Living-Plus

 

Succession

starring Brian Cox, Sarah Snook, Kieran Culkin, Alan Ruck, Jeremy Strong, Matthew Macfadyen, J. Smith-Cameron, Nicholas Braun, Justine Lupe, David Rasche, Peter Friedman, Hiam Abbass, Fisher Stevens and an absolute Murderer's Row of guest stars

created by Jesse Armstrong (Peep Show, Fresh Meat)

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IT'S NOT LIKE I HAVEN'T GIVEN YOU PEOPLE ENOUGH TIME TO FINISH IT, ANY SPOILERS BEYOND HERE ARE YOUR FAULT, IF YOU REALLY THINK ABOUT IT

In fairness to myself, it's only been one calendar month since the initial airing of the series finale of this show, so this review isn't that late. I like to pretend I just needed time to think about it, unlike those other people who "review" things for a "living" in exchange for "money," but I get it; they're not in a hurry, they just get to watch this stuff before I do. It's the bedrock foundation of the corporate-media partnership that guarantees essentially free promotion in exchange only for access, ideas I spit upon on account of my very high principles and because nobody has asked me yet. But I'm pretty sure if it came to it, I'm in a position right now to say I definitely think I'd probably consider the high road. I declare I cannot be bought (in this hypothetical situation only myself and no money-having third parties are participating in).

In a way you could say Succession is about just that kind of corruption,* but in retrospect (and why I've waited to talk about it at all until all four seasons were finished) there isn't any corruption going on at all. Not if you take it as an active verb, as a thing that is happening. After four seasons, it's been made starkly and manifestly clear by Jesse Armstrong and the stable of best-in-class television writers and directors who hauled this thing onto its feet and made it stomp around in some very expensive shoes that there is not, in any season, storyline, character arc or even scene, an act of corrupting going on. Everyone arrives to the party well and truly corrupted, in a state of decay that is not perpetual (which is to say: moving, progressing) and more lodged, stuck, like a bullet in a kidney leaching lead into a system already ravaged by chiggers and hepatitis. It's a story that begins with a guy throwing up inside the Disney-esque mascot head he's wearing at a theme park. There aren't a lot of parts of this that aren't pretty gross.

It would be reflex-lefty of me to just wallow in the the kind of savaging that can only be served up with a mirror. Any other method for this long-term type of a beating would just end up being exhausting if it weren't self-administered, which is also how you know it was created by a British person. Americans are always looking for someone redeemable, someone we can relate to. British writers and creators are far, far more comfortable letting the aspects of the art (the language, the performance, the production design, the staging, the lighting, the choreography...) carry the viewership forward. It's not that they don't care if we don't have someone to root for, they just understand at a more basic level that "rooting" is relative. You can just as passionately want someone to succeed (ha) as you can want to see someone fall down an open manhole, if the dialogue sets it up properly. If there's a challenge, then, for the writers to solve in Succession, it's really only that there aren't enough open manholes in all five boroughs of New York to account for all the karmic backlog piling up around these people.

A more conventional show would have found a way to give us a new character making their entree into this world of top-level business and one-percent-of-the-one-percent living to orient the audience, and to watch their illusions and delusions fall away as the absurd reality of the atmosphere smothers and suffocates whatever soul they thought they'd brought with them into this biome. The best candidates are Nicholas Braun's Greg (the barfing mascot) and Matthew Macfadyen's Tom, the Midwestern outsider cradled into the bosom of the family. But neither are ever depicted as possessed of any kind of empathy-triggering naivete for anyone to identify. At best they sometimes achieve an occasionally endearing Rosencrantz and Guildenstern double-act of outsiders observing from inside, but both go on to prove, probably more than any other characters, that advancement and merit are wholly divorced from one another, and each sees the vapid, self-regarding, casual cruelty of The Family up close, and their moral imaginations can only conjur an impulse to strive for that kind of detachment themselves.

Overall, in the end, Succession is a show about competition, entirely for its own sake and with absolutely no stakes except for hundreds of billions of dollars. That sounds stupid, but honestly, once anyone gets past the point where they need to strategize or plan for the cataclysmic financial eventuality of, say, your car breaking down or getting sick for more than three days, the money becomes just a number you compare to someone else's number. Unhooked from the existential, when survival is an afterthought, what else could be the outcome but an atrophy of initiative and perspective? The brilliance of the show is that it takes the things that rich people fear about poor people (complacency, valuing the wrong things, wastefulness, idleness, venality, scheming, abuse of systems) and shows them plainly as projections from a bunch of dopes trapped and withering in a zero-sum mindset when the sums on their side already have at least nine zeroes behind them.

