Ahead of its premiere at the London Film Festival at the start of the weekend, the British creator of the hit HBO show Succession – Jesse Armstrong – admitted he was taken aback a little by the attention it’s been attracting.
“It feels quite overwhelming being down here on the Southbank with a lot of folk as you know in my mind Succession is still a relatively small show on HBO and Sky in the UK so it’s rather affecting to see all these people who I presume like the show”, he told reporters, even as the clamour for the new episodes was escalating.
On the one hand, it’s easy to see his point. Whilst many would argue it’s the best drama on American television at the moment, its viewership figures are modest, and whilst its fanbase is devoted, it’s barely getting a whiff of Squid Game numbers. But we’ve been here before: Breaking Bad was never a ratings juggernaut, but over time it’s become widely watched, and rightly regarded as a high point in modern TV.
All four have different tactics, all four are in the game looking for the same prize.
Furthermore, interest in Succession has been climbing since its debut in the summer of 2018. Without getting into spoilers – that’s not what this article’s about – what instantly impressed about Succession is how brilliantly it blasted out of the gates, albeit again with a first episode that got around half a million viewers in the US.
What that first episode expertly set up of course is the underlying arc behind the whole show: who’s going to take over the running of gigantic media conglomerate Watstar RoyCo when eightysomething patriarch Logan Roy (a cipher of sorts for media moguls such as Rupert Murdoch, Jeff Bezos and Sumner Redstone) stands down. The jostling for position amongst his four children – Connor (Alan Ruck), Siobhan (Sarah Snook), Kendall (Jeremy Strong) and Roman (Kieran Culkin) – kicks off pretty much straight away, and shows little sign of stopping. All four have different tactics, all four are in the game looking for the same prize.
The second season of the show in particular lit dynamite underneath the family dynamic, something that the third season follows up quickly. Yet it’s the tipping points of it all that remain quite expert, and I can’t think of a show that does this better at the moment. That the power dynamic between the characters is so intricately woven: things don’t tilt massively, it’s lots of little movements that come along with each episode. Like a share price that changes thousands of times a day, but still ends roughly close to where it started at the beginning of the day’s trading.
It’s not just what it does, though. It’s how it does it.
A lot was made – rightly – of how the British BBC crime drama Line Of Duty was happy to play its scenes long, to lock characters into extended conversations that allowed its writer, Jed Mercurio, to change regularly who was in control before our eyes. What’s struck me particularly about Succession is how this seems to be happening in pretty much every scene.
It’s little secret that the third season of the show was delayed due to, well, the obvious. And there are moments where cars are driving through a major American city and there’s no traffic whatsoever about: Succession clearly has to work around that. But what it also means is season three has a number of episodes where there are people sat in a room, having to work stuff out. I do believe this is where it’s at its finest.
ArrayFor here’s where Armstrong and his team have really struck gold. Notwithstanding the fact that they’ve built a collection of hateful characters that you then find yourself oddly rooting for (and a cauldron of more self-centred vipers you’d struggle to find elsewhere on the box), it’s all quietly shifting before your eyes. As Logan Roy says at one point in the new series, things are always moving.
The intimate handheld shooting style adds to this (it’s worth noting on top of that just how well the actors are blocked as well: a small, crucial detail). But the sharp writing frequently builds up walls of confidence for the characters of the Roy siblings, and then when their father enters the room, they subtlety dial back. The little non-verbal cues are telling, but what I noticed more and more is how the show’s power rests ultimately in who has the stones to make an actual decision. It’s less about whether it’s the right decision, more about making a call that Logan would approve of. And constantly trying to find some kind of validation off him.
Sure, there’s a lot of toing and froing over the smaller stuff, but the dynamic of the show frequently sets up people who had basically done one man’s bidding for most of their lives, trying to prove they don’t need to do one man’s bidding. Yet when they build up the bravado to do so, there’s usually that little sideways glance to see if Logan approves. Logan, in return, rarely shows his cards, but clearly despairs of the whole lot of them.
It’s telling too that when one of the Roy offspring finally goes off message, it feels like a seismic moment in the drama. The weight of it is immense. But then what Succession has quietly woven is that for all the nastiness, backbiting, power games and struggles, Logan is in charge. And it’s going to take a hell of a strike to even nudge a little past his armour.
Brian Cox as Logan Roy plays to this wonderfully, of course. Oftentimes, he just needs to sit in a chair and be looked at by every other character in the room. But Armstrong from day one has introduced the sometimes-overlooked other factor: that he’s vulnerable. Not just in a corporate sense, but in his health.
We see this increasingly with big American dramas. The American western drama Yellowstone for instance sees Kevin Costner in a similar patriarchal figure, but with an overt ticking clock on him set up very early on. Succession is rarely that straightforward and quite so black and white, but there are similar undertones. What it means is that for long periods, we tend to forget Logan’s health, but it’s both very much in the back pocket of the programme, and also quietly present.
… he’s vulnerable … Not just in a corporate sense, but in his health.
The constantly shifting plates of Succession does mean that, as the writers have acknowledged, that some characters drift in and out of the show a little as it follows particular narrative threads. That remains the case throughout the first half of season three. But what’s telling too is when characters are brought back into the drama, they’re not scenery. There’s zero interest in having people making up the numbers.
All of this might all be television writing basics, but it’s fascinating because few shows do this anywhere near as well. And maybe that’s what’s taken Armstrong a little by surprise. I can’t speak for him, but I do wonder if in his eyes, he’s writing and running a programme in the way he believes it should be, with the minimum of fuss. The fuss is coming from outside, and it’s only when he sees a red carpet premiere lined with people desperate to find out what happens next in Succession it really manifests itself.
But that’s the show all over, isn’t it? Subtle, behind closed doors, only occasionally showing how big it is. Oh, and always willing to tell someone to fuck off…
