threat, he will implement oligarchy" while she is at a party where the oligarchs are deciding the next presidents, and her only goal in life is becoming Top Oligarch. I don't know if the writers are doing that on purpose, or by accident, because they are genuine libtards. I don't know if it's meant to be a sincere attempt to say "look she's a GOOD concervative", or, a cheeky point about her callousness. And then the episode ends and it doesn't fucking matter anyway, because no plot thread has any significance more than one episode later.

Until the end I postponed judgement, but now I fully say, the ambiguity is intentional. It is a deliberate creative choice. That was the only tension for me at the end. The plot and the lore and the characters were all inconsequential, but I was looking for the finale to see if the ambiguity was intentional, or if it was accidental.

Temporarily embarrassed billionaires

The only aspect of the show that is relatively unambiguous is then the social drama and emotions. This is then what the show is about. It is not about fox news, or trump, or politics. It is in fact not even about rich people. All of the cast do not actually act like rich people. They behave and act and feel like average middle class Normies. Every single main character is a perfect clone of people I know in real life. My initial cool line about it was “It’s just dressed up in rich people aesthetics to appeal to an American audience of temporarily embarrassed millionaires, they have to “be rich” for the average American to be able to watch it without shitting himself in a crisis of identity.” But I think there is slightly more to it than that. I think it is about “temporarily sympathetic millennials” - not only must they be “rich”, they must also be “evil”, for the audience of millennials to be able to watch it without shitting themselves, for psycho-sexual peter pan syndrome and complex shame reasons. The same principle as “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” but for emotional maturity.

It's a shame because it's interesting enough, despite my vitriol the show has got stuff going on, and the actors are all well cast and playing the line between sympathetic and annoying very well, but ultimately the interesting positives are accidental not central. They are honestly lame and annoying millennials, but this is not a central theme that is confronted seriously, but an accidental marketing excuse, to be able to sell more television. They don’t ultimately do anything with it.

Succession is at its core about the emotional state of the aging millennial middle class.

The inclusion of the overt Trump election politics in season 4 is a cheap gimmick to distract you from the fact that it's a show about nothing. It does not follow either thematically, dramatically or in any shape or form, from the initial setup in the beginning of the show. The opening is about the family dynamic of weak millennials with a strong tyrannical Father figure, who has a stroke and all of a sudden becomes weak and vulnerable and infirm. That is a delicious setup. That is a strong, dangerous, scary and tense situation, that is interesting. To see your father weak for the fist time, to see that he is human and mortal, is the beginning of adulthood, which then sets the stage for the Peter Pan failsons to grow up. Easy. Perfect. Interesting. Engaging.

The final season is about Scandinavian not-Elon-Musk buying Fox News and the Gang Has To Stop Him (because they are selfish, or to save democracy? YOU decide! choose your own adventure!).

The father just dies off screen, after having spent 2,5 seasons being totally back to full health and back to being an immortal God figure who bullies them, because it’s subversive and shocking and you don’t expect it. They do nothing with it except for crude shock value. When the delirious father grabs his daughters hand and tries to make her masturbate him, that is just pure shock. Shiv doesn’t grow or change from being sexually assaulted by her infirm, demented father. The next episode she is just back to status quo.

The final conflict and dramatic tension of the ultimate climax of the final episode, is only introduced in the second-last episode. There is no dramatic through-line to even the start of the season, let alone the whole series.

Tons of interesting “things” happen, but none of them affect any of the characters internally, only externally. There is no character growth in anyone, only character reveals.

Kendal’s very very easy character arc is not only subverted once, but twice, when he in the final episode lies to his siblings and says when he admitted it to them earlier, that he was lying for attention - in a desperate attempt to win the big board meeting.

You can say that this is all the point and intentional, that it is deconstruction and the point is all of them are Bad Successors, and the lesson of the story is that, but if you think that’s worth 40 hours of your life, and you think that was the intention all along, then I think you have bad taste and you’re not paying attention, and you just enjoy the ambiguity, because the show was indeed made for people like you.

Three fan fictions

Here’s some ways I woulda done it

The Final Greg Solution

In the final conflict where The Siblings have to overcome Scandinavian Elon Musk and save the company, but they have to pitch a new CEO as part of the deal, and they are discussing and plotting it for the gazillion-th time and re-airing the same complaints about each other and the same dynamic that has been going on and on an on for 4 seasons: Kendal is a drug addict who has destroyed his public image by trying to backstab his dad 900 times. Shiv doesn’t actually know how to do the job. Roman is an incel who cant do public speaking. Instead of just doing the exact same plot, again, as they do - you use the fact that literally five seconds ago, Kendal promised the wacky comedic relief side character Greg, who has been failing upwards and climbing the corporate ranks the whole show, a big favor, and being allowed into the inner circle, turning the triumvirate into a quad, for giving them the valuable information the enables them to make this one last push to retain the company.

