The same as Logan’s children seek to inherit his creation without having done the hard work of building it, hard work which included shady deals, sacrificing morals when convenient, cutting corners when necessary, and screwing over competitors, we inherit a world built by giants from Thomas Edison to Teddy Roosevelt and have no idea what to do with it.
I’ll be honest: I have mixed feelings about Succession. I know many people rate it as one of the best TV dramas of all time, but I cannot be so generous, believing the show is dragged down by essentially unlikeable characters outside of Brian Cox’s brilliant and mesmerizing Logan Roy, dialogue more stilted than some of Shakespeare’s prose soliloquies, and an underlying premise so flawed it makes not the slightest bit of sense. Let’s start with the premise first: No one with an IQ over 75 would trust any of Logan’s offspring to run the proverbial hotdog stand, much less a media and entertainment empire. The closest analogy I can come to is Hunter Biden thinking he’s going to be the next President, or – as detailed on a storyline in the show itself – Logan’s son, Connor, winning the Presidency. Kendall, Roman, and Shiv are not simply fatally flawed in their various ways from drugs to sexual peccadilloes. They are completely and totally incompetent, unqualified, and lacking in every possible visionary and leadership quality conceivable. Indeed, they wear these very traits on their sleeves and as a result, almost everything they touch rapidly turns to complete shit, from Kendall’s failure to acquire technology companies Waystar-Royco is targeting to a literal disaster on a launch pad in Asia. Human nature being what it is, we can imagine that they themselves might not be aware of their own limitations, but surely everyone else would see it as a scarlet “U” for useless emblazoned on their foreheads. For that matter, their own father knows it, and yet the audience is supposed to believe that there is some non-zero chance the Board of Directors, other executives, shareholders, and the general public might choose one – or even all three! – to lead the company into the future. It might have been possible to accept if any of the trio were charismatic Machievells, able to trick people into believing they had skills they didn’t, but these flaws were apparent from the very first scene. As someone who has worked for several family owned businesses throughout my career, I can assure you every employee in the company can spot the black sheep and steer away from them, but Succession’s entire climax somehow hinges on this complete suspension of disbelief.
In its own way, the dialogue hinges on a different suspension of disbelief. I was reminded of possibly apocryphal story about an early showing of David Lynch’s Eraserhead in the late 1970s. Supposedly, someone stood up in the theater, yelled “people don’t talk this way, people don’t act this way” and promptly stormed out. Succession, in my view, suffers from what we might call a David Mamet on steroids problem, where people rattle off one liners back and forth with far more wit and penchant for snappy phrases than possible in real life. Mr. Mamet was once the pride of theater and screenwriting, crafting such classics as The Untouchables and Glengarry Glen Ross until he penned a piece, “Why I am no longer a brain dead liberal.” Nevertheless, Mr. Mamet pioneered the current era of overly articulate, machine gun dialogue, penning such gems as “Fuck you, that’s who I am,” and “Put the coffee down. Coffee is for closers.” Mr. Mamet, however, was downright tame compared to Succession. Naturalism, this is not. Unlike other shows considered to be among the greatest such as The Sopranos or Breaking Bad, which prided themselves on creating authentic characters, everything in Succession is stylized, manufactured, and sometimes awkwardly so. Hence, we’re “treated” to put downs far too pointed, such as Roman commenting on his brother-in-law’s vest. “Ooh, nice vest, Wambsgans. It’s so puffy. What’s it stuffed with, your hopes and dreams?” Or this one, “It’s dirty, it’s weird, and it’s evidence of precisely the kind of disgusting liberal metro butt-love that makes our viewership angry enough to buy pharmaceuticals.” To be sure, this is not entirely a flaw. It works to lend an hyper-realism to the proceedings when combined with the documentary filmmaking style and judicious use of music, part stage play and Shakespearean drama, part a fly on the wall watching scenes we should not see. It also serves to make the show interesting, and produce some startling moments. For example, the word “straightener,” used in the context of a small amount of drugs or alcohol to offset a larger amount has become a term of art in my own household, and of course, Logan’s use of the phrase “fuck off” becomes an artform in and of itself.
