On Succession’s eternal returns

SUCCESSION COULD HAVE BEEN a space opera, so infrequent were its characters on terra firma. As teased in its woozy title sequence, in which both absurdity and gravitas spill from the rotten blooms of Nicholas Brittel’s score, the characters in the Hobbesian HBO family drama mostly hover somewhere in the air: in helicopters, bleached penthouses, glassy upper-floor offices. Despite being American cultural despots, as owners of Fox doppelgänger Waystar Royco, the Roy family whips around in a cultureless vacuum, a reflection of their ideological vacuity and volatility. To tell the story of three siblings unmoored by the lack of stakes a life of material excess can create—and how ego-shattering stakes can thereby attach themselves anew to anything—Succession uses Manhattan’s vertical social and physical architectures as brooding metaphor. The generic terrain of the island, and all of the sterile spaces its characters occupy within it, package the high-stress emptiness of their lives at its top in a crystalline anti-aesthetic.

Succession’s Roy family, in all their ignoblesse oblige, are practically allergic to the streets of the stratified city they—like the Murdochs on whom they’re based, whose patriarch helped elect Mayors Koch and Giuliani (whose advisor was soon-to-be Fox News head Roger Ailes)—helped create. The Roys’ always-urgent need to “get some altitude”—per the stilted management jargon the show’s writers ridiculed with zeal—on a particular situation is revealing: Their dwellings, all penthouses, are as far away from the world below as they can possibly be.

On the rare occasion we see any of the Roys—with the exception of obsequious Citi Bike user Cousin Greg (Nicholas Braun)—at ground level, the masses are an assault on their senses and senses of self. Chaos ensues when the third estate comes into contact with the family of the man who, to quote his older brother Ewan, the show’s crotchety approximation of a moral center, “may be the person most single-handedly responsible for the death of this planet.” (Of note: Ewan, played by beloved character actor and Midtown Starbucks dissident James Cromwell, is also a shareholder of Waystar Royco, and worth at least $250 million.) Abused, nihilistic “slime puppy” Roman (Kieran Culkin) fulfills his masochistic desires by making himself into an anti-fascist protest’s piñata. Snarling media tyrant Logan Roy becomes the target for an exploding bag of piss. At one point, during a Season 2 clash between Antifa and Fa protestors, the Waystar Royco building is thought to be under siege by an active shooter following revelations that one of their prized political commentators stans Hitler. (Turns out, the “active shooter” was just an employee of Waystar Royco, apparently pushed to suicide by workplace bullying.)

“Number one boy” or, per fictional Forbes, “Heir with the Flair” Kendall (Jeremy Strong) slips into and is neutralized by a steady stream of commuters after his failure to entice a vote of no confidence against his father leads to his ouster. His sudden oneness with the crowd reads as cataclysmic for a character who has been conditioned to think of himself as exceptional—in a brilliant shot mutating Pete Seeger’s version of Florence Reese’s union song “Which Side Are You On” into a shareholders’ requiem. In Season 3, cruising through the streets in a limo, Kendall, in a moment of manic revolutionary delusion after self-interestedly exposing corruption under his father’s rule, cajoles his fair-weather entourage to participate in a game he invents: Good Tweet/Bad Tweet, in which, simply, the people stuck in his company read him good and bad tweets about himself. “Kendall Roy is not a hero, fam. He’s bootleg Ross with a daddy complex.” “He clearly has mental health issues and crazy guilt coupled with addiction. That’s all this is and it’s sad.” Behind the tinted limousine windows shielding him from the city, the Internet is the only porous surface through which the public can seep.

Shiv (Sarah Snook), the slipperiest, most mercurial operator in a show filled with such characters, with a knack for shrouding her moral bankruptcy in bien pensant liberalism, makes barefoot contact with the ground only to cozy up to and intimidate a survivor of sexual assault threatening Waystar Royco. She approaches the woman—who intends to testify about the rape culture created by a man Waystar Royco insiders jokingly refer to as “Moe Lester”—at a playground. In a hilariously calculated imitation of an everyday gal, she looks down at her heels, says, “Oh wow, these just kill me,” and removes them in the middle of the playground before beginning to bribe the survivor. Like all things with Shiv, even her connection to the earth beneath her feet her is transactional.

For Kendall, the street below even starts to look like death itself; the series teases his impulse to hurl himself from the Sauronic tower of his father’s corporation. Early on in Season 1, on the Waystar Royco rooftop, the company’s general counsel, Gerri (J. Smith-Cameron), tells Kendall “don’t jump” before alerting him to the company’s $3 billion debt. That seems an innocuous quip, until, in Season 2, Episode 4, Kendall stands gazing down desirously from that rooftop, before a glass suicide barrier is later installed—as if a suddenly omniscient Logan Roy has ordered it to keep his son in his purgatory. When in Season 4 Shiv and her wormy husband Tom Wambsgans (Matthew Macfadyen) rabidly argue on their balcony, it’s hard to resist clenching at their nearness to the edge.

