While nothing exceeds like excess, how is it that nothing quite succeeds like Succession!
A still from Succession 3
I hope it’s not a spoiler to reveal at the end of binge-watching the third season of Jesse Armstrong’s HBO series Succession (available in India on Hotstar+Disney), that I simply feel hollow in the head. Slightly affected/agitated, yes, but mostly hollow; still processing, as it were.
ADVERTISEMENT
Not so much for the cliffhanger of a finale that I feel will keep one hanging on a mental cliff for some time. But more so by the end of an almost 29-hour drama, you wonder what could ever replace its dramatic quality to engage the brain in quite the same way. Everything else I’m likely to watch hereafter might make me bark like Logan Roy (Brian Cox), “Oh… F*** off!”
What does this series do to achieve this level of engagement through its world, story, characters, and their ever-changing arcs? What’s Screenwriting 101, really—as old as the lesson from Aristotle’s Poetics, anyway. Or, as derived from it, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin puts it in his master-class centuries later: To have a conflict in every scene.
Meaning, a scene where there’s always a character, who wants something, and a character opposite, who can’t give it; just yet. The hustle that follows, often between splintered groups, is essentially the relentless tension in Succession.
Scene after scene—of simply conversations, after conversations. To a point that if you heard this show on radio instead, with no narrator for description, it might remain almost as gripping still. But, of course, Succession is not a radio play. It’s a massive filmic production with castles on earth, private jets in the air, and pieces of glass in the sky for homes/offices.
And yet, from purely an action point of view, the most dramatic thing that happens in Succession 3 is the estranged son Kendall Roy (Jeremy Strong) walking back into his family/daddy’s company headquarters, in full public gaze, and a phone-camera swiftly following his move. That’s it. And, that’s all.
No other crutch of cinematic pyrotechnics or mayhem necessary at any moment. For, it’s the colourful parts, their multiple motivations through the dynamic scenes, again, that seamlessly guide you towards the fundamental question you follow riveting stories for: What happens next?
This is how an hour-long episode feels shorter than 15 minutes. Those who watched this nine-part third season with a new episode dropping Monday will know better. I caught the finale over three instalments, just to slow down time, and savour the series a little longer.
Most plot writers will know all of the above that I’m saying. And yet to pull off highlights of multiple characters’ lives and their circumstances—with the audience hardly ever knowing which way they’ll blow, depending on the unpredictable wind, of course—is competing with God, albeit on television, no?
Succession, as the title suggests, is about a bunch of potential heirs in a massive media empire, looking to succeed their self-made father for the top job. Not that the situation is vacant.
These children, at the core—glib, but ruthless; wholly lacking a moral centre, having grown up terribly unloved at home; totally obsessed with a public life, where nobody trusts anyone—could be a little like their own father. But they’re actually more like each other. Just so you know what White, potentially Right Wing, extreme-privilege/entitlement looks like. Besides, how the lack of the separation of Church and State might be how politicians garner votes. It’s the parasitic bridging of the big corporation, chiefly big media, with the big government, that people are ruled. Tables in the backrooms are laid. Deals will eventually get done.
I recently polled on Twitter who the audiences thought was their favourite Succession character, playing the actor, instead of the other way round! Results—Dad Logan: 22 per cent. Son Roman (Kieran Culkin): 22 per cent. Daughter Siobhan (Sarah Snook): 15 per cent. Son Kendall: 41 per cent.
Enough support (from outside poll options, though) for the outsiders: Greg Hirsch (Nicholas Braun), Logan’s long-lost grand-nephew; or Tom Wambsgans (Mathew Macfadyen), Siobhan’s husband.
Through whose eyes we also experience this world better. And they do really want this world; do they? Do you, the self-satisfied middleclass, surveying these schmucks? These outsiders are often equated to the eunuch Sporus, who the Roman Emperor Nero favoured, castrated and married. Only that Tom is as much the Roy family’s Sporus, as Greg is willingly Tom’s!
Everyone, dripping with buckets of sarcasm, does what they can get away with. The flawed idea of success here is to blindly go up a hierarchy, rather than stand outside it. “Nothing is a line (to cross). Everything, everywhere, is moving forever. Get used to it,” says Logan. This is manslaughter among the supposedly civilised. Absolutely the only thing they don’t do is consciously kill. Merely because that’s a bad career move.
It’s not about the money then, is it? Which, like health, you only think of, when you don’t have enough. Even the quasi rich have more than enough. It’s about a life in rarefied spaces, as the middle-classes might imagine it. Succession started off as Rupert Murdoch’s story. Where it’s at—and I think it should be studied even more closely—is quite simply Shakespeare; no less.
Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture. He tweets @mayankw14
Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com
The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.
Subscribe today by clicking the link and stay updated with the latest news!" Click here!