The performances are exemplary and the writing is superb. Those things have been said enough, so I'm not dwelling on any of them. If there's any complaint it's that most of the characters are coming from the same place, a sort of born-on-third-base obliviousness that cannot help but overestimate their own ability within a closed fish tank; a bunch of goldfish who have convinced themselves they are piranha, trying over and over to gum each other to death in the absence of anything practical like teeth. Even the ones that are meant to comment on it, probably best exemplified by James Cromwell's Ewan Roy and, oddly enough, Brian Cox's Logan Roy, neither of whom came from wealth but either indulge in a series of meaningless protests while living in the comforts afforded (in the case of the former) or continually swimming forward in pursuit of a meaningless more, like a genuine poor person would.

In the end, Logan Roy gets the best line-reading of the series: I love you, but you are not serious people. It's a one-line break from a character built on manipulation or bullying to do neither or both all at once. It's a weary criticism, a surrender, and an odd fucking thing to say from the guy who makes adults play something called "boar on the floor" for his amusement.

Alan Ruck's Connor Roy comes closest to being capable of human feelings, but in the end probably ends up making the most grandiose spectacle of himself, both personally and publicly. It's a deeply sad, rootless, self-ostracized character that gets (probably rightly, for consistency's sake) overshadowed by showier parts for Snook, Strong and Culkin.

There aren't a lot of deep insights left to excavate. A lot of what needed to be said about the show has been said. It's clearly a satire, but like most satires, a decent percentage of the audience will find it aspirational, which should be disturbing but to my mind just legitimizes its existence, its intent and the quality of its execution. The grand denouement ends in exorbitantly wealthy dipshits "losing" a self-referential game of their own devising and having to console themselves by divvying up almost $200 billion. And the last few shots are of heartbreak and emotional implosion. Like all good satire worth the time to take it in, it's fucking aggravating as shit. I dug it.

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*See what kind of master-level segues you could have access to, investor and/or advertisers?! You're missing out.

The Banshee

I'm a man of science, so I don't believe in ghosts. In more specific point of fact, I'm a man of social science because I have multiple history degrees, so you know I really want to believe in ghosts so that I could talk to them and ask them about, like, if Henry VIII knew about China or what it was like to have scurvy. So the fact that I don't believe in them carries double the weight, because of my obvious devotion to intellectual rigor and because of how much it sucks I can't seance up Christopher Columbus just so I can tell him he's a dick.

I also don't believe in curses. I like sports well enough, which is where you hear about curses the most, but any of us who were adults through the first two decades of this century saw the White Sox, Cubs and Red Sox all win World Serieses. A curse implies supernatural punishment or impediment and there's no way to look at the fans of at least two of those teams and understand: if there were an invisible, conscious constant, It wouldn't allow them to be happy. Sure, "but they suffered for so long," fine, but did they? The Yankees have won the whole fucking thing like 27 times, if you need any more proof there's nothing beyond the worldliest, most corporeal. Darwinian cruelty and indifference at work. The worst-possible outcomes only express themselves that consistently if it really is chaos, ironically. I hate to be all Manichean about it, but a manifestable divinity surely would have come up with some kind of evidence of a countervailing force in the face of such reckless and wanton evil.

So many people, especially lefties like me, and especially ones my age, will tell you "well, I'm not religious, but I am spiritual," which basically means sometimes they don't mind tofu all that much. Sure, they'll eat animals, but it's important everyone knows they feel the requisite amount of bad about it, and besides, it's only the ugly ones like fish and chickens, but certainly almost never veal. With that in mind, I would never describe myself that way. I like to think of myself as a conscious agnostic, recognizing I don't know what I don't know and, further, understanding about myself that I am genuinely disinterested in the answer. Do I want to know if there's a god or spirits or souls or whatever? I mean, if someone else figures it out, clue me in, sure, just like I'd want to know about cold fusion or a viable jetpack. But I'm not holding my breath for either, nor am I trying to solve either problem myself. If I go casting around for deuterium, I'm already completely wasting at least one person's time, minimum.

No goblins or cryptids or horses. All made up, mythical stuff. If I wake up at night agitated from some nightmare, I've never been afraid a wolfman or a dracula was lurking in the shadows of my room. I'm perfectly capable of convincing myself the level-eight spicy aloo matar is a heart attack, I'm already plenty scared.