While the Roys are cloistered from New York’s distinctive character—and drivers of the very forces that leech it—Succession is very much a product of the city’s cultural sensibilities. Its supporting cast is a who’s who of phenomenal New York theater actors (J. Smith Cameron, Eric Bogosian, David Rasche, Arian Moayed, Sanaa Lathan, Cherry Jones, Rob Yang, Zoe Winters, Juliana Canfield, Peter Friedman, The Lehman Trilogy’s Adam Godley, to name a few), and Succession’s role as an annex for this community makes its occasional skewering of the theater world’s high-minded self-image feel like a particularly knowing inside joke. “I could outlaw drama,” US-presidential hopeless, Napoleon-penis purchaser, and all-around family embarrassment Connor (Alan Ruck) at one point warns his girlfriend, Willa (Justine Lupe), an escort and aspiring dramatist. “I never would, but just illustrating the power of the position.” Instead, he funds her Broadway passion project. Its set’s many tons of sand are giving audiences sand mites, which burrow into their hosts’ skin to lay eggs, perhaps not the intended way for a play to stay with audiences. (IRL, The Ringer posted a scathing review of the fake drama, Sands, and a New York comedy troupe did a staged reading, Sands by Willa.) Kendall begins a heated romance with a Sands starlet, jetting her on a horny whim to Scotland (the Roys have enough money to essentially Amazon Prime people) only to realize that she overuses the word “awesome” around his father; he quickly ships her back to the US like a defective order.

One could tune into any podcast catering to one of New York’s various political subcultures and trace very few degrees of separation from Succession—itself a composite progressive imaginary of the contemporary Right. Heroes of the Fourth Turning playwright Will Arbery—whose 2019 Pulitzer Prize–finalist transported audiences to a college reunion of discontented conservative millennials in Wyoming—was brought on as a consultant in Season 3 and a writer in Season 4, and has appeared twice on Dissent’s Know Your Enemy podcast. In Season 3, Succession featured Red Scare’s crypto-sedevacantist cohost Dasha Nekrasova as the punishingly named crisis PR consultant Comfrey—her loaded presence opening a horseshoe-shaped portal between New York’s post-Left and New York’s TV Right in a fraught precursor to a headline like “Republicans Court the ‘Red Scare’ Left With Roger Stone Martini Hour.”

Succession revels in prodding proxies of New York media. Take fictional startup Vaulter—acquired and, like so many fledgling digital publications, subsumed, digested, and eliminated with a regularity gastroenterologists would applaud. Were it a real company, it’d probably be harvesting clicks from Succession recaps and hot takes, encouraging parasocial relationships with its characters through “which Shiv lewk are you?” quizzes. (The ever-self-aware Vice admitted that Vaulter’s headlines—for instance, “Wait, Is Every Taylor Swift Lyric Secretly Marxist”—hit a little too close to home.) Sophie Iwobi, played by comedian Ziwe, hosts The Disruption, occupying the space of a millennial Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, the kind of show that purported to fuel the #Resistance by calling Trump a “screaming carrot demon.”

The Manhattan skyline, imagined as a playground of personal possibility, appears in innumerable films from the ’80s to the aughts: Think of fish-out-of-water rom-coms from Splash to Working Girl to Coming to America to The Devil Wears Prada, not to mention the cornball clincher of Sex and the City 2’s “Empire State of Mind”–scored opening credits, over which Carrie Bradshaw expounds: “Once upon a long time ago, there was an island: some Dutch, some Indians, and some beads” as an overhead of the green isle is filled with a grid of buildings that transubstantiate into blingy diamonds. In those movies and untold others, the Manhattan skyline is a concrete jungle where dreams are made of rather than a spiked rampart wrought by rapid development and luxury real estate’s vice grip on New York politics. Pre-9/11, the World Trade Center—a pet project of David Rockefeller’s, created with a vision of “catalytic bigness”—was often showcased, camera all aswirl, in preludes to stories of exhilarated new starts and leaps of faith. In Succession’s opening, the Twin Towers’ leviathan replacement, the “Freedom Tower,” obstructs a cold sky; the series’ interior office scenes, and their soaring views of life far below, were shot doors down, in the 4 and 7 World Trade Center buildings. Succession’s vertiginous depiction of the skyline is a fitting shift for a city transformed by financialization and super-gentrification, where so-called affordable housing has become a regulatory workaround for developers. In this footage, each skyscraper is a barrier, its reflective surfaces concealing the amorphous conglomerate monsters looming over Gotham’s grid.

Meanwhile, in the real world—and despite of Succession’s aesthetically impoverished vision of life up high—the series’ locations have become a central fixation of New York real estate writers; a recent New York Times article noted that one listing agent for the 200 Amsterdam duplex occupied in the series by Roman Roy would redirect the fictional character to TriBeCa: “Given his winning personality, she’d advise him: ‘No one’s going to talk to you here—you won’t make any friends’ in the family-oriented Upper West Side.’”

