Happy?! Who has time for… shut up!

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This article was published 04/12/2021 (1774 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

As Succession heads toward the end of its soul-crushing third season, it continues to work with a fascinating contradiction. This is a series whose very title teases us with the question of who will inherit the Roy empire, while simultaneously making it clear that the answer is utterly irrelevant.

There’s a kind of brilliant stasis to this devastating dynastic saga, which follows the dysfunctional Roy family and their massive media-entertainment corporation, Waystar Royco. The show is excruciatingly painful to watch, especially once we know we will see many of the same awful things happen again and again — including Kendall Roy (Jeremy Strong) rapping — but it is also absolutely addictive. Succession retains its can’t-look-away quality even as we realize nothing will change, no one will learn anything, nothing will get better. Its despicable oligarch characters are super-rich and supremely unhappy, and even if Waystar Royco implodes tomorrow, they will continue to be super-rich and supremely unhappy.

As a series in which almost every encounter is steeped in bad faith, Succession loves to play around with irony. Paralleling the “I’m kidding!/Am I kidding?” approach of its characters, the series stays busy with corporate power-plays, high-level negotiations and hallway walk-and-talks, while also slyly reminding us that none of this matters. No outcome will be any better than any other on Succession, not just for the wretched Roy clan but also for the rest of us.

For the Roys, nobody really exists outside their bubble of extreme wealth. Out here in flyover land, we’re “nobodies,” we’re “units,” we’re “the retired janitors of Idaho,” as Roman Roy (Kieran Culkin) would say. That’s why the company cynically divides its crises into situations that might actually threaten the Roys — these are extremely rare — and those with “No Real People Involved.”

As the series makes clear, for all of us NRPI folks, the Roy family business will continue to be a sinkhole of exploitation and inequality, misinformation and malign threats to democracy, no matter who’s in the big office. Watching Succession, then, feels a lot like living through hyper-capitalism. Sometimes it feels as if it doesn’t really matter who’s running things.

Aging patriarch Logan Roy (Brian Cox) is an obvious monster, overcompensating for his waning health and weakening competence with poisonous malice. But would Shiv (Sarah Snook) with her girl-boss faux feminism or Kendall and his awkward embrace of social-justice buzzwords be any better?

Kendall likes to think of himself as a crusading whistleblower who wants to do the right thing. He talks about cleaning up the company’s toxic corporate culture. He has a vision — several visions, in fact, from episode to episode — of how to take Waystar Royco into the 21st century. But this is a cynical branding exercise that has nothing to do with the public good and not even that much to do with profit.

Kendall’s so-called business decisions are mostly about personal grudges. Likewise, Shiv’s corporate machinations are all about her need, as the only daughter, to be taken seriously, while Roman is driven by his increasingly desperate attempts to get his father’s attention and affirmation.

As with Waystar Royco’s vile corporate values, it seems unlikely that the dynamics of the damaged Roy family will ever change. The last attempt at group therapy ended with the therapist having an accident that knocked out his teeth. “Freud would have had a field day,” comments Shiv’s husband, Tom (Matthew Macfadyen).

As several critics have suggested, it might make more sense to read Succession as a sitcom rather than a drama. This isn’t just because the series is viciously funny, with a genius for nasty dialogue and cruel absurdities, but because a lot of its appeal lies in repetition. We get a lot of callbacks of comic tropes. (Oh, that Logan, telling everyone to f–k off! Oh, that Connor (Alan Ruck), complaining about overly refrigerated cheese!)

While there are echoes of Greek tragedy (Kronos devouring his children!) and Shakespeare (Lear raging on the heath!), there’s also a kind of sublime pettiness to Succession. The series often shows people striding purposefully towards waiting helicopters, but its larger narrative doesn’t really have any dramatic forward momentum. The stakes might seem high because there are billions of dollars on the line, but they’re actually low, since people who have that much to stake have even more to fall back on. The Roys will probably never face a life-changing reckoning. At the most, they’ll lose a few notches on the Forbes list.

That’s not to say that we don’t get the occasional surprise. In last week’s episode, which features the saddest birthday party ever, Tom even manages to have an epiphany. “Why is no one happy?” he wonders, in a drug-induced mope, which is about as close as a Succession character ever gets to a breakthrough.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca