HBO's Succession - Season 2 and Beyond

re post speech celebration they were prob just relieved he didnt fuck it up

To me the Living+ and the studio storylines are meta comments on the nature of having to produce your show on a streaming platform that's also turning into a generic hub for content 'for everyone' and tech encroachment on everything with Mattson's company. It also highlighted more of parallels between Matsson/Musk – meme producer, stock evaluations playing a hand in acquisitions and deals.

I think this is happening across the board in other shows. Like Barry and the plot on Sally's show being thrown around because of opaque metrics – and the use of director of Coda working on a MCU movie. Idk, both shows are closing somewhat rushing things, in the same platform that has been shifting and turning.

Karl was happy Ken didn't give any "numbers" as planned to really jack up the stock price and fuck the deal

Kendall literally deepfaked Logan to say the “doubling” thing that he was so upset about earlier

Also liked the mirroring of Kendall’s sadface/recovery at seeing Logan insult him again on video (“That’s a Valentine’s card”) with Roman replaying the fake microdick insult over and over again at the end.

yes, but he threw it to Karl for "specifics" and that felt like him giving into the threat. No real forecast.

Just "double the earnings of the Parks dept" from the Logan puppet.

It was kinda nice that the Logan fakery was confined to good old-fashioned audio editing with no discussion of deepfake training sets or whatever.

xp

yes, but he threw it to Karl for "specifics" and that felt like him giving into the threat. No real forecast.

I agree, but only the dead guy said it. I may have read it wrong, but it felt like Ken held back some of the planned rocket fuel. But maybe all of the "numbers" talk was only to jusify Logan's "double" fake.

having a dead guy do the dirty work is pretty funny

It seemed like Ken kind of listened to Roman and Karl, maybe just enough to keep it from being a disaster.

yeah does seem like their lil talks prevented kendall from going further down the rabbit hole

teamwork!

YOU are an ATN citizen and YOU are an ATN citizen

lol greg telling tom his speech sucks right before hes set to go on

This was my favourite episode of the already-excellent season so far

I hypothesise that Ken is going to get in trouble next episode

I want to see the Matt Levine Money Stuff column covering Ken’s hype speech vs financial reality.

1. Are we to understand that Kendall is coked up again?

2. Who made the Logan microdick video? On watching, I for some reason took it as Roman having made it himself for his own masochistic reasons. But some people seem to think Kendall made it in order to insult/punish Roman for doubting him on Living+? On the third hand, the only person we actually know has the ability to get fake Logan voice video made is Greg, so was it Greg?

I thought I saw that it had come as a text from Kendall, but it was too quick to be sure?

ya

https://i.imgur.com/Kno30sr.png

i wasn't picking up coke vibe from Kendall

So messed up that Kendall knows that's actually a sweet gift to send to Roman

the bit where matsson explicitly tells a board member of a company that he does not own but is attempting to acquire to kill a product launch seemed like illegal gun-jumping to me.

probably won't come up, but wonder if the fact it happened on runway tarmac (where all the good crimes happen) was a hint that it ... might?

should've done it in international waters, rookie mistake

The multi-faceted implications of the "Doderick Macht Frei" tweet were staggering

Also I hope that everyone, like me, needed to google "Doderick" to understand the reference. Season 1 was a long time ago!

Yeah I also didn't get it -- they did put a big "Doderick and Friends" movie poster in the lobby to remind you but all that did is make me go "Who's Doderick?" twice.

Yeah, when Logan's video mentioned "Waystar's characters" I guess I'd forgotten that they were some kind of pre-Disney-acquiring-The-Simpsons version of Fox, I guess

One of my favourite moments from last night was when Kendall starts excitedly saying "I am the eye, I am the eye, I see everything" and the camera nudges down his sightline and shows that Ken is eyeballing snacks from the vending machine as he's saying this. I snorted

We met Greg vomiting in a (Doderick?) suit.

I don't know if this is that kind of show, but now I'm worried about Roman harming himself.

Yeah I didn't know what Doderick was! nor that the Calispatron thing went back really far either.

Roman trying to convince Kendall that Living+ (I'm sure this is already the name of a Freeview channel, so took me ages to figure out what it was supposed to be) is possibly awful reminded me of Peep Show where Jez is trying to tell Hans that their track is shit. "What's shit? The track's shit? it's THE shit!"

omg this ep was so cringe & stressful & GOOD

the insane havoc these grieving idiots can wreak with so much power & so many minions at their disposal, it’s dizzying

guys i don’t think rome’s ok

grumblequote grumblequote

roman firing people immediately upon experiencing the slightest discomfort, top ceo strat

tell me i’m not like my dad & i will laser you from outer space

So did Gerri get fired or not? She was still there at the end.

I think she just laughed off Rome and kept doing her job.

I don’t think she’s fired. I think there will be a flurry of awfulness immediately next week (Joy’s litigation, some watchdog organization calling Kendall’s stock bluff which might in turn cause Karl to turn traitor, Matsson making moves) and Gerri’s “firing” will just be a nothing

I’m one of the rare few who adored Margaret and it has been such a pleasure to see both J Smith-Cameron and Jeannie Berlin in this fantastic show

She didn't get fired, she just got told she was fired

good to be reminded what absolute scumbags the whole family is. just poisonous people. this felt like a greatest hits episode. kendall on stage, shiv toying with tom, roman hapless and cruel, etc

i just learned today that karolina isn't played by patricia arquette lol

She's a Dagmara dagnabbit

always happy for an Annabel Gish cameo. bummed she was fired right away. she would have been a nice foil for Roman and Kendall's co-ceo shtick.

that back and forth was amazing though. obv Roman is off the rails but his jab about LA was pretty brutal.

Tom's patheticness is just bottomless, it's incredible. Shiv whips him like a dog and he comes back for more. He digs deep down, gets really real, and she mocks him, makes a joke of his love, or what he thinks is love, and she allows him to participate in the joke, and play his own vulnerability for laughs, a chance which he obediently grasps

I'm glad this show has reminded us how terrible all these people are. You spend this long with certain characters and I guess there is probably a natural desire to redeem them, to have them come good, but that would be a disservice to what the show is actually trying to portray imo

"How am I supposed to follow this?? He just offered them eternal life!"

"Security plus entertainment is a very compelling offer"

tom and shiv playing bitey really made the sub-dom subtext of their relationship into text

greg trying to do kendall's "no one says no" routine to the audio engineer and immediately making it pathetic with "i don't want to get fired"

that was a jam-packed episode. lots of ups and downs for everyone

tom/shiv relationship ruins is prob the first time i’ve found tom not pathetic tbh

i’m not interested in any of them being redeemed (it’s a v shakespearean show so i feel like that’s not even in the cards) but the special hypnotism this show practices makes it so i can watch a full hour of them being horrible bastards to each other and everyone else and still think “oh my precious beautiful evil terrible embarrassing children”