A fact I often think of when I watch “Succession,” perhaps the defining fact of the HBO series, is that the first full lecture at the table occurred on November 8, 2016, Election Day. The run ended with a party at executive producer Adam McKay’s house to celebrate Hillary Clinton’s victory. It didn’t work that way. Sarah Snook, who plays Shiv, the mentally ill, galling daughter of media titan Logan Roy, later recalled McKay saying, “Well, we’re doing the right show.” Series creator Jesse Armstrong recalled that Election call for Trump as “such a shock – and five, ten minutes later everyone lives in a new reality”.
For me, and for many viewers, Succession, spanning six years and four seasons, was the right show for the moment, a way to process and live in this new reality. No other show, I would argue, no other cultural product, has been better suited to reflecting, filleting, rippling, and sometimes even anticipating the toxic cartoon rollercoaster ride of the Trump presidency than a series about a fragile media corporate family with more than a few similarities to the Murdochs. Just as Hamilton immediately conjures up the sunny seriousness of the Obama years, Arrested Development belies the goofy incompetence of the Bush presidency, or Bo Burnham’s Inside will be the only thing I ever look at to remind myself of the pandemic, Succession isn’t just inseparable from it not only for the national context, but also symbolic for the atmosphere. When the show comes to an end this Sunday, it will be the end of a prestige TV era. And it’s also a farewell to our most succinct, scathing, and brilliantly distorted reflection of the Trump years. (Of course, one could argue that Trump’s era never quite ended — he’s the current Republican frontrunner for 2024.)
For much of its run, Succession didn’t directly engage with politics or real events (the pandemic altered the production schedule, but thankfully not the world within the show). Trump was not mentioned; The Roys’ television network, ATN, covered Fox News, race-baiting Chyrons and all, but there was no prosthetic-laden Roger Ailes to keep track of accuracy. But it had the feel of the overwhelming zeitgeist: messy, prickly, supremely ironic, a destabilizing combination of clever and consistent but dumb. Characters with an absolute allergy to sincerity. There were predatory corporations, a bunch of high-earning idiots fighting for the wheel, a competitive carousel of bullshit (as Kendall put it in season one, words are just “complicated airflow”). Increasingly decadent but sterile cowardly wealth: “No real person involved”.
Brian Cox, who played Logan, once referred to the show’s “ludicrosity” — not a real word, but a pretty good description of both Succession’s lyrically profane, achingly funny dialogue and its hamster wheel of greed, shamelessness, and sheer stupidity , which emanates from within and around the post-2016 White House. I’m inclined to think that the Trump presidency was tantamount to a never-ending reality show: a campaign of insincere jokes turned into an attention-grabbing circus where the stakes turned never felt quite real (except…). Of course they were) with twists you couldn’t quite believe (unless you could, of course). In a time of cultural fragmentation, it was the one show most Americans watched, willingly or unwillingly.
Photo: HBOI started watching “Succession” shortly after it premiered in the summer of 2018, while working as a reporter in a politically troubled state, and was immediately struck by its two-degree deviation from our reality. It was America, but not exactly. It was the easily recognizable politics and profit aversion of the super-rich, “just doing my job” to achieve unseen, horrible ends, without the black hole of a name. Viewers could easily fill in the blanks with ATN, the Roys, the unnamed, fugitive President on the other end of Logan’s private line.
There were many, many aesthetic and technical reasons to watch Succession (the script! the performances!), but fundamentally it was an outlet for a residue of inescapable, information-rich sadness. And maybe also an illusion of expertise and control. Meetings, back rooms, and palatial suites were held here, where deals were negotiated and power exploited. The people in it were terrible, but they were people too. And other people’s fallibility–bruised pride, broken moral compass, lifelong pursuit of love–is much easier to understand than board meetings or the details of a corporate acquisition, and more important too.
As the writers land the Succession plane, the series moves ever closer to our timeline. Like many, I had a hard time getting through the third to last episode, “America Decides,” in which a sinister, fascist-leaning Republican named Jeryd Mencken spoils Democrat Daniel Jiménez’s anticipated victory with the help of a dodgy early phone call from ATN. The episode provides many portals to the dizzying giddiness of November 8, 2016: brisk news anchors discussing election polls and forecasts and Arizona’s resulting electoral votes, Roman’s obnoxious use of “false flag” as an argument, Shiv’s despair as she realizes how bad it is could get. It’s entertaining and stirring, too close to the bone.
In the end, ATN delivers the crucial demand for an authoritarian president because one brother wants his team to win and the other is steaming with betrayal. And that’s it – “We just spent an evening watching good TV. We did. “Nothing happens,” Roman shrugs, while the Mencken call echoes, sounding a lot like the nihilistic, dissociative tendency of recent years to view unresolvable events as plot twists or episodes, a ploy to comment on and react to can. Roman may insist this is just business, but the Roys’ pettiness will have far-reaching consequences that aren’t hard to imagine. That the succession allows us to do so after years of staying just far enough away to reflect the ethos of an era is as apt a conclusion as I could have hoped.