JEREMY STRONG, BRIAN COX, KIERAN CULKIN, SARAH SNOOK AND…ALAN RUCK, MATTHEW MACFAYDEN AND NICHOLAS BRAUN…“SUCCESSION”
When you’re surrounded by snakes you do what you do best. You bully.
“There are rules? There are no fucking rules. It’s fun.”
— Logan Roy on ‘Wrestling For Sausages’
No winning, no losing just debasement to the nth. degree.
Like peeing in the corner into a bucket upon command.
Or crawling around on all fours making guttural noises.
After all, they’re nothing but traitorous underlings anyway — fright, paranoia, vindictiveness, ego, a penchant for humiliation and the blunt-force power of loaded threats notwithstanding.
The insatiable thirst for power itself, pervasive and all-encompassing.
The common thread.
“Here’s the safety briefing. If you move against me, I’ll put a hole in the back of your fucking head!”
The perils of succession.
Of Succession.
What is the dead-eyed, beaten down former heir-apparent and failed hostile takeover catalyst Kendall Roy to do? Or the fun-loving puerile Roman? The conflicted politico Siobhan? Or misplaced and clueless cousin Greg? Lost Tom? Even POTUS wannabe, the vapid wine-decanter Connor?
After all, Daddy Logan holds all the cards and won’t be givin’ ’em up anytime soon.
The Roy family — really just Logan Roy (Brian Cox) — runs an international media and entertainment conglomerate Waystar Royco, one of the biggest in the world.
Succession tracks their lives as they go about their daily routines, the second generation all-the-while contemplating what the future may hold if and when their aging tyrannical father begins to step back from the company.
Set in New York, the themes of power, politics, money, control and family dynamics are interwoven.
At the center of the Roy family are three of Logan’s children: troubled Kendall (Jeremy Strong); his outspoken, opinionated but largely empty-suit kid brother Roman (Kieran Culkin); and their savvy but torn and manipulative sister Shiv (Sarah Snook).
Brother Connor (Alan Ruck) is uninvolved in the day-to-day; he’s busy exploring an uninformed run for the presidency of the United States. This brainstorm hit after more than 50 years of doing absolutely nothing.
Cousin Greg (Nicholas Braun) who lost his job at the family-owned amusement park and Shiv’s new husband Tom (Matthew Macfayden) insinuate themselves into the scene for better or for worse, overmatched on every imaginable level.
The series follows a joust for power — replete with lances, shields and the metaphorical horseback sparring — as each family member struggles to hang on to what they have and then acquire a controlling interest in Daddy’s empire.
They aspire in their own inimitable ways.
The future is uncertain and the past their enemy.
The inner beauty of Succession is manifest in the realization that the protagonist mega-rich Roy family — forces of evil not good — somehow engender sympathy from the viewer.
For instance, shuttering an underperforming digital startup subsidiary after a few months — a dubious acquisition in the first place brokered by Kendall — ostensibly due to low traffic and talk of unionization should have been depressing in and of itself. Four-hundred-seventy-six people lopped off the payroll with a swipe of the scythe by a callous billionaire is not a pretty picture painted. Yet it is that very billionaire, Kendall for whom we feel when he numbly explains that he was doing this because “[his] dad told him to.”
So the question becomes, does Succession really hate the super-rich?
Those who suffer, elicit sympathy. And sometimes we empathize with some really bad people.
Kendall’s quest to be his father’s son taken seriously had us rooting for his failed takeover(s) to succeed. We laugh at Roman’s feeble stabs at humor and identify and perhaps even commune with the passed-over Siobhan, clearly the brightest of that generation. Greg and Tom — hapless and out of touch — demand that their pyrrhic victories be celebrated.
Begrudgingly we pay a measure of respect to crusty and irascible family patriarch and comic sociopath Logan as he tosses off the shackles of illness to reclaim his monarchy with a steely and unsentimental resolve.
The Roy children suffer awash in all the money in the world, each in their own custom-made hell.
Kendall of course is fueled by his desperate inefficiency, a voracious need to please and a desire to be loved by his weakness-hating father all of which portends failure not success.
Roman is mired in infancy; his behavior and dialogue ensure that he is not to be taken seriously.
Eldest brother Connor harbors a secret belief in his intellectual superiority which can only be fed and thereby flourish privately where few if any can recognize it.
And Siobhan’s gender dooms her to be another not-quite Roy orbiting the King.
Aaah yes the King.
King Logan himself reigns and reigns by himself, an abusive father who despises his children for the wealth and ease he has bestowed upon them and who — consciously or not — drives them to betrayal, the only form of love he can fully grasp.
As a result, because each of them is a brilliant portrait of a doomed, self-defeating existence — neurotically recreating and perpetuating the conditions of their own unhappiness — they become too pitiful to really hate.
Logan rejects all of his children (unlike King Lear) driving them out into the waggish version of the storm. A decadent billionaire family is made to look pathetic by wringing pathos out of their suffering and satire from their caricatured ineptitude.
Could anyone truly be evil if they are this oblivious, sad and just plain stupid?
Though the Trump presidency might offer a compelling exception, the writers and characters of Succession would like our answer to be a resounding, “no.”
[Editor’s Note: This piece was written by Mr. Kaplan in September 2019.]
