HBO's Succession - Season 2 and Beyond

Also puzzling is how Greg was suddenly aligned with Ken at the end of S2 and then suddenly in S3 he’s back in the office ??

seems like shiv is going to switch sides/go rogue at some point, using the spying on kendall's kids as an excuse but more because of logan and roman keeping her on the outside

i have finally come around to the position that it doesn't matter who runs the company in the end. i think i'm more worried about how this all ends, i just don't want some stupid ending for these characters, want something satsifying and "real" whatever that means. i trust in the writers though man watching this is rough and cringe at the same time

fair imo

the key to this season of succession is to remember that peep show was also a show about horrible people who don't learn from their mistakes and slowly get worse and worse until the things that made you empathize with them are just unrecognizable.

— Gita Jackson (@xoxogossipgita) December 2, 2021

Yeah I think the thing with Kendall's kids' present was more about him flailing about looking for something 'real' (or at least flattering to his self-image) in the gigantic edifice of bullshit that he had constructed for himself.

I won't be able to watch the next one until Thursday at the earliest, guess I'm offline until then.

otm

everything is so hollow and the kid gift is like.. kids! i have kids! family that i don’t hate and maybe don’t hate me! ahhh!

and then just being a total asshole about his girlfriend getting him a watch even though she is there and does care, showing her he’s a completely self-absorbed shit

Also puzzling is how Greg was suddenly aligned with Ken at the end of S2 and then suddenly in S3 he’s back in the office ??

I mean, I thought it was pretty clear that Greg was riding both sides as long he possibly could.

watching him opening her gift, it was like he was both dreading and extremely hoping that it would be drugs

I did particularly like this reply to Miles' tweet about Sunday's episode:

Kendall Roy "L to the OG" (Taylor's version) 58 minutes.

— Brian Martin (@brianmartin848) December 2, 2021

I like that the (lost) kids' present had wrapping paper with rabbits on it, given that he likely killed their pet through his phone instructions an episode or two ago.

it wouldn't make sense, but I worried he'd find the present and the dead rabbit inside

I thought that before my gf patiently talked me though why it doesn’t actually make any sense

vibes-wise, though, it just feels right

Kendall's arc def serving Gatsby vibes esp in last episode idk this has probably been said by everyone

and then just being a total asshole about his girlfriend getting him a watch even though she is there and does care, showing her he’s a completely self-absorbed shit

I disagree that he was an asshole and thought his reaction to this gift was pretty measured given how fucked up he was in that moment. I'd have to rewatch the scene, but from what I remember...

1. She pushed it on him to pacify him when he was upset and manically looking for the gift from his kids. Like one would do to distract a child. Right or wrong, he would have picked up on it on some level.
2. Like Logan with Tom's gift (also a watch) in episode one; he doesn't give a shit about watches. Don't buy a watch for a Roy.
3. A $50,000 watch is a trinket to these people.
4. He was actually polite about it at first, until she pushed, and even tried to guilt him about not pretending hard enough to like it. (At least this is how I remembered it.)

In the middle of a moment where he was realizing he was surrounded by sycophants who don't know him/care about him, who had incompetently lost the one gift from people who do know/care about him, she mis-stepped by trying to distract him with a gift that demonstrated how little she knew him.

I think it's the beginning of the end for the relationship. She is really more of a co-dependent drug buddy than a partner, and I wonder if the rest of his story this season is going to be him trying to clean himself up with some half-cocked scheme to get his family back.

I disagree that he was an asshole .... In the middle of a moment where he was realizing he was surrounded by sycophants who don't know him/care about him, who had incompetently lost the one gift from people who do know/care about him

https://i.ibb.co/1QFHYQG/ugpj-WV4l-MWAL6j-B96x-NAugow-Hyk.gif

Ken trying to get clean was already a story arc. But HBO likes to churn so yeah let’s try again

xxp fair enough! my take was that he was being childlike and needed to be distracted, but yeah, a watch was never going to do it

Much as though I love this series, it does feel like it's in permanent stasis with nothing ever moving anything forward. The past couple of episodes have Tom in an increasingly dark mood as he contemplates jail... but then all of a sudden, a literal get-out-of-jail-free card. Back to where we were before, nothing has really happened after all. It's kind of the same with Ken - he tries to take over the company, gets thwarted, goes to a dark place, then finds a new way to try and take over the company, gets thwarted, goes to a dark place... Compare with The White Lotus, another series about asshole rich people acting like assholes - but there things actually happened, someone died, there were consequences etc. And here, what are the stakes anyway? The latest episode has Logan offering to buy Ken out for $2 billion. $2 billion!!! With that kind of money Ken could literally turn around and set up his own streaming service or whatever it is he wants to do. There's no actual downside to getting kicked out of Waystar!

