My God, “Succession” Sucks

[Spoilers ahead] Sally and I started watching Succession earlier this year and made it though about three episodes. It’s a lacerating show about loathsome people. (Buddhists might recognize it as a perfect meditation on the nature of suffering.) I decided to go back and sprint through the whole thing, one finger on the jump-ahead button, which I exercised constantly. 

A lot of talent went into the show, but it is ultimately failed art. For four season, three children of a Rupert Murdoch-like figure maneuver to take the reigns at his death. Their machinations are dumb and banal. The father was a malignant and damaged figure who taught them only combat and manipulation—they fight for his love and approval, seeing the business as the only acceptable emblem of their worth. To lose the business means personal annihilation. So the entire show consists of different set pieces for their desperate combat, all manipulation and maneuvering. We never see any of the actual business. As a stand in for Fox News, it’s a wan and distant presence, a peripheral force that ultimately functions as a McGuffin to advance the plot. (That’s true even near the end, when the kids elevate an actual fascist by calling a Presidential election prematurely. The writers immediately abandon the entire episode once its function passes as a bargaining chip among the children and it is only alluded to obliquely thereafter.)

The ending is apt, in that one of the children decides at the last moment to scuttle a deal that would keep the business in family hands—solely because she’s so damaged she can’t, finally, allow her brother to win the prize. 

The most damning critique I could offer is that were Sally, having seen nothing but the first few episodes, to jump the finale, it would have made complete sense. Absolutely nothing of narrative import happens that changes the themes or meaning of the show in the intervening four seasons. The point of Succession is to experience, over forty long hours, the pain of all this dysfunction. There is no point one doesn’t grasp in the first hour, no artistic function of playing out 39 more hours, no reason for the show to exist. It’s just toxic billionaires inflicting their damage on each other in the futile effort to quiet the pain. 

Watch Reservation Dogs or The Bear instead. They’re so, so much better.