Farewell to Succession — Cultural Digest #10
A love letter (with NO spoilers).
So, this is it.
It’s over.
It’s really over.
I suspected it might be long before I knew for sure but I held off believing it for as long as possible. Then I found out online. You’d announced it through your PR team. It was official.
It’s been two weeks already and I’m still at a loss as to how to express everything you made me feel during the last few years, particularly the last few weeks. I’m still dreaming about you — last night Cousin Greg released a book on accounting that looked an awful lot like Parks & Recreation’s ‘Brief History of Pawnee’ as written by Leslie Knope. And the two nights before the finale, it was as if I was there, deep in it with you all but it was real and it played out differently. Perhaps this is just part of the letting go.
I understand, I do: the story is complete. A friend of mine said the same thing once, when she ended something before the people who loved it and her, were ready, so I really do get it better than most. I also want you to know that I feel deeply sated. You were always remarkable but that final encounter was a truly spectacular feast. Consistently, artfully nourishing. A tasting menu but with proper helpings and never-before-experienced flavour profiles every step of the way — but I will miss you. I already miss you. I have an appetite for more but everything you gave was enough. You left the party early just when everyone was eating out of your palm, cheering your name and honestly, I respect you all the more for it — you ludicrously capacious provider of everything that I love about storytelling, specifically television.
Your complexity, your nuance, your pacing, your toxicity, your outrageous and hilarious meanness, your playfulness, your vulnerability, your trust in the intellect of your audience, your mercurial dance around genre. If I run a search it will tell me you fall into at least five and though you cannot (and should not) be categorised by modern standards, perhaps that’s because the Venn diagram crosses paths by more ancient ones and really you should be classified as an epic, a tragedy, a history that speaks directly to the present, the satirical tragedy of our own times. Which makes sense. Your roots are Darwinian. Shakespearean. Greek. Even Roman. Did you name him for that? Occasionally he went by Romulus, what was it Gerri said on the plane to Norway? “They may think they’re Vikings, but we’ve been raised by wolves.”
Kendall, Shiv, Tom, Conor, Greg, Mattson too, even Peter’s friend who’d ‘come all the way from Monaco’ and many more besides — in no particular order either because every single one of them could have had their own show. But instead you threw them together and they warred, and vyed, and humiliated, desperately trying to social climb their way to the tippety top of the Waystar Royco pile, sociopathically crushing those who got trampled underfoot, whilst flinging insults like it was nothing, a food fight, a meal fit for a king, with the horrible intimacy that can only be found in the cruel confines of your nearest and dearest. GOD the mess they made was glorious. Blood, sweat, smoothie crowns and tears.
Some people took their time with you before they fully embraced your insidious bounty of complicated riches but not me, I loved you from the first moment that Tom Wambsgans wrestled over what to buy Logan as a birthday present and I will love you forever. How I envy those yet to indulge you.
You granted actors permission to truly demonstrate freedom within the form. To fulfil their artistic potential. Actors who were already excellent but who excelled to incomparable glory by virtue of exquisitely crafted writing. And on that note you showed the world the most magnificently nuanced length, breadth and scale of human imagination when we needed it most, as we stood on the precipice of whether or not to delegate our creative potential to non-sentient beings.
So too you led us into the beating heart of capitalism, of media, of exclusivity, of privilege, of inordinate wealth that in Jesse Armstrong’s own words ‘no matter what happens, will never be diminished’. In the rooms where it happens you will always be underscored accordingly by Nicholas Britell’s transcendentally discordant blend of piano, strings and hip hop beats, because when you’re the richest, most powerful people in the world you can afford to walk to the beat of your own drama.
You showed us the power of corruption and the corrupt nature of power. You showed us why even those with the ability to create meaningful change, will make decisions that are not for the greater good of humanity but always for the greater good of themselves and it is precisely this, that makes them as infinitely human as the rest of us.
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Every season has joyfully hairpin turned in different directions, usually at the final bend in a deftly handled, screeching, two-wheeled, emotionally charged stunt. Unexpected. Electric. Thrilling. You were the master of the bait and switch, setting our course in one direction only to collide into us from the blinded side so I always trusted you would expertly navigate the final landing, but what I didn’t expect was to take off again and again the second you hit the helipad, before we’d even had a chance to catch our breath or stretch our legs. You left me gasping. Every episode building on the momentum of the last. There seems to be some kind of universal alchemy to third episodes — I’m thinking of other HBO giants: ‘Long, Long Time’ for The Last of Us and ‘The Long Night’ in Game of Thrones, maybe it’s something to do with Longness or even HBO — except you kept it short. To me it seems you drew on all your strengths and threw everything you had left into every second you had left. Each week a new offering would show up and my heart would butterfly if I knew I was getting more than 60 minutes in your company.
I watched the last one twice in a day, I had to savour it. I watched all the others at least twice in the run up right before it. I once watched the second season for a second time in one sitting on a plane, just because I could. The last twenty-five minutes I have played over and over and over again. And I know that still, I will return to all of it repeatedly, forever. Such is my thirst, my hunger for more of it, more of the same, more of you.
You have shared the fruits of your labour, the spoils of a creative collective in total command of their craft. It is unquestionably the greatest acting and writing I have ever seen in anything ever (not to mention directing, editing plus all the rest) and whilst there is occasional improvisation, I would never mistake the dizzying heights of naturalism you achieved as a result of the efforts of your actors alone — few actors would dispute that 95% of good acting is good writing. But you were possessed with an unfathomable skill for writing dialogue that only Jesse Armstrong and your writer’s room will truly know the secret behind. The subsequent interpretation by actors who have inhabited their characters so thoroughly, so expertly and for so long that they can make everything they say sound as though they came up with it in that moment is a masterclass in embodiment. It’s as if we were back in my dream again and the Roys are in fact, real. They are, sort of. Inspired by the Murdochs, of course. By the end, I was heave sobbing for them, for me, for all of us, my face red raw.
I cannot thank you enough for this gift. For the careful, tender observation of those who quietly but violently dictate so many aspects of our lives from their ivory sky scraping corporate towers. For making us care about them despite their flagrant lack of interest in us, reminding us starkly of our own humanity and the things many of us aspire to whilst holding a mirror up to theirs. For showing us the dark centre of the zeitgeist through an otherwise impenetrable crack in the doorway, so that we might affect change and break through — and if not, at least scream-laugh at all of it. From the L to the OG.
You were rightly compared to King Lear and you will forever remain just as timeless. The greatest of all time, satirising the worst of mankind but at your heart you were the simplest of tales, one to which we are all in one way or another condemned; children seeking the approval and love of their father — and if you can’t have love, the next best thing is power.
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