The series’ best real estate joke comes in Season 3 episode “Too Much Birthday,” in which Kendall, living in a penthouse at 35 Hudson Yards, throws his own party just downstairs beneath the “enormous tectonic foreskin” of The Shed, a neoliberal culture cathedral erected—as Claire Bishop noted in these pages—on the foundations of “supply-side predation, accelerated gentrification, [and] speculative construction.” Here, the one Roy sibling who has a relationship to culture—evidently, an ouroboric identification with hip-hop’s aspirational identification with the ultrarich, to boost his sense of professional swag as an ultrarich—has, for his fortieth, commissioned hagiographic immersive installations galore and promised musical entertainment from child band “Tiny Wu-Tang Clan.”

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Likely due in part to its self-reflexivity, the series seemed to exist in its own closed-loop system, mirroring the New York commentariat’s sometimes-inflated sense of cultural reach. (One of the ways Waystar Royco’s ATN News, like Fox, weaponizes its faux-heartland appeal is by dissociating from “condescending” New York sensibilities.) Despite it seeming to dominate discourse on a weekly basis (a likely result of algorithms feeding New York media tweets to New York consumers of New York media), the series’ ratings trailed far behind other major HBO dramas. (Succession’s final and most popular episode garnered 2.928 million viewers, while Game of Thrones’ finale had 19.3 million viewers and The Sopranos’ had 11.9 million.) In response to a tweet from IndieWire noting “the series finale of #Succession has set a new viewership record—for itself—on at just 2.928 million,” film critic David Ehrlich aptly tweeted, “yeah but every one of those 2.928 million people wrote a thinkpiece.”

In one such thinkpiece, from 2021, The New Yorker’s Naomi Fry astutely noted that the series could feel “almost Seinfeldian in its cyclical efforts to capture a group of eccentric, petty characters as they try, again and again, to one-up one another.” Succession’s New York setting strengthens the case for its consideration within this sitcom shape. Soundstage New Yorks—perfect settings for multi-cam shows that rely on the ability to portray characters bumping around the bubbles of apartment sets repeating their quirky behaviors—were home to the contained worlds of Seinfeld, Friends, Will and Grace, I Love Lucy. In their arid chambers, the Roys and their Machiavellian antics can also start to feel nearly slapstick—with a desperation reminiscent of characters in creator Jesse Armstrong’s earlier sitcom, Peep Show. Of course, Succession often broke free from its confines. Almost every other episode, it sent the Roys from their tentacled company headquarters casually jetting to Iceland, Scotland, Barbados, Norway, Turkey, Tuscany, Croatia—only to then remind us that no matter where these characters went, their habits of forsaking any vestige of interpersonal connection for advanced positions within their forever game were unwavering. Fittingly, the series’ only main character death occurs in the pressurized cabin of a private jet: Logan, the Roy siblings’ “world of a father,” is suddenly supine in the belly of his plane, as his shell-shocked children, on a yacht far below, are held up to his unhearing ears via cell phone. They then question whether the floating sarcophagus should circle for a while instead of landing in Teterboro, to give them time to solidify their press strategy.

As Succession’s final season progressed, it became clear that sitcomic repetition was in fact the source of the series’ particular tragedy. Although its protagonists had to contend with the idea of losing their publicly traded company multiple times per season (while still gaining billions from its buyout), whenever the prospect looms, it’s played as total devastation. This could make for exasperating viewing, and certainly made it the right time for the beloved series to end. But what was compelling about the show was never the question of who would “win,” but rather how characters’ tiny, intangible ways of hurting each other could be as cruel as a literal disembowelment on any series where drama is derived from physical violence. (Meanwhile, the material ways they hurt the world, with the exception of Season 4’s heavy-handed election episode, came across as a chilling, ambient drone: what the screams of a protest might sound like from fifty floors up.) The show was mostly so skillful with tone that it was able to make the competition for a job between three people who absolutely never need to work—a premise truly fit only for a sitcom—into a matter of world-historical consequence.

In the series’ concluding scene, after the final nail seals Kendall’s CEO coffin, he’s followed by his late father’s hand-me-down bodyguard Colin (Scott Nicholson), a human wall between him in the public sphere, into Battery Park. He stares off the precipice of Manhattan into the Hudson, and the question—“will he jump?”—hovers once again. Jeremy Strong improvised a take in which Kendall attempts to do so, but later acknowledged that acting on that impulse would be wrong for the show; these characters, he observed, “don’t do the spectacular, dramatic thing. Instead, there’s a kind of doom loop that [they’re] all stuck in, and Kendall is trapped in this sort of silent scream with Colin there as both a bodyguard and a jailer.”

Minutes earlier, Roman pointedly delivers the show’s tragic, Seinfeldian thesis: “We’re nothing,” he pronounces to Kendall in a nondescript, empty conference room. This presumably occurs doors away from where, after being named COO while his father recovers from a stroke, the sexually and professionally impotent edgelord, almighty and pathetic, once jerked off to his own dominance over the skyline of the world’s wealthiest metropolis; his cumshot against the city looked more like a bug squashed on a windshield than any kind of success.

— Moze Halperin