It's probably brain poisoning from all the interpersonal machinations of this show, but I found myself wondering if Kendall's ex made up the rabbit-wrapped present to set him off

Much as though I love this series, it does feel like it's in permanent stasis with nothing ever moving anything forward.

― Zelda Zonk, Thursday, December 2, 2021 7:48 PM (thirty-five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

basically the thing that makes me think it might actually be good rather than just a good show

Well, I can certainly see it as a point of differentiation. But if nothing really ever happens, then nothing is really up for grabs.

is art when things are up for grabs

everyone so mad for arcs and resolutions
it doesnt always have to be swings and roundabouts! i think the show is still great, still enjoyable & horrifying
its great just the way it is
just enjoy the ride, dudes

agree 100%

Fair enough!

Feel like the lack of consequences is one of the themes of the show. You cannot truly fail *or* be redeemed. Wealth protects and corrupts in equal measure.

Yup. It’s a theme. It’s just not great drama around season 5.

says you

it’s just people being threatened with a vat of acid while living in luxury
Logan thinks he grew up on the acid shores
Shiv is on the acid beach and pretending she cares when people are dragged toward it, dances around
Connor is against acid, but acknowledges it is present but he doesn’t know how it works and also libertarians hover above it with magic
Roman is always like “throw me in the acid! I love it!” but has never felt the sting despite waving his hand over it all the time
Kendall just wishes the dissolve would hit him, just acid bath. Maybe not even in the acid bath lineage and that is why the acid question never really hits right. He wishes he knew.
Greg has never heard anything about this but always falls short of speculating what the burning thing people talk about might be. Maybe ask grandpa

Much as though I love this series, it does feel like it's in permanent stasis with nothing ever moving anything forward.

― Zelda Zonk, Thursday, December 2, 2021 7:48 PM (thirty-five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

basically the thing that makes me think it might actually be good rather than just a good show

― lag∞n, Friday, December 3, 2021 1:25 AM (eight hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

otm. it's waiting for godot, except they're waiting (very comfortably, amid opulence, committing heinous crimes upon their loved ones and others) for death.

I mean the whole show is called Succession. It's like if the succession ever actually gets settled, the show's over.

the final scene will be brian cox addressing the camera saying you are the successor and it pans and hes talking to iverson

's rabbit

lmao

iversons DEAD rabbit

hey now, we haven't seen the body on screen yet. this is HBO.

it ate an entire bagel

Some part of me felt "rabbit" was code for "rabbi" and "kill the rabbit by feeding it a bagel" was code for "assassinate Josh Aaronson" who I will point out hasn't been seen on-screen since that episode

wow

lol I also assumed that he was talking to someone who was a lawyer or fixer and “rabbit” was a code

thats v funny to me

cmon, a rabbi can totally eat a bagel

This tale of Jeremy Strong’s student efforts to bring Al Pacino to his college campus is an insta-classic https://t.co/jpICwRzjLY pic.twitter.com/JAVS5eWARg

— Dave Itzkoff (@ditzkoff) December 5, 2021

Good long profile of Strong linked there ^^:

At the audition, Strong, his shoes tied tight, read a scene between Kendall and the C.E.O. of a startup that he’s trying to acquire. Armstrong was skeptical. He asked Strong to “loosen the language,” and the scene transformed. “It was about, like, Beastie Boys-ing it up,” Strong recalled. “I was missing the patois of bro-speak.” By the end of the day, he had the part.

i’ve always found it a little disquieting that the reason he is so good at being Kendall is because he’s giving 100% of himself

dude goes so deep it’s scary

lmao

When I asked Strong about the rap that Kendall performs in Season 2, at a gala for his father—a top contender for Kendall’s most cringeworthy moment—he gave an unsmiling answer about Raskolnikov, referencing Kendall’s “monstrous pain.” Kieran Culkin told me, “After the first season, he said something to me like, ‘I’m worried that people might think that the show is a comedy.’ And I said, ‘I think the show is a comedy.’ He thought I was kidding.” Part of the appeal of “Succession” is its amalgam of drama and bone-dry satire. When I told Strong that I, too, thought of the show as a dark comedy, he looked at me with incomprehension and asked, “In the sense that, like, Chekhov is comedy?” No, I said, in the sense that it’s funny. “That’s exactly why we cast Jeremy in that role,” McKay told me. “Because he’s not playing it like a comedy. He’s playing it like he’s Hamlet.”

v good profile wow

dude is intensity in ten cities

It's not a comedy.

Something's not a comedy just because it's funny!

Wow, he sounds absolutely intolerable. Of course, there's always the possibility that the writer hated him and cut out all the parts about him being a non-maniac who someone was able to marry and live with.