As Succession Comes To End, It’s Time To Recognize The Problems With It Most Ignore.
Part 1: What the Saga of The Roys Really Is — And Why It Compares Badly With the Most Successful One
As someone who has spent much of the past three years railing at Succession for being one of the most overrated series in history, especially when it has come to taking awards away from series that I think are infinitely better, I may have been one of the few people who greeted the news that the upcoming fourth season will be the series last. My biggest fear right now is that it will what it has done in 2020 and 2022 and take a lot of Emmy nominations and awards from the extraordinary final season of Better Call Saul.
Over the next several months, there will be much writing about the final struggle for power between the Roys for Waystar, whether the inevitable winner was the right one, and the series place in the great pantheon in television history. Critics and fans will no doubt be judging where Succession deserves to finish based on the final season and the final episode. I’m probably going to have to write about it in some regard going forward, but since we’re almost at the end, I’m going to make one last major effort to file a minority opinion as to why all of this is a wasted discussion.
As I have said, over and over, while the performances and the writing of the show are brilliant, it does not change the fact that all of it is done in the picture of one of the bleakest and most unlikable series in the history of television. And yet paradoxically, all of the things that have caused critics to rant against other series for these actions — the fact that entire seasons go by with no consequences for any of the characters, the fact of all of the characters are fundamentally unlikable, the fact that it took three seasons to go by before the Roy family to really do anything against their father — seem to be arguments for it greatness in the eyes of many. People raged against The Sopranos where nothing seemed to happen or the slow pace of series like The Wire or Deadwood in their later seasons. But the fact that somehow nobody seems to have really taken an action against any of the powerful figures doesn’t seem to work against Succession.
I think because of the superb level of the acting — and make no mistake, the entire cast is brilliant given the fact that they have to make something out of characters who go through entire seasons without doing anything other than yell creative insults at each other — the viewer seems to genuinely think that Succession is something more important than it actually is. Which is why I intend to write two different articles explaining some of the more fundamental flaws in the series that nobody seems willing to accept: the kind of show they’re actually watching and why the fundamental basis of this series that everybody claims to be caring about has always been a moot point.
I’m going to start the first article in this with a theme I actually used before in an article two years ago: that Succession is not, in truth, modeled on some great Roman or Greek epic as Jesse Armstrong claims in his previews or even some fantasy power struggle like Game of Thrones. Instead, it is very clearly modeled on something that has basically vanished from broadcast television in the 21st century: the prime-time soap.
For those old enough to remember (I barely qualify) the 1980s and 1990s were filled with prime time soap operas based on the sagas of rich and powerful families who spent hours on end struggling for power against rival companies and each other. These series were among the most popular in the 1980s, including Dynasty, Knots Landing and Falcon Crest, but by far the most successful was Dallas.. It’s original run was more than eleven seasons, it inspired several TV movies and it actually had enough interest to spark a revival series on TNT in 2012 with several members of the original cast and some new actors playing characters who had appeared on the series before. In many ways, the Ewings were the Roys well before Jesse Armstrong came up with the idea and had he tried to pitch it a decade earlier he might have called it ‘Dallas meets the Murdochs’. Because I think there are far more similarities between the two series (and I actually think that extends to the revival) I will use it as the model for the comparison.
And let’s start with one clear difference: at no time did the writers of Dallas have any illusions that they were making art. Even the cast and writers would be more than willing to admit that at its peak, Dallas never deserved to rank in the realm of L.A. Law, Hill Street Blues or St. Elsewhere which would dominate the Best Drama awards throughout the eighties. The series did win the occasional Emmy of course, and was occasionally nominated for Best Drama, but that may have said more for the quality of TV at the time than that of Dallas. Millions of people may have watched every week for over a decade, but they weren’t doing that because of quality television.
I would like to make clear upfront that as a critic, I don’t have a problem with that. Not everything that any medium produces is high art. There have to be some shows that you watch because you can’t take them seriously even if they’re ostensibly serious. I’d actually argue that one of the problems with Peak TV is that it has more or less killed off the ‘guilty pleasure’. We can’t admit we’re watching a series because it’s got a lot of sex or ridiculous plotting; there has to be some kind of higher value to it. Shonda Rhimes is by far the most guilty practitioner of it in Peak TV; I would be far more inclined to appreciate Scandal or How to Get Away with Murder or maybe even Bridgerton if Rhimes would just say that this isn’t supposed to be high art. But because she believes that everything has to have artistic merit, Rhimes and showrunners like her insist that their shows are deeper than they are. And while critics are more than willing to call out some shows on it, they will not do so for Succession.
Because to be clear, the Roys are little more than the Ewing clan except they’re struggling to take over their father’s company because they each think they deserve too. If Armstrong and his writers would commit to the campiness of the enterprise, I might actually enjoy Succession more. Because no one on Succession really deserves to be talked about in the same way that so many of the other characters in Peak TV do — and honestly, I think if the Ewings ever were involved in a hostile takeover bid of Waystar, they could manage it in two episodes, maybe three. Here’s why.
J.R. Ewing was the most legendary character in Dallas and indeed TV history. Part of this was because of the superb performance of Larry Hagman as J.R. who was, to be clear, everything that the Roy family and most critics are convinced Logan is. He’s not. If J.R. had come across Logan early in his career (not impossible based on the timeline of Roy’s rise to power) J.R. Ewing would have been able to destroy the Roy family before any of Kendall, Shiv or Roman were even born. No question. It would have been a knockout in the first round.
