There is no unhappiness quite like that of a Legacy Media Family. Such is the premise of HBO’s Succession. At the heart of the show is Logan Roy (a very leonine Brian Cox) and his four children, the most viable candidates to take over leadership of the publicly-owned but family-run company called Waystar Royco, a conglomerate of business ranging from cruise lines to motion picture production to cable news. The Roys are miserable, especially when they are all together, and they are always together—insulting, undermining, and threatening each other with little reserve or discretion. They find the savage fun in dysfunctional, and many of us could not wait for the show to return after a long Covid-19 hiatus.
Season Three finally started in October to general and continuing acclaim. Critics have begun to notice, though, that the show is repeating itself, and they are divided on whether this is good or bad. It’s bad if you see this as a throwback to the earlier TV paradigms in which the beginning of each new episode returned its characters to the same starting block as if no change had occurred in the previous episode, as if nothing could be changed or learned. That kind of repetition may be a virtue, however, if you can refocus your understanding of the show’s genre and declare, as critics in both Slate and The New Yorker have, that Succession is basically a sitcom—by far the least serialized and most narratively conservative of classic network genres. The sitcom analogy is indeed illuminating, but only up to a point.
It is true that the stories spinning around Season Three have barely advanced the over-arching succession issue forward, backwards, or sideways. That narrative inertia is possibly the best reason to regard Succession as a sitcom. The essentially conservative nature of the classic situation comedy is something anyone raised on reruns of I Love Lucy or The Honeymooners takes for granted. And another reason, of course, is that the show’s general tone is comic. All the main characters, and most of the minor ones, can be fairly described as comic monsters and the sharp, mean wit of the showrunner’s earlier work—see, for instance, Peep Show—has never been better deployed to a more fully realized dramatic purpose.
Each episode of Succession is very, very funny. As in a great sitcom, the humor is the primary mode through which we learn to distinguish the characters from each other, and that is how over time they seem to become like people we really know. Each of them has a defining way of making a wisecrack, revealing a fundamental foible, comically misreading a situation, uttering a catchphrase (n.b. Shiv’s delightfully condescending “Uh huh”). While the show’s characters may sometimes seem a little bit rounder than usual, for the most part they remain as flat as silver dollar pancakes. The show pronounces their differences much more emphatically than their similarities. None of them looks remotely like genetic relative of the others. Like the characters swarming around Volpone’s deathbed, they have only one thing in common: an unwavering longing to take power over the family company from their ailing, sometimes seemingly dying, father. But he, Logan Roy, in his Zeuslike way, seems immortal. And so the comic hamster wheel keeps spinning.
Except. It’s not always like this, even though it seems that way if you try to comprehend all twenty plus episodes of the show so far as comprising a single narrative unit. For example, the Roy children from time to time rise above comic shallowness and actually do something competent. When I re-watched Season Two for the first time since I’d seen it two years ago, I was surprised by how much smarter and better and even mutually collaborative the Roy siblings were than I had remembered. These people, I thought, would not be failing in life if they could somehow separate themselves from their patriarchal overlord, Logan Roy. But they cannot. While on their honeymoon, Shiv and Roy are so desperate to return to the scene of Roy family action that they verbally fence with each to coerce the other into being the first to say, “let’s go home.” And we have seen that the farther Kendall gets from Logan, the more depressing and less funny the show becomes. The distance between them has been so great in recent episodes that in the latest, Logan sends Kendall a “fuck off and buy out” note rather than a birthday card. Such scenes have introduced a sadness completely incommensurate with the typical affects produced by television comedy, making it even harder to maintain that Succession is governed by a sitcom rubric. This shift may represent something like narrative advancement, however glacial, which contradicts the fundamental law of the sitcom (family is all you need). It’s one of several reasons why the sitcom classification doesn’t quite get to the essence of the show or account for common ways viewers express the pleasures they take from Succession as a whole.
Among these viewers are those who think it’s interesting because of what it’s about—a “media legacy family,” to use a phrase that the re-watching of Succession has permanently seared onto the surface of my brain. But let’s briefly consider the degree to which is not, in fact, about legacy, media, or even family—and I do so to clear some space for my ultimate argument that this show might be best understood as a tragicomic satire about the innate corruption of magnificent wealth and power. J. Smith Cameron (brilliant in the role of Gerri the Waystar consigliere) was on target when she recently compared Succession to I, Claudius.
Does the show’s primary appeal really lie in the ongoing contest among multiple contenders to become emperor? Many think so, treating it as something like a re-do of Game of Throne (this time as farce, as it were), and locking on the question of who will succeed Logan Roy. This position is not unreasonable but after 20 plus episodes we are no closer to answering that question and, to borrow a punchline from a very old and obscene joke, all of this ostensible jostling for power and paternal love isn’t really about hunting, is it?