I'm not a total idiot reflex-skeptic though. Like any reasonable person, I of course believe in boogeymans.

You're probably saying "well obviously, but don't you mean boogeymen?" to which I'd reply "wow, what a stupid fucking question." They don't travel in packs, your typical boogeyman, it's one per person, so multiple versions of a definitionally singular thing has to be pluralized with that instantial singularity in mind. So mathematically and grammatically it can only be "boogeymans." You can fight me on this if you want, but keep in mind I looked it up on the internet here. Go argue with that guy if you're so keen.

If it's not curses or ghosts, what is boogeymans? Besides being self-evident, I guess I'll indulge you and say boogeymans is juju. Whatever the bad version of "serendipity" is. It's a thing you don't fuck with because it's clear way before you try it that it's going to get you. It's why every year there are compilations on the internet of X-rays of unnatural things people got stuck up their asses. That's not bad luck or whippets or whatever, that's walking (backward, in this example) into a situation you know is fraught and getting exactly the result you knew you probably would. Your boogeyman got you, and you know it. But you also know: you never "get got" by boogeymans, it's always something you realize in retrospect was a surrender. Boogeymans don't gotta chase you if you go running into their arms.

As another example, let's say you spent $250,000 to get inside a homemade submarine to visit the underwater site where like a thousand people died in that same water. Is your voyage cursed because the Titanic was cursed? No, of course not, a curse is a stupid idea. There's no invisible force outside of nature trapped in that busted-ass boat on the ocean floor. What's boogeymans then? Tens of thousands of pounds of pressure differential in a vessel unequal to the task of keeping the ocean weight off your bones. It's not ghosts of Titanic in a hexed tomb that got those people, it was the draw of the wreck in a place inhospitable to human life in the first place. It's a nexus gathering of celebrity and hubris that dulls the impulse to self-preservation, a sense of daring that is the only sustenance that keeps boogeymans alive.

Boogeymans got Titanic in the first place, hooning around the North Atlantic in the dark in a ship a bunch of regular, squishy, drownable humans decided to call "unsinkable." The only thing that defeats boogeymans is preparation and a sense of the finitude of a human life. So you can do daring things without boogeymans getting in your way, like flying in a rocket to the moon. That's a manifestly insane thing to try, but with the right amount of math and physics and redundant systems, boogeymans get all pushed out to the periphery, where they really have to chase to make themselves known. And everyone knows boogeymans hate running. All strength work, no cardio.

Woody Guthrie Was A Communist

A lot of people on the left, and even some in the center with a distaste for drama or a well-founded suspicion of anyone who goes in public with a face comprised at least 80% of concealer, Trump is anathema, a nonstarter nonpareil, a thing they want more of in their lives like they want shingles or another Shazam! movie.

Even on the right, as the field for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination starts to clog with the usual amounts of detritus, a sociopolitical fatberg made of busted up dog-whistles, little particles of atomized NASCAR tires, red hats and Aqua-Net, the Trump-skeptical mumbles have graduated all the way into murmurs. Any even vaguely contra-Trump statements are of course still immediately denied when re-asked for clarification in any kind of direct follow-up question, but in the stubborn way of true things, they cannot be entirely hand-waved away as "liberal media lies." The pushback is as measurable and real as a measurable thing can be (as in: not zero), but these are very privileged people exulting in an impossible and silly ambition (to be president, an aspiration that only takes real sickos) talking about someone cast out and adrift from that very thing almost three years ago now, so less speaking truth to power than power fantasy speaking truth to power fantasy. It's worth remembering there's only one nomination to win here, so all but one of these people is putting it all on the line and are going to walk away with only the Ted Cruz Memorial Participation Trophy to show for it. Some real courage on display!

It would seem daunting to cross Trump, especially in defeat, as you risk everything for almost no shot at what you're aiming for but guaranteed to cross the famously aggro-philic GOP base, which since 2016 has been animated (in the same way Ophiocordyceps unilaterlis animates an ant) by Trump and fanatical Trump love. Sure, it hasn't really manifested itself in electoral results since that one popular-vote-loss-but-electoral-college win in 2016, and even has been a hindrance to electability in the interim, but if we're going by the stupidest merch sales alone, Trump is still definitely a force.

Overall though, maybe the non-Trump candidates are feeling emboldened by the fizzling of the in-person crowd presence Trump used to be able to boast about, not just in size but in potentially murderous intent. After all, Jan. 6, 2021, was a very public response to Trump at the point of being the most threatened: on the brink of losing his ability to say he was a very important person in public and actually have people believe him.

