Psycho-warfare of the finest degree
You guys can keep all your superheroes.
There is a scene about halfway through the first season of the shrewd new show Succession — one involving a boardroom meeting — that is more nail-biting and tensionscrewing than really any action scene you’re gonna find in Marvel or DC.
Flowing from a nettlesome sequence of events involving an “air space on lockdown” — something that even the richest of the richest, sadly, cannot control — and the quotidian whims of a speaker phone (who doesn’t hate a conference call?) the passage is probably one of the most exciting things you’re likely to see on the screen, big or small, in 2018.
HBO’s new prestige series (starting Sunday, June 3, at 10 p.m.), follows the ups and downs (mostly downs) of a family-owned media conglomerate that is 100-per-cent, positively not based on the Murdoch family — or so goes the official line from its producers. (To quote Cher in Clueless: “As if.”)
Executive-produced by Big Short director Adam McKay and led by thespian Brian Cox in the role of the ruthless patriarch, Logan Roy, it’s got a lot going on, let’s just say.
There is the older son, Kendall (Jeremy Strong), he of the androgynous name, the Jared Kushner-skinny frame and a deeply penetrating gaze set to be one of TV’s finest. He is as ambitious as he is damaged.
There is younger brother Roman (Kieran Culkin), a man-boy joker who seems like he had Ritalin with his Cheerios growing up, and who looks exactly the kind of person you’d want to “do” Coachella with. The sardonic veil hides a fella who wants to be more but doesn’t know how, and is caught in the dark-side crosshairs of a brother and father.
The lone sister in the family, Shiv (Sarah Snook) — one who clearly has demons that come with their own blinking lights and carries herself with a kind of insouciant, unthirsty Hyannis Port style — is noblesse oblige to the max, max, max. She is also, as one character in the series tells her to her face, “the acceptable face of the worst family in America.”
Yet another sibling, Connor (Alan Ruck), exists almost solely as an asterisk: one who has decamped from the business and set up quarters in New Mexico. He says he’s neutral in the clan’s many zigs and zags ... but is he, really?
And that’s just for starters when it comes to this vast caterpillar of an ensemble.
Previewing episodes of Succession, I had an image of a network chief at HBO hollering to an underling, “Get me our Billions!” That Damian Lewis-led series has been critical catnip for rival network Showtime, so HBO sired Suc- cession, trading in Wall Street for the Fourth Estate, in terms of a world to explore.
It struck me that the show is like a giant cocktail shaker of Billions, The Crown and Veep. It has some of the same nihilism as Veep and quite the unexpected wryness for what seems, at first glance, like a heavy King Lear- instilled drama (indeed, the show even shares some creative DNA with Veep: Political columnist Frank Rich is a consultant on both shows). I bring up Netflix’s The Crown because Succession delves into many of the same messy interior lives and shades of grey of a family in the spotlight.
It is my absolute favourite new series of the year ... did I mention?
Smartly sketched, what I like most about Succession is that it’s novelistic in form and, yet, not bombastic. It lets things flow, leaving you, the viewer, to fill in gaps. It doesn’t telegraph too much or get bogged down with exposition.
And because it is 100-percent, positively not inspired by the Murdoch family (yeah, OK), it’s pretty interesting reading into the real-life parallels. For anyone attuned to Murdochology — the longrunning saga behind one of the world’s most powerful families — it’s all there: the power struggles, the standoffs, the strings attached (particularly in the cross-paths of the three Murdoch children by his second wife, Elisabeth, James and Lachlan).
The psycho-warfare plays out just as one would imagine in the house of mirrors Succession — including a particular Thanksgiving-set episode that makes the family dynamics in the movie The Family Stone look pretty light in comparison. It’s not for nothing, after all, that the Hollywood Reporter, in its review of the show, posited that “The Roys, the media clan at the heart of the show, are more powerful than the Carringtons ( Dynasty), chillier and more remote than the Gettys ( Trust) and somehow more dysfunctional than the Bluths ( Arrested Development).”
As a keyhole into a whole world, it nails it, be it the nevernot-present black town cars that are almost a character in the show — smooth and shiny like the carapace of a spider — or the staff that cosset nearly every aspect of a life like Logan’s. In one hilarious scene two men deign to order ortolan in a hot restaurant.
“It’s a deep-fried songbird,” Shiv’s fiancé Tom, played by Matthew Macfadyen, begins to say. “You eat it whole. It’s a rare privilege ... and it’s also kinda illegal.”
As with any family of the .0001 per cent so much comes down, ultimately, to what is implied, what is construed and what is left decidedly unsaid.