‘Succession’ Is a Darkly Comic Warning About the Post-Boomer World
There aren’t any heroes in Succession, HBO’s darkly comedian drama a few cohort of rich, privileged media-business strivers, all of whom are quite disagreeable, or on the very least deeply pathetic indirectly. However the present does have one thing like a villain, within the type of Logan Roy, the ageing, raging patriarch whose Foxlike media enterprise, Waystar Royco, is the empire the entire present’s different characters search in a method or one other to regulate.
But Logan Roy can also be the lynchpin of the collection, the prime mover in a forged of wealthy and nominally profitable but primarily feeble and gutless wannabes. And therein lies Succession‘s central critique of our period: It is a present concerning the uneasy and unsure transition of energy and authority from an terrible but decisive and pivotal elder era that has held on for too lengthy to a youthful cohort that lacks Logan’s gumption: The present corrals a forged of influencers from the worlds of media, tech, cash, and politics, all of whom have the trimmings of success and prepared entry to actual energy—however neither the imaginative and prescient nor the need to successfully wield it.
Performed with Shakespearean menace by Brian Cox, Logan is the present’s stormy king, reigning over his youngsters and different potential heirs to his throne, all of whom know from the collection’ outset that his time is proscribed. Over the course of 4 seasons, he is been variously portrayed as abusive, merciless, domineering, callous, chilly, condescending, and, if often not overtly racist in his personal conduct, far too snug with enterprise endeavors that promote racists and racist political ideology. Over the previous 4 seasons, the present, which ends this weekend, has introduced his villainy repeatedly and with a sick form of glee, letting it glare from each floor. It’s apparent and straightforward to identify.
What’s much less apparent, nonetheless, is that Logan is the one character the present affords a measure of respect and deference—not as a result of he is an effective individual, however as a result of he’s adept at exploiting energy, cash, and affect.
Not like the scheming youngsters and incompetent executives—or, maybe, his incompetent youngsters and scheming executives—Logan constructed one thing, shaping the world via his will, his vigor, his imaginative and prescient, and, most of all, his consolation in accepting the results of his choices.
(Warning, spoilers for the present’s closing season forward.)
That concept of Logan—as a builder, a maker, a doer, a world shaper—was put within the highlight in final week’s penultimate episode, which revolved round Logan’s funeral, following his shock dying early within the season. First, Logan’s estranged, offended brother provides a harsh, sudden eulogy stuffed with coldness and criticism: “He has wrought essentially the most horrible issues.” He accuses Logan of getting “fed that darkish flame in males.” Then, youthful brother Roman, who’d been set to ship a extra optimistic eulogy, one meant to bolster each his father’s legacy and the corporate inventory worth, melts down with emotion. Lastly, Kendall, the eldest of the three Roy youngsters vying for management of Waystar Royco, stands to defend his dad.
“Yeah, my father was a brute,” Kendall begins. “He was. He was robust. But in addition—he constructed. And he acted.”
Kendall goes on to pay tribute to his father’s acts of willful creation, tying them on to his father’s nastier tendencies.
Logan Roy “had a vitality,” Kendall says. “A power—that might harm. And it did. However my god, the sheer…the, the, have a look at it. The lives and the livings and the issues that he made. And the cash. Yeah. The cash. The lifeblood, the oxygen of this glorious civilization we’ve got constructed from the mud. The cash. The corpuscles of life, gushing round this nation, this world. Filling women and men throughout with want. Quickening the ambition to personal and make and commerce and revenue and construct and enhance. Nice geysers of life, he willed. Of buildings he made stand.”
Succession is simply too wry and too cynical, too cautious of earnestness to completely endorse this view. It is very a lot the attitude of Kendall, Logan’s (probably) chosen successor who’s nonetheless too weak, too gutless, too indecisive to fill his father’s large footwear.
However the present does not precisely undercut Kendall’s sense of his father as a world-building titan both: In its presentation as an informal, from-the-heart protection of his father at a pivotal second, the present lets Kendall’s starstruck imaginative and prescient of his father as a maker, a mogul, a form of god determine stand unchallenged. It might not be the fact; however it’s a fact.
Logan Roy, the present appears to say, was a bullying, brutish, menace of a person. And one has to think about the chance that it was exactly as a result of he was a bullying, brutish, menace of a person that he was capable of do, construct, and create a lot. And the query, then, is what comes subsequent—not solely within the cloistered world of Succession, however in the actual world it displays.
Logan Roy isn’t just a sharply noticed fictional character, however an avatar of our age—the tyrannical previous guard baron who held on too lengthy and did not plan very properly for his personal demise, appearing as if he was invincible till the very finish. These competing to rule his empire and construct the world that comes subsequent are equally forged not solely as particular characters, however as fashionable archetypes of energy.
First, there are the kids: the mushy Kendall, the freakish Roman, and the shallow and vainly political Shiv. All of them are too weak, too indecisive, too intelligent by half, too coddled and inexperienced to steer.
Then there are the corporate executives, a troop of anxious and weaselly paper pushers coasting on Logan’s waves, and the low-born strivers, males like Tom Wambsgans, who search to amass a stake within the household through marriage and employment, however who’re essentially incapable of constructing one thing of their very own.
There are politicians, left and proper, who search energy nearly fully for its personal sake, and particularly, a vile right-wing demagogue, Jeryd Mencken, who seems to ascend to the White Home through assist from the Roys.
Lastly, there are cash males and tech moguls, the latter represented primarily by Lukas Matsson, a billionaire tech CEO who’s portrayed as just too bizarre, too inhuman, too out of contact with odd human feelings and realities to take a seat on the throne.
Succession, then, is not merely a slender narrative about which character will take over from Logan, however about which middle of energy—tech, cash, politics, dynastic inheritors—will triumph in our personal world after the ruling gerontocracy finally passes away.
And what the present consistently appears to say is that none of them are able to rule—not in Succession‘s world and never in our personal—as a result of, not like the Logans who constructed the empires we now inhabit, none of them have the need, none of them have the brio, none of them have the heart to make choices and take accountability for the results.
Thus, the collection shouldn’t be a protection of Logan a lot as a form of acknowledgment of his capabilities—and a warning concerning the frailty and fecklessness of the following era’s would-be kings.
Logan might need been a monster. However he constructed. He acted. He bent the world to his will. “Life, bloody sophisticated life,” Kendall says of his father, concluding his eulogy. “He made life occur.” And it is by no means clear that any of his potential successors can do the identical.