This week when he was threatened again, indicted and arraigned for being a total fucking idiot... his people stayed away. And this was not the first time. It seems, ironically, that Jan. 6, the coup attempt that represented a complete on-the-day failure of law and order to almost the ultimate degree, has ended up being a point of reference that makes all the very, very tough, tough guys stay home out of fear of law and order. It's complicated, but a long-standing obsession with things that literally do not exist, like "crisis actors" and capital-A "Antifa," coupled with aggressive and successful prosecution of Jan. 6 criminals have put it in the heads of these unshakeable defenders of real American ideals, cut from the same cloth as the original Revolutionary War patriots, that maybe a better tactic to own the libs would be to hang out and wait for the new season of Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan to drop on Amazon.

In the same way that nobody was more successfully terrorized by the terrorists on 9/11 than growly, finger-pointy Dick Cheney and all the other ones who supported panic-flail lashing out in the form rolling back civil liberties for Americans in the name of "security" and a full-scale invasion of two countries, one of which was completely uninvolved in any 9/11 terrorism, nobody has proven to be less defiant in the face of "political persecution" than these freedom-fighting liberty boys. Every time the "oppression" they identify ramps up in the form of prosecutors doing their regular jobs prosecuting obvious crimes some dopes broadcast themselves doing on Periscope or were turned in by their moms, the smaller the crowds get, the more pathetic the "protests," the more cowed they become. A cynic would say maybe they don't actually believe what they say they believe; maybe it's an act for clout and status among a vanishing minority of politically overcaffeinated simps and/or grifters, but that would be goading. The smarter position would be one of gratitude: hey man, let's all stay home and take it easy. The cop in the street on the day who doesn't understand the irony of having a Punisher decal on his vest will take it easy on you, but after that, some libtard on Facebook is going to rat you out to the FBI or your boss just because you weren't worried enough on the day that there would be cameras catching you standing, untroubled, next to some Nazis. Embrace it, man. Stay home. Have a chicken pot pie and a Tab. It beats a knock on the door from the feds any day.

Power In The Blood

Genetics isn't exactly a new science. I'm not going to bother googling and I didn't really do "science" as a thing when I was getting my multiple degrees in the subjects where it's OK to invent things that are true if you just argue them hard enough. So I'm going to say genetics has been around at least since the time of, let's say Albert Einstein and his theory about how all things have to do with your relatives. That's a pretty hacky joke, but keep in mind the only thing I know about Einstein for sure at this point is that he was Swiss and was also somehow Meg Ryan's uncle. I'm working at my limits here.

I am finding it's becoming more and more interesting to me what little time bombs are lurking in the strands of the DNA I never asked for. I'm fairly fortunate that, as I approach a half century of life, both of my principle genetic donors are still going concerns on this side of the veil, sputtering on (separately and yet somehow cosmically and temperamentally conjoined) out of a combination of inertia and bloody-mindedness. Neither one will die due to a) having had kids pretty young, so they're not THAT old yet and b) a common allergy to the idea of anyone or anything "getting one over" on them, up to and including human mortality as a concept. Though I'm not much like either of my parents in many ways, I will cop to sharing the idea that being dead sure feels like a ripoff. What's in it really besides "rest" I suppose, but I was just as nonexistent before the day I was born and have been exhausted every day since then, so how restful could it have been really?

I'm doing all the stuff you're supposed to do to manage your health: I exercise, I get the tests, I don't smoke or drink... this is where I'm supposed to also say "I watch what I eat" but I already said I don't smoke or drink, there's only so much dopamine a human body will make unprompted. It turns out mine needs a lot of cream cheese frosting to achieve what my therapist calls "balance." There's a chicken-egg question about motivational salience, but I don't really eat eggs anymore either, what else do you want from me?

Even with all that in mind, I can't help but watch my parents slough slowly into decrepitude and wonder, incredibly selfishly, which of their maladies or ambulatory inconveniences are theirs alone or ours as a cursed bloodline. It's not easy to fish out either when one or both of them have had deep, sensual, life-long affairs with cigarettes, alcohol and homemade mac and cheese (did you know you can make it with heavy cream?) at clinically inadvisable levels. As a variety of their joints lock up or capillaries cease being able to capil, how am I supposed to know which proactive prophylaxis to opt for and which are programmatically unavoidable, no matter how hard I swerve?