Because J.R. Ewing is everything Logan Roy is not. He’s clever, he’s charming and he can see around corners that everybody thinks they can. People love him even as they hate him, Bobby might have spent years struggling with him but at the beginning of the revival when J.R. was in a convalescent home in a coma for years, Bobby came to him and admitted even after everything that happened, he still loved him and even missed the fights. (Of course, because this is J.R. immediately afterward, he roused himself from his bed, and began to make calls to try and thwart Bobby’s plan to sell Southfork.) His relationship with his wife, Pamela (Linda Gray) was one that was forever born out of what seemed to be mutual contempt but the two of them were always drawn to each other time and again. JR’s son, John Ross, despite what must have been a troubled childhood (I’m speaking of the revival) still respected him and wanted his approval and love. And JR inspired loyalty because of his cleverness borne out of devotion instead of fear: when he got a certain look on his face, you knew that he was thinking and that person was in trouble.
Logan Roy, by contrast, has none of those qualities. Perhaps at some point he might have actually had some kind of calculated brilliance, but Armstrong has in fact implied that the main reason he has risen to wealth and power is because he is just a bully and has so much wealth and power that everyone’s terrified to tell him he’s wrong. Even when he has tanked the stock of Waystar, even when he refuses to leave newspapers for social media, even when he is clearly leading the company to ruin, no one wants to say no to him, not even his own children. And compared to J.R., he can’t even say anything clever. J.R. had the ability to insult in such a way that even the recipient might not be sure they were insulted. Logan’s catchphrase is ‘f — -off.” Now I know that Dallas took place on network TV in the 1980s and Succession is on HBO, it doesn’t change the fact that Logan insults are basically just calling people names. I think J.R. would do better under similar circumstances.
That’s the other thing. For all the flaws the Ewings had (and trust me, there were a lot of them), in times of tragedy and pleasure, they would willing come together, even just to observe the idea of politeness. Even at the height of their hatred for each other, I can’t imagine Bobby and J.R. taking separate cars to a corporate meeting, let alone fly in separate private jets rather than spend even a few hours in stiff silence.
Not that the Ewings weren’t capable of splitting in alliances. Indeed, in the early seasons of the revival one of the more intriguing aspects was that while the Ewings were fighting for control over Southfork, the breakdown did not come down on generational lines, but rather by pure family. J.R. formed an alliance with his son, John Ross (Josh Henderson) while Bobby formed one with his son Christopher (Jesse Metcalfe). Many of the alliance that formed were based out of family loyalty more than corporate. By contrast, the Roy family spent the better part of three seasons refusing to ally with any of their siblings rather than lose the possibility of holding power later on. The only true loyalty the Roy family ever had is to the bottom-line. In a third season episode, Kendall tried to convince his siblings to join him against his father, but while they all saw the wisdom of doing so, they were all terrified of their stock losing value. It’s worth noting the only reason that the three younger children are now working together against their father is not because they suddenly want to take him down but because Logan is selling the company to someone else and they all now fear that they will lose the power they’ve had all this time. The Ewings were not good people, but you often got the sense that it was them against the world. The Roys have the world and are only willing to fight each other.
And its not just that the Roys are horrible people to each other in private. I may not know this one way or the other because I haven’t watched the show enough to care, but do any of the Roys have friends or even someone that loves them other than Connor (who to be clear, his fellow siblings don’t seem to real consider one of them)? I don’t know enough about Kendall’s marriage or him as a father to know if he cares about either of them more than the company. Shiv told Tom on their wedding night that she didn’t believe in monogamy. Connor seems to pride himself on isolating everyone he meets. Logan’s second marriage essentially broke up on his eightieth birthday and his brother holds him in contempt. The Roys mother had no problem betraying them in the third season finale and Cousin Greg had no problem betraying his cousins. The only relationship people care about on the show is Tom and Greg and Tom clearly holds Greg in contempt. Gerri Kellman says in one of the trailers that ‘they can’t go against their father…he’ll crush you..” I don’t think for a minute it’s because she cares about them even after working with the Roys for decades or even because she’s on Logan’s side. The only thing she cares about is the company and I don’t think any of the other people we see around the Roys would be near them if they weren’t the Roys.
One of the most famous cliffhangers in TV history occurred when J.R. Ewing was shot. The episode which revealed ‘Who Shot J.R.?” was the highest rated episode in TV series history to that point and is still among the highest ever. It is a tribute to the work of Hagman and the writers of Dallas that a man who had so many people who wanted to kill him got this big an audience not so much to know who the potential murderer was, but because that they wanted to see if J.R. lived. (This was a soap opera, after all, and lead characters are killed on soap operas all the time, even in the 1980s when it was rarer.) We should have been rooting for who pulled the trigger, we might well have been in a later era, but people watched because they gave a damn about J.R.
No one will give a damn if Logan Roy or indeed any of the other characters end up dying in the final season of Succession, and if they do, it’s only because they are under the belief as to how it will affect who ends up finally running Waystar. That’s the other problem at the core of Succession. Armstrong has been trying so far to get us to care who ends up in charge that he’s completely misled on the most critical point: that it doesn’t matter one way or the other. I will deal with how the viewer seems to have ignored that fact even while it has been hiding in plain sight, and why that is the major reason we should not regard Succession as a great series, certainly not in the pantheon of great HBO dramas.