Deep in Season 3 of HBO’s “Succession,” Kendall Roy (Jeremy Strong), descendant of a family of media billionaires-rogue, tells her brother Roman (Kieran Culkin), “You’re not a real person.” This is a significant disgrace on the show, at which the question of who qualifies as “real” and who doesn’t comes up over and over again. Most shockingly, this family business originates in the corporate designation for incidents of sexual abuse and violence against workers on cruise lines owned by Vestar Royco: “NRPI,” or no real person involved.
This chilling language draws on a core theme of “succession”: that today’s very wealthy F. Scott is more separated from you and me than Fitzgerald dreams. Royce, and the handful of hyperrich among whom they walk, are simply not a breed other than ours. They have become another species.
“Succession,” whose strangely weird third season debuted Sunday, is superficially similar in style to “Dynasties,” “Dallas” and other older soaps about the unhappy superrich. Leaving the lyrically positioned obscenity aside, it would fit perfectly on prime time with its thumbnail premise in 1981: Kendall, Roman and his sister, Shiva (Sarah Snook), attempt to become the favorite of their Muggle father Logan (Bryan). do and want. Cox), or his destroyer.
But in a vital sense, the show is nothing like its predecessors, as getting rich is nothing like it used to be.
The wicked oil tycoon of ’80s TV soaps was different from you and me, the way Ernest Hemingway responded to Fitzgerald: He had more money. He used that money just as his audience would have if they had won the lottery. The opening sequence of the original “Dynasty” is a time-capsule rendition of champagne desires and caviar dreams, with John Forsythe sniffing something expensive and Joan Collins wearing bejeweled earrings shaped like a squash racket.
Like money today, “succession” is a logical progression and something of a completely different order from its Reagan-era predecessors. The show is made for a time when the richest are proportionately so wealthy that it has alienated them. (Even the ones that aren’t literally going to space.)
Getting rich on “Succession” doesn’t sound like fun. If anything, it’s aggressively anti-fun, as if fun itself were a scathing concept for the lumpen people crowding family amusement parks. The libido of the show is not hot but perverse; For example, Roman becomes most agitated by being embarrassed and humiliated, preferably by family advisor Gerry (Jay Smith-Cameron). Its aesthetic is not glossy but cool.
The opening episodes of the new season — which pick up immediately from the climax of Season 2 in which Kendall dramatically pinned a cruise ship cover-up on her father — were largely held in conference rooms and on the tarmac, inside airplanes and corporate cars. occur in parts. Royce goes from one greasy, dry bubble to another. Sometimes they go to parties, which look like conceptual art installations and look like works.
Compared to the iconic shine of ’80s soaps, the modern luxury of “Succession” is both unattainable and isolated. It says, not only will you never have it, you NRP, your primitive mind doesn’t even have the cultivation of wanting it.
This may be one reason why “Succession”, unlike its predecessors, is a niche sensation rather than a massive broadcast hit. It is a bitter acquired taste, like expensive imported licorice, with twisted pleasure but little wish fulfillment.
Unless, at least, the desire is not for untouchability. Royce’s surname – Roy, King – is an understatement. They are more like Greek gods. They can sometimes get off and play between us. But they only recognize obligations to each other – if so – and they can only be hurt by their own transhuman type. (Vulture reported that the producer, Jesse Armstrong, decided not to rewrite the new episodes to address COVID-19, on the theory that the pandemic doesn’t really touch people like him.)
The new season, one of the most openly political and gleefully dark yet, focuses on whether forces of reckoning can enter the force fields of Roy and his ilk. It is not optimistic.
As Logan defends himself, he leans on the show’s fictional American president, an overlooked Republican whom he calls “raisins.” After all, raisins are grapes, and grapes are for filling the stomach. Or cultivated, when the old ones stop giving juice.
With an election looming, Logan — who owns a cable news network like Fox with conservative kingmaking power — begins auditioning candidates, including a cunning quasi-fascist played by Justin Kirk. For Logan, the leader of the free world, as he puts it in Season 1, is basically an “Intern.” This may explain his contempt for the presidential ambitions of his eldest son, Connor (Alan Ruck): Connor’s dream isn’t just absurd, it’s slum.
Is there any good in all of this? Shiva, once a political adviser of modest principle, idealizes that he would stick to a touch longer than the other Roys, before throwing them like a flute of champagne on a waiter’s tray. Roman is an irresistible imp, but his eternal joke-no-joke mode makes him more secretly dangerous, like the Internet memelord of circa 2016.
Beyond family origins, you reach characters who are just as morally weak as you or I can be thrown into this world. Shiva’s husband, Tom (Matthew MacFadden), is an arrival, with a painful awareness of his disability. Greg (Nicholas Braun), a cousin of a poor branch of the family, is delightfully nimble, a worm constantly turning to avoid the hook and perhaps swinging a few inches above the fishing line.
Greg’s helplessness makes him sympathetic, but is he respectable? His grandfather Evan (James Cromwell), Logan’s bitter brother, tells him in the new season that he is “in the service of a demonic enterprise.” Evan may be a holy scolding—he’s the most principled and least likable character on the show—but he’s not wrong.
That is your “succession”. The best lack all the charisma, while the worst are full of panache and intensity.
That’s where the new season of Kendall 2.0 is particularly interesting. You can expect him to fill the role of Bobby Ewing the good-man, in rebel mode, and it’s hard to argue with his attack on toxic Westar culture.
But he comes across as a rich poseur trying to make idealism his #brand, citing the kind of progressive catchphrase he used to promote a bad rap at a season-2 party for Logan. Morality, to him, is like an exciting new market in which he can claim a first-mover advantage—or like an easy Oedipal cuddle to brainstorm with his father.
The only unified figure is Logan, the boozy, manipulative Chronos whose kids compete to make sure he doesn’t snack on them first. He always seems to be technically close to destruction—corporate, legal or physical—yet his children can never shake the fear that he will rise from his sick bed with vengeance like the father from Kafka’s “The Judgment.” There is no tyrant quite as knowing you when you were in diapers.
But the evil genius of “Succession” is that it knows that the play wants to make the audience root for someone regardless. You drop from one loyalty to another – Team Shiva, no, Team Gerry, no, Team Greg! – As if jumping barefoot on a hot pavement. The audience is like the citizens of a country that has fallen into a one-party authoritarian regime. Good people are not going to win; Good people are not even in sports. You can only hope to see a terrible person do something terrible to a more terrible person.
This makes “Succession” an addictive spectator game and one of TV’s great horror stories. We can enjoy the NRP knowing that we have no stake, except for a small fact that people like Roy run the world. And we can take comfort in the certainty that whoever wins in this Greek play—whoever ends up, in Roman’s words, “climbing Mount Olympus to become the new Dr. Zeus”—at least its There would be decency not to enjoy.
(This article originally appeared in The New York Times.)
read all breaking news, breaking news And coronavirus news Here. follow us on Facebook, Twitter And Wire.
.