Ultimately, the dialogue would work significantly better if the characters delivering these lines were more likable rather than simply fatally flawed. Logan himself is a terrific monster, bold, charismatic, competitive, and fearless, he centers the show and remains the only truly captivating personality. He is also perhaps the only character that truly seems real, as though he were assembled from legends of the old industrialists and is ready to take his place in a history book beside them. Otherwise, Logan would be fitting as the tragic hero in a classic play, one where events swirl around him, mostly at his command, but those that aren’t vex him to the point of madness, a modern King Lear dividing his kingdom to cite an obvious parallel. Tom also possesses a certain weak pathos; a striver and brown noser who we might imagine would be a better person if he weren’t married into this family. The rest, however, are all pretty much hopeless. Kendall has delusions of grandeur not backed by any actual accomplishments, hampered by a drug addiction that lead to someone’s death. He is impossible to root for, even though he was played with a certain puppy dog vulnerability by Jeremy Strong. Roman is slightly more sympathetic in general, one of those more classic characters who simply isn’t comfortable in his own skin and yet spends most of his life trying to prove otherwise, but bizarre sexual hang ups, fetishes, and other strange behavior render him largely inscrutable and far removed from anyone we would want to spend time with. In principle, Shiv should be the most likable, but she has far too over inflated an opinion of herself, is way too much the schemer, and mistreats her husband so badly, that we remain only distant. Meanwhile, Connor is more of a pretentious oaf with outsize ambitions to be President, despite having accomplished precisely nothing in life except spend money earned by his business mogul father. Collectively, they don’t possess enough talent to operate a marijuana dispensary in San Francisco and are about as likable and approachable as drug addicts lingering outside.
This might sound hard on the show or suggest that I didn’t like it. That is untrue, for perhaps the most striking thing about Succession is that these three flaws combine to define the show, rendering it bigger than the sum of its parts, wildly entertaining at its best, and elevate it to the perfect allegory for the modern era. In that regard, it’s not much of an exaggeration to say that the modern world was built on the backs of giant’s from the 19th and 20th centuries. Ambitious and at times ruthless pioneers in industry, the arts, government, and science that willed into existence so much of what we take for granted today. The same as Logan’s children seek to inherit his creation without having done the hard work of building it, hard work which included shady deals, sacrificing morals when convenient, cutting corners when necessary, and screwing over competitors, we inherit a world built by giants from Thomas Edison to Teddy Roosevelt. Sadly, we are the children in this analogy – undeserving, largely incompetent, clueless about what it really takes to build something lasting, and yet convinced of our own genius, covetous of our worthless self-worth, and self righteous to the point of lunacy. As Kendall, Roman, Shiv, and Connor look upon their father as a flawed man – even a monster – who just accidentally did something great or did something great at too great a moral cost, the establishment looks at the past and believes achievements that ring through history could’ve been done better and different, although this same establishment has never accomplished anything remotely on that scale and has repeatedly proved incapable of doing so. Similarly, the establishment believes it can cover up this lack of accomplishment and consequence with a combination of fancy degrees from the right schools and flashy words. Action – that is the drive to get things done (almost) whatever the cost – has become subservient to endless, mainly nonsensical talk, and results a mere afterthought less important than intention. Hence, we can laud Joe Biden for his diplomatic success in Ukraine despite being embroiled in a war that shows no sign of ending, one which has cost a country most of its infrastructure and thousands of citizens. We do this fully knowing that a truly gifted foreign policy strategist like Teddy Roosevelt or Harry Truman would have avoided the entire war in the first place. The media, as exemplified by shrill, self-obsessed figures like Taylor Lorenz and Felicia Somnez, hold privileged positions and live privileged lives, but see fit to rant about everything and everything. Attacking their own employer, the same way the Roy’s attack their own father. Ms. Lorenz for example recently bemoaned the horror of being asked to pull down her mask while going through security at the airport three years after the pandemic, publicizing her rant on Twitter, projecting her own ridiculous phobia onto a failure of the Transportation Security Administration.
Late in the series, a political advisor to a Presidential candidate and former lover of Shiv’s is somehow shocked and offended that Kendall wants to trade favorable coverage for killing GoJo’s acquisition of Waystar-RoyCo. He tells Kendall outright that they are not the previous generation, either of them. “You are not your father.” It’s as true of us allegorically as it is of the characters in the show. We are not our fathers, that is we are not those who actually built this word. Instead, we have rebelled against the very traits that brought into existence a world so safe, secure, and convenient we consider it dangerous to remove a mask to get on a plane. Logan himself put it this way shortly before his death, “You’re such f**king dopes. You’re not serious figures. I love you, but you are not serious people.” If the world crumbles in the near future, I’m hard pressed to find a better epigram. We are no longer a serious country. No one outside the American and Western Establishment bubble can possibly look at Joe Biden doddering along a stage, if not outright falling down, and believe that we are. Even if we can get past an increasingly senile President who believes we can build a bridge over the Indian Ocean, the obsessions that define our day – from counting the precise number of genders as if they were angels on the head of a pin, to insisting obvious men are no different from women, to finding every aspect of the past lacking in our view, retrograde even when there was no grade to regress, to unilaterally dismantling our own economic and energy advantages – are so far from serious we might as well return to the era of physiognomy and alchemy. This doesn’t mean there aren’t serious people out there, but frighteningly many of them are sitting in Communist China, happy to sell us “tuck friendly” swimsuits and windmills, while they continue their plans to dominate the world. Succession ended in something of a whimper, a pathetic and obviously doomed plea to keep the business in the family. Let’s hope the same is not true of the modern era.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 