The solution is, all three siblings accept their previous failures, and accept that they cannot be The Successioner, so they name Greg as a front man, whom they can control from the shadows.

This is the one redeeming act of character growth from all of them, as they internalize their individual mistakes, accepting their flaws, and make a practical solution that enables them to win, by learning from their mistakes. None of them can be the guy.

This is nice and subversive, the funny comedic relief character was the real Guy all along. You can even have a little wink at the camera at the end where you go “oooh is greg going to fire them all now???” and keep your desired ambiguity, but this way something happens, and something pays off, and multiple storylines are tied together into a neat bow at the end.

The lesson is, ambition is rewarded and the real Succession boy, was just the most ruthless and amoral of them all, all along: Greg.

The Shiv And Tom Show

The payoff there is in the actual show is fine. I do like the way the Shiv and Tom storyline ends. My beautiful girlfriend, wife and partner, articulated the powerful reactionary points of this very well:

It’s actually the Shiv show, she was the real main character all along, and the big question of succession was not “who will be the next CEO", but "Who will be the new Daddy”. Here is an emotionally broken modern woman in search of a father figure, and she tries to become the father figure, but is put in her place, and this is actually what she really wanted all along. All along she never wanted to be the next dad, she wanted Tom to become her new Brutal Tyrannical Father figure. It is a happy ending, because she gets what she really wants, and not what she thinks she wants.

This is all well and good, and I agree, that is pretty funny. But if that is what you are doing, its a 12 episode single season show. You could do that in a single season, and that would have been great. If that was what you were doing, and setting up, and paying off.

In that case you would have the show start out pretty much as it does: the Three siblings are fighting over who gets to be the next dad. Shiv is overtly the protagonist. Her brothers are overtly antagonists. Doing this as an ensemble show is detracting from the potency of it. But if you lean into it, and this is the story you are doing, it would be excellent. Roman represents total amorality and being a corporate evil right wing man. Kendal represents reforming the system from the inside with good liberal values. Shiv is conflicted between the two extremes, attracted to both, and we explore her decision making, values, and desire, which is then subverted at the end when her dog-parent millenial peter pan husband ruthlessly outplays them all. That works, but it has to be central and focused, and not have 3 seasons of total filler about a fake red herring Kendal non-character growth, or Roman being revealed as “actually hes not a total playboy like he pretends, he is an incel who cant get hard and has mommy fetish!!!”. That is all diluting and distracting the potency of the drama, and makes it much less interesting.

Instead what we actually have is drama for anxious people. Drama, for people who are afraid of conflict. A psychological thriller for people who have anxiety disorders.

The Kendal and Roman Show

I already described the outline for a Kendal character arc. You can easily combine this with what they are already kind of doing with the brothers. At the introduction, Kendal and Roman are introduced as types. Kendal is the corporate tryhard, he wants to be Mr big business. Roman is introduced as the lazy playboy. Over the first two seasons, the two do a role reversal. Not by action, “do” is the wrong word. All of the characters are low agency and don’t ever really “do” things. But they are revealed in the writing, to be “the opposite of what we initially showed you, made you assume”.

We THOUGHT Roman was a stupid lazy playboy, but ACTUALLY that’s what Kendal is! And that’s why his attempts to fuck over his father fails! Because HE was the lazy playboy all along, who wanted to just be a celebrity and go on podcasts and be liked!

Meanwhile Roman turns out to be actually decent at “the business”, and he was just ACTING like a playboy - he is ACTUALLY an incel who cant get hard, he was lying about all the sex he was having, and he has a mommy fetish for the old woman at Fox news. He is ACTUALLY the sensitive young man that Kendal wants to be!

You have on your hands here a classic “battle brothers” literary motif. You can do anything with it. You can have them come to terms and work together, and have them enable each other to accept their true selves: Kendal can just be a podcaster who gets laid and hangs out with famous people, and he can inspire Roman to take the reigns, because he is ultimately the best suited for it, and all he needs is emotional support (as per his mommy fetish issues), have someone in his corner who believes in him. Or, you can have one of them kill the other. Say all of that plays out, and then Kendal sees his brother succeed, and gets envious, and kills him with a rock. Passion. Meaning. Growth. Drama. SOMETHING HAPPENS.

Or maybe, Roman sees Kendal destroy his life with drugs and a party lifestyle, and dies from getting needle Aids. And that makes Roman reflect on his own behavior. Why was I even trying to affect that personality? Did I just do it to impress my dad? My brother?

The two brothers represent two sides of the same character, sides of the father, and in their interaction, they meditate on his internal contradictions, and ultimately resolve it and come out the other end better than their Father, either together, or with one as a sacrifice. Who knows I’m not getting paid to write this shit.