“Succession”
Drama: HBO (10 episodes, 5 reviewed); Aug. 11 Starring: Brian Cox, Jeremy Strong, Kieran Culkin, Sarah Snook
The first season of “Succession” felt indebted to Sartre’s existentialist play “No Exit.” The characters — centrally, a trio of siblings scrapping for their corner of a family media empire, with various lackeys and hangers- on in their orbit — were miserable creatures, and unwilling to get out of one another’s way. The condition of being stuck in a war that could not be won, and that could only be waged through vicious bickering, wore on.
What a pleasant surprise, then, that the second season has found a way forward — and has become vastly more interesting in the process. The world of the Roy family has opened up, yielding a meaningful understanding not merely of the lust for power but of what that power can do.
The first five episodes concern the tending and maintenance of the family’s media holdings, with a legacy outlet alluring as a potential acquisition. The enterprise provides variation and dimension for the characters. Dutiful semi-reformed addict Kendall (Jeremy Strong), emerging from a bender that left a body count in its wake, hews to his father’s commands with an appropriately chastened demeanor and too much zeal by half. Roman (Kieran Culkin) seems yet more feckless and sniveling as, tasked with demonstrating something other than wit, he can no longer keep up in conversation. And Shiv (Sarah Snook), the show’s shrewd standout character, surprises herself with her willingness to play power politics with the family’s conservative holdings, which run up
against all of her core tenets except the most powerful of all: self-interest.
These character traits aren’t new, but they now exist in a relationship with patriarch Logan (Brian Cox), a compelling monster of entitlement whom the show has wisely brought back to exceedingly rude health after sidelining him for much of Season 1. It’s more fun seeing people compete for the love of an active madman than a lion in winter. And the children gain shading and potency by being put in situations that extend beyond the family: The Roys’ pathologies are all the more striking when placed in context, and in contrast. We receive, for instance, a greater understanding of the Roy-owned cable news network, run by a sharply drawn neocon gorgon (the great Jeannie Berlin) — and why its presence in the show’s ecosystem is so galling to Roy critics. We meet a muckraking journalist (Jessica Hecht) whose persistence indicates at once how famous all the family’s members are and how much of their privacy has been sloughed away in return for grand wealth. And a confab with a family whose establishment liberalism runs as deep as its vapid self-worship provides something more intriguing still: the Roys brought low, forced to confront that which they lack and cannot replace with money. Some of these absences are moral, like rectitude and the ability to get along; more crucially, though, is the lack of respect from their social inferiors.
It’s through the new, wider aperture that we more clearly see the truth: Led by a renegade outsider patriarch and populated by famously broken ne’er- do-wells, this is a family whose greatest export is schadenfreude. The earlier iteration of “Succession” promised access to the gilded corridors of the Roys’ world and overdelivered: The poisonous bonbons of family hatreds grew a bit glutting with time. Showing us exactly what’s at stake in the fight for domination, and how eroded the family trust is by public hatred, has made the series into a fascinating document about what it’s like to live in a world one does not control. Collisions between the Roys and the rest of us have given “Succession” — richer in humor and insight even as it’s scabrous as ever — vibrant, dimensional life.