And to what extent is Succession about legacy and legacy media? Is the “media” of “legacy media” a reference to the Murdochs and Redstones and Hearsts and other families whose lives Succession has been mercilessly skewering and from which it has been freely and so rewardingly pilfering? Or does “legacy media” refer to the obsolescence of print, radio, and terrestrial and cable television? Probably both, to an extent. Indeed, the great second seasons devotes a long arc to exploring and exploding the myth that these “legacy media families” themselves embody the values of their particular media holdings and that their integrity, their family traditions, will somehow keep their business going. Season Two introduced the patrician, intellectual and cultured Sulzberger-like Pierces who stand for giving the public what it “needs” while the Murdoch-like Roys stand for giving the public what it “wants.” That’s a distinction Kendall Roy makes to the Pierces when his family is attempting to buy their company. They are (legitimately) concerned about how the Roy brand will diminish their moral luster, but Succession makes it quite clear in the end that the Pierces are, also an unhappy (and morally compromised) media family, but in their own way.
On the other hand, Succession isn’t that interested in plots about media per se. Most of the time the Roys could be selling oil like the Ewings or any other widget. And only occasionally and recently have we seen them flexing the kind of power that comes with being a Murdoch—ousting the old president and anointing a new one, for example. This leaves “family” as its primary subject.
I suppose there are those viewers who see a kind of affinity between their own family and the Roys or perceived a consistent, abstracted understanding of family dynamics (in the way, say, psychologizing viewers could parse the inner lives of Tony and Carmela Soprano). As things now stand in Season Three, however, I’m currently under the impression that the only way to “relate” the Roys to “my” family would require me to invoke pre-modern, pre-bourgeois, pre-nuclear-family ideologies and think about the type of family depicted in Oedipus Rex and King Lear. He isn’t called Logan “Roy” (roi/rey/king) for nothing. What the Roys have in common with the grand royal houses of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Shakespeare is the absence of any visible bond between parent and child, sibling and sibling, that isn’t merely formal. The scale of their affection is limited, a mirage that appears (as Goneril and Regan and the Roy children know) in a postprandial encomium or the occasional family press conference.
There are occasional references to those things “we” did together as kids and some of these may be suggested in the photo montage that runs below the opening credits. But none of the connections between them seem to come out of any shared experience beyond coming from the same uterus—and in Season Three, Episode Seven (“Too Much Birthday”) we are told exactly what to make of their shared physical origin when Kendall’s decorators convert a party space into a representation of his mother’s birth canal. Shiv, told she is standing in a re-creation of her mother’s reproduction, immediately and sardonically recognizes it as a “cold and inhospitable” place. And when the Roys ever do need childhood bonding memories they can invent them. Roman at one point tells an investigator that he fondly remembers fishing with his dad in Montana. Logan, later, says, “well done, son” or something to that effect (I’m paraphrasing from memory here) but then says, “I don’t remember fishing in Montana”—“Oh yeah, Dad,” Roman explains, “that wasn’t you” but his half-brother Connor, not Logan himself. Father approves the ingenuity of his son’s addition to the legend of familial closeness. For a moment he appears fond and proud of his child.
A family whose members bond only when they’re fabricating family memories may not be entirely unrecognizable to some of us as what family is or what families do, but by and large the Roys represent some kind of throwback to the classical royal family. The only enemies the Roys have are not, despite their family squabbles, each other, but it is those few outside the family who may have more money or power than they do. In that, one may sense a connection to another HBO prestige hit, The Sopranos, but it would be wrong to see the Roys as mobsters with more private jets and more freedom to revel publicly in the social/cultural legitimation available to those who (ahem) have not obtained their wealth through criminal means. Indeed, Succession maybe be better understood in conversation with The Crown or The Great, than with The Sopranos’ more deliberate take on modern family, which plays off the contrast between the normalcy of any New Jersey suburban experience and the life of a crime boss, wife, and children. The Roys and the Windsors, unlike Jersey mobsters, are forever too big to fail.
Like The Crown, further, Succession feels most significant when it invokes the moral atmosphere of its temporal setting—the last years of the Trump administration (although there are no specific references to Trump himself or any other particular marker of our times). Still, running throughout the series is an echo, sometimes not very subtle, of Trump’s acknowledgement that he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” His “bad” voters laughed uproariously when he said that (watch the original video) but “good” (anti-Trump) voters remain appalled by the nakedness of his boast. Trump’s populism exploits a base that detests some elites more than others, and sometimes even seems to admire the super-rich who can do anything with impunity. The Trump voters may have understood him as bespeaking a grotesque hyperbole for comic effect; we anti-Trumpers were afraid of the truth within the “joke.”
Succession’s characters again and again succumb to the irresistibility of enjoying the greatest thing great wealth can give a person: apparent absolute emancipation from moral restriction. This dispensation doesn’t mean you don’t make mistakes and never feel guilt or ever feel happy. But who can renounce it? And why do so many of us, lacking that freedom, admire those who have it?
