In Michael Schulman’s New Yorker profile of Jeremy Strong (a chill just ran down Jessica Chastain’s spine), the writer raises the question of genre. Is HBO’s critical darling Succession a comedy or a drama? Schulman and Kieran Culkin, who plays depraved little goblin Roman Roy on Succession, say the former. Jeremy Strong, who turned a parasocial relationship with Daniel Day-Lewis into an acting career and won an Emmy in 2020 for playing Kendall Roy on Succession, thinks the show falls into the latter category. It’s a great anecdote, illustrating in just a few lines Strong’s ostensible disconnect from his cast-mates and what could be construed as the self-serious indulgence of his approach to Kendall’s character. And all without actually outright saying, check out the pretension of this fucking guy.
With the tragicomic balancing act of the season three finale just behind us, I think it’s safe to say that both sides of the debate are right. When you step back and consider the disparity between Succession’s silliest plot lines and its darkest, it seems almost ludicrous that the scene where Roman accidentally sends a dick pic to his dad can exist on the same show as the scene where Kendall confesses to leaving a young waiter to drown at his sister’s wedding – and yet.
Succession often takes cringe comedy to a whole new level of potency. It’s also an unflinching study of how power, privilege, and wealth erode the soul. The caustic jokes and one-liners that have become show creator Jesse Armstrong’s signature are here in abundance, but the show is asking more of its viewers than to simply point and laugh at these petty, cruel, emotionally bereft rich people.
You could watch Succession at a total remove from its characters, I suppose, but if all you feel for the Roys is scorn or indifference, then why would you even still be tuning in? Before the season three finale aired, some viewers complained that the show was running out of narrative steam, that nothing and no one in it ever changed, and that there was no fun in watching if the rules governing the Roys’ world were set in stone. These are the rules in question: Logan (the Roy patriarch played by Brian Cox) never dies, never loses, and never stops kicking puppies just to see how many times they come back; and his kids, no matter how hard they’re kicked, can’t seem to walk away for good. The debilitating and repetitive cycle of abuse and trauma in which the Roys find themselves stuck is the point.
Succession is often funny and sometimes theatrical, but it is always about being haunted by the sins of the past, both imagined and true. The scars scoring Logan’s back, shown on screen once without comment and then never again. The mysterious death of Logan’s sister, Rose, which he blames himself for. “Evil Uncle Noah,” who presumably gave Logan his scars and serves as his own twisted proof that, in terms of father figures, his own kids could have it worse. Roman’s unsettling childhood anecdotes of violence and humiliation that nobody else in the family seems to think are worth remembering. The spiral that Shiv (Sarah Snook) mentions she was in when she met Tom (Matthew Mcfadyen) and decided to settle for a man she neither loves nor respects. Half-brother Connor (Alan Ruck) being estranged from Logan for three years after he divorced his mother, who was later sent to the “booby hatch” (a psychiatric hospital) and is no longer alive. The young waiter, as previously mentioned, who drowned as Kendall fled from the scene.
On a lesser show – one that’s more interested in gaining its audience’s sympathy than in being interesting – these memories might be revealed through flashback at pivotal moments of characterization. With Succession, adding another item to this laundry list of secrets and scabs feels voyeuristic, like eavesdropping through a locked door. The Roys would like nothing more than to believe they have no history, that what others did to them and what they’ve done in return has no bearing on who they are. They just can’t quite keep then from bumping up into now. Every so often, when the glossy, impersonal sheen of their immense wealth cracks – that’s when we get a glimpse of the true decay underneath.
As with any family business, Waystar Royco is more than just a company. It is the family – Logan’s monstrous triumph and his children’s white whale, a dinosaur in denial of its own irrelevance, the architect of their misery masquerading as the cure. Of course it stinks of corruption, too. Every closet in this corporate haunted house has the skeletons of sexual assault victims stuffed inside and around every corner is an ATN ghoul waiting to jump out and deliver an elevator pitch for fascism. No Real Skeleton Involved. Outsiders might be able to tell that inheriting Waystar Royco and the title of CEO would be more of a curse than a reward (“why can’t they just sit the fuck down and be rich?” is a common refrain on Twitter), but when you've been tailed by ghosts your whole life, it’s hard to believe you could ever outrun them.