The obvious (and stupidest) answer, of course, is: I can't. It's 2023 and everyone is still fucking guessing. Not only do we not have medical certainty, a non-zero portion of the population is reflexively rejecting the parts we already do know, like basic germ theory. I look forward to some investor figuring out a way to monetize that distrust into a new kind of hokum "medicine," based on literally nothing, that the skeptical can opt for instead of, you know, antibiotics. It wouldn't be unprecedented though. That's the kind of thinking that got us Scientology and chiropractors.

Your parents aren't your destiny, of course, no matter how much your co-dependent mother would like that to be true. All I can really do is take the best advice of non-chriopractor doctors and try not to stress when I follow their advice imperfectly. Diabetes is not a desirable outcome, but neither is a lifetime devoid of cake. The goal is to land somewhere in the happy medium between amputated toes and red velvet.

Nickels Like Manhole Covers

It's not that I'm cheap. Well, no, let me revise that: it is that I'm cheap. And I guess that's the end of the statement? Wow, I thought there was going to be more to it than that.

No, of course there's more! That's an area in which I've never known parsimony, in words. Or even letters, I suppose. Like, there was no reason to use "parsimony" there, but when all it costs me is a bit of typing, I'm Mike Tyson's spending habits. Why not buy a tiger? And a tiger leash, how much more could that cost really?

I've got some real-world experience as an actual poor person, way back when I was in what are understatedly called the "formative years," back in (what seem to me to be) the beginning times of when being poor made you a political enemy and morally suspect, in the good old days of Ronald Reagan, the first of America's charming racist grandpas to win 49 states in a general election. Luckily that hasn't turned into a tradition of cruelty and disregard-to-the-level-of-hostility half the American electorate feels beholden to as a "tradition" or anything. Imagine if we were still a place that punished people for being in the lower half of a zero-sum equation. We'd be monsters!

Like a lot of raised-poor people, every dollar I have feels like it's worth about seven. All outgoing expenditures feel like the first pebbles of an avalanche that will drive me right off the edge of the financial cliff and somehow end up not just in the poorhouse, but somehow also in 1983. It's a powerful and uncontainable neurosis that thankfully doesn't show up on dates or with my kids, but the idea of spending a dollar on myself is like suggesting I stab out my own kidneys. Which is crazy because health care in this country, the co-pays alone to treat something like that... you couldn't even sell a kidney to pay for it because you just stabbed it voluntarily. That's the kind of tragedy-loop financial thinking that will kill you every time, in this case possibly literally.

I bring this up because I sit here today, perfectly still, in climate-controlled comfort, but sweating because I just had to buy a couch and a love seat. They're leather and handsome enough I suppose, but still all but the cheapest ones I could find of any quality. The old ones I had gotten for free when I was still married, about 20 years ago now, from my in-laws. So they were already used, but my in-laws had great taste and liked quality, so they (the couches, not the in-laws) held up great until the holes started to arrive and the seams started to split last year (again, not the in-laws. They seem to be holding up great). And that was last year. The purchase of a big-ticket item like this took me... I dunno, six months of shopping around? By that I mean wandering through furniture stores (all of the furniture stores) and talking myself out of shit I kind of maybe liked. I call this hate shopping, which has the benefit of being both bias-confirming (I told you all the options were bad! The only thing to do is wait, maybe forever!) and cost-free, minus the gas. You'd be surprised how far I'm willing to drive just to definitively not buy something.

The other part about growing up poor is there's also so much shabbiness you can tolerate before you feel like someone is going to find out you used to get free school lunch and then, I don't know, take your house away, so the time came. I will tell you I spent about $2,500 for the couch and love set together, which is as close to nothing as I could manage. They did have one returned, slightly damaged couch on its own at the store for about $375, but my son talked me out of it just because it was way too small for what I needed and the cushioning felt like you were sitting a sack of palm fronds.

So that's me done spending money for the year. My backyard is weeds and possums, but it will have to wait. The water heater could go at any minute, but we'll live in that could as long as it holds out. My car needs some maintenance repairs, but as long as it doesn't need to be towed to get them, it can wait. Last year I went to Switzerland with someone who had airline and hotel miles to subsidize the whole thing, which now I have a bit of a desire to see more stuff. My oldest kid is going to (in order) Boston, Japan and Seattle this summer, because he has no mortgage and a full-time job. That could be me. But he grew up solidly middle class, his whole outlook makes zero sense to me. Maybe I've been too supportive.