A hundred or more years ago, novelists from Tolstoy through Proust and James to Wharton, somehow understood that exploring the lives of the very rich paradoxically shed more light on the psychosocial problems of their times than focusing on characters with more immediate human needs (hunger, for example) could provide. In those days, the world knew a lot about the peculiar discontent of the very rich. Hemingway was being a know-it-all when he said, “they have money.” Fitzgerald, in contrast, understood that “rich are different from you and me.” They weren’t any more happy than anyone else – as Nick says of Tom and Daisy Buchanan at the end of The Great Gatsby, back home after comfortably getting away with murder:
They weren’t happy, and neither of them had touched the chicken or the ale—and yet they weren’t unhappy either. There was an unmistakable air of natural intimacy about the picture and anybody would have said that they were conspiring together.
An “air” of intimacy is not the same thing as real intimacy, and no reader of The Great Gatsby can believe Tom regards Daisy as his equal, but it’s clear enough that Daisy is a moral coward reluctant to give up the security of offered by Tom’s American version of Nietzsche’s Blonde Beast. Shiv is equally pusillanimous when she concedes to pose with the family around their chosen presidential candidate, a virtually self-confessed fascist. Fitzgerald understood that “we” have morals but the rich don’t need them. They’re living as if Nietzsche’s slave revolt never happened; they are “natural” aristocrats in all but name.
And even their worst fuck-ups can be turned to gold. When Logan realizes his son Kendall has played a criminal role in the death of a waiter at the end of Season One he doesn’t hesitate to hide the deed, and uses it to re-establish an unhappy intimacy with his seemingly wayward, emotionally devastated, drug-addled “best boy.” Kendall spends a certain amount of time trying to shake off his sense of guilt, but by the end of Season Two he feels confident enough to very publicly revolt against his father—but only after his father finally erases his guilt by saying, “You’re not a killer” (a double entendre because, while Kendall is in literal sense, complicit in murder he lacks the guts to be ruthless in the executive suite and board room). Soon thereafter, however, Kendall marshals the courage to publicly denounce his father and by the end of Season One, Episode One he evinces a smarmy confidence so great that he can sarcastically say, when compared to OJ Simpson, “Who says I never killed anyone?”
The creepy ease through which Kendall rises above his guilt only further reveals the strength of the family safety net: no Roy need fear direct personal punishment beyond a decline in family stock values. And if it does look like someone might need to go to prison, there are always volunteer scapegoats standing around. In Season Three, Logan’s son-in-law Tom, in an act of weirdly discomfiting self-sacrifice, volunteers to take the fall if anyone has to go to prison for DOJ actions following Kendall’s public revelations. Tom spends much of this season obsessing over the quotidian details of future life in the pen, even as his wife Shiv grows increasingly bored with his obsession. She sees him as pathetic because he does not know what she was born into knowing: they cannot touch us. Lie if you have to. “We don’t get embarrassed,” as Shiv tells a prominent family employee, a Tucker Carlson type pundit, whom she coerces into furthering a lie about the president that will benefit her family company while destroying the politician’s career.
That is one of Shiv’s darkest moments; if there was ever a thought that she is “better” for having once consulted for a Democratic senator, by Season Three we see that she can be every bit as depraved as any of her brothers. As Season Three draws to a close, it is unlikely that she, or her brothers, is willing to sacrifice anything to maintain whatever she expects to get from staying close to the security, the absolute freedom, of living next to the patriarch.
Who would give this freedom up? We know the correct answer to this question; it’s what separates good people from bad. If you say “I would!” then you are a good viewer; if you say “Not me” than you are a bad viewer. Right? In a now much-cited essay, Emily Nussbaum links the phenomenal popularity of All in the Family to the fact that, while its liberal credentials were unassailable, it appealed equally to those who identified strongly with Archie Bunker, just as today another kind of “bad viewer” would identify with Tony Soprano or Walter White, decades later. How do we separate the good and the bad viewers of Succession? Apart from its Fitzgeraldian sense of the perfect invulnerability of the super wealthy, it’s hard to discern a single message in this show.
So far, Succession hasn’t offered the kind of truth-knowledge provided by The Sopranos (ethnographic/psychoanalytic) or The Wire (sociologic/journalistic). But this is not to say that, by its finale, it will not emerge as a work of art with the stature of either of those HBO classics. In some ways its foregrounding of satire over realism may lead one to conclude that, like the stories of James and Wharton and Fitzgerald, the incessant focus of Succession on the impunity of the really, really rich feels more radical and, dare I say, Marxist than early 1900’s novels directed at and expressly dedicated to the depictions of the proletariat.
This class consciousness may result from the Englishness of Succession’s principle creators, but who can say? America could use a bit more of it, and that is what I take to be, maybe, the moral of the show.
