A fact I think about often when I watch Succession, perhaps the defining fact of the HBO series, is that its first full-cast table read was on 8 November 2016, AKA election day. The run-through ended with a party at executive producer Adam McKay’s house that was supposed to celebrate the victory of Hillary Clinton. It didn’t work out that way. Sarah Snook, who plays Shiv, the psychically bruised, acid-tongued daughter of media titan Logan Roy, later recalled that McKay said: “Well, we’re making the right show.” Series creator Jesse Armstrong remembered the election call for Trump as “such a shock – then five, 10 minutes later, everyone’s living in a new reality”.
Over six years and four seasons, Succession has been, for me and for many viewers, the right show for the moment, a way to process and inhabit that new reality. No other show, I would argue no other cultural product, was better suited to reflect, fillet, riff and even at times anticipate the toxic cartoon rollercoaster of the Trump presidency than a series about a fragile media conglomerate family with more than a few similarities to the Murdochs. In the way that Hamilton immediately conjures the sunny earnestness of the Obama years, or Arrested Development spoofed the silly incompetence of the Bush presidency, or Bo Burnham’s Inside will be the only thing I ever watch to remember the pandemic, Succession is not only inextricable from its national context but emblematic of its atmosphere. When the show concludes this Sunday, it’s the end of a Prestige TV era. And it’s also goodbye to our most incisive, eviscerating and brilliantly warped mirror of the Trump years. (Of course, you could argue that Trump’s era never fully ended – he’s the current Republican frontrunner for 2024.)
For much of its run, Succession did not directly take on politics or real-world events (the pandemic altered the production timeline, but not the world within the show, thank God). There was no mention of Trump; the Roys’ TV network, ATN, stood in for Fox News, race-baiting chyrons and all, but there was no prosthetic-laden Roger Ailes to scour for accuracy. But it had the feel of the overwhelming zeitgeist: chaotic, barbed, highly ironic, a destabilizing combo of smart and consequential but dumb. Characters with an absolute allergy to sincerity. There were rapacious corporations, a bunch of over-compensating idiots scrambling for the wheel, a competitive carousel of bullshit (as Kendall put it in season one, words are just “complicated airflow”). Evermore decadent but sterile, craven wealth: “No Real Person Involved”.
Brian Cox, who played Logan, once referred to the show’s “ludicrosity” – not a real word, but a pretty good descriptor for both Succession’s lyrically profane, painfully funny dialogue and for the hamster wheel of greed, shamelessness and sheer stupidity emanating from in and around the White House after 2016. I tend toward the view that the Trump presidency amounted to a never-ending reality show: a campaign run on disingenuous jokes turned into an attention-seeking circus where the stakes never felt quite real (except, of course, they were) with twists you couldn’t quite believe (except, of course, you could). In a time of cultural fragmentation, it was the one show most Americans watched, willingly or not.
I started watching Succession shortly after its premiere in the summer of 2018, when I was working as a reporter in a politically fractious state, and was immediately hooked by its two-degree tilt from our reality. It was America, but not exactly. It was the easily recognizable politics and profit-blinders of the ultra-wealthy, the “just doing my job” to unseen awful ends, without the black hole of one name. Viewers could easily fill in the blanks on ATN, the Roys, the unnamed volatile president on the other end of Logan’s private line.
There were many, many aesthetic and craft reasons to watch Succession (the writing! the performances!) but fundamentally, it was an outlet for a backlog of inescapable, high-information sadness. And maybe, also, some illusion of expertise and control. Here were the meetings, backrooms and palatial suites where deals were minted and power leveraged. The people in them were terrible, but they were also human. And the fallibility of other humans – wounded pride, broken moral compasses, the lifelong quest to be loved – is much easier to understand than boardroom negotiations or the specifics of a corporate takeover, and also more important.
As the writers land the Succession plane, the show has flown ever closer to our timeline. Like many, I had a hard time getting through the third-to-last episode, America Decides, in which a sinister, fascist-leaning Republican named Jeryd Mencken spoils the expected victory by Democrat Daniel Jiménez, with help from a dubiously early call by ATN. The episode offers many portals to the stomach-dropping vertigo of 8 November 2016: chipper newscasters talking about exit polls and projections and Arizona’s consequential electoral votes, Roman’s obnoxious use of “false flag” as an argument, Shiv’s exasperation as she realizes how bad it could get. It’s entertaining and viscerally upsetting, too close to the bone.
In the end, ATN provides the crucial call for an authoritarian president because one brother wants his team to win and the other is steaming from a betrayal. And that’s it – “We just made a night of good TV. That’s what we’ve done. Nothing happens,” Roman shrugs as the Mencken call reverberates, sounding an awful lot like the nihilistic, dissociative tendency, during the past several years, to view un-processable events as plot twists or episodes, artifice to comment on and react to. Roman may insist that it’s all deal-making, but the Roys’ pettiness will have broad consequences that are not hard to imagine. That Succession allows us to do so, after years of staying just far enough away to reflect back an era’s ethos, is as fitting a conclusion as I could hope for.
