HBO's Succession - Season 2 and Beyond

I guess that's super-rich people for you.

think my favorite thing about the boardroom meeting was that if Kendall had pre-arranged the seats so that shiv would have voted earlier, she'd have much less leverage. logan would have taken that into consideration.

everything about that meeting showed how bad Ken could be. The cockiness especially.

I still can't fathom the mentality of "sure, I'll just nip down to Barbados the night before the most important board meeting ever". What if there's a storm or your plane won't start and you can't get back?

yeah you'd think Kendall would have learned his lesson after that happened to him in the first season

'I still can't fathom the mentality of "sure, I'll just nip down to Barbados the night before the most important board meeting ever"."

it's like a 5 hour flight, I can't even figure out how they got there so quickly even with private jets.

wait til you see how fast they figure out long distance travel in Westeros without even engines!

Who has a better story than Ken the Broken

lol armstrong got so sick of all the bad shiv theories that he couldnt hold back

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fxi5opeaQAEQ3TY?format=jpg&name=large

her brother who is basically the nastiest most awful person when he's not getting his way, what did he call shiv on election night, "fucking filth" or something?

it was perfectly evident it wasn't some calculated move just based on her performance when she made the decision

I'm starting to feel like people with the "worse finale than Game of Thrones" takes should maybe stick with something more up their alley, like Paw Patrol.

going to have to tap the "not getting the ending you personally wanted does not automatically make it a bad ending" sign more and more frequently

it does if your method of watching television is rooting for characters like they're sports teams!

inspired by this one I saw last night:

The Succession Finale is worse than the Game of Thrones Finale is one respect. GOT had already been trash for at least two seasons. Succession was at the height of its powers before the Finale, leading to great disappointment.

— NYCTaper (@nyctaper) June 2, 2023

I'm glad the guy does a great job of taping and sharing live performances but uh not going to him for media take

for the record, this is his justification:

Plot holes all over the place. The fake GoJo Asian numbers were not even discussed, which is bizarre in a half-stock deal. The Ebba stuff was forgotten. No appearance by either candidate or any discussion of the election fight. There’s a bunch more.

— NYCTaper (@nyctaper) June 2, 2023

i can't believe we didn't get any more Jimenez scenes, truly what the fans have been clamoring for since his appearance several episodes back.

it's as if the show wasn't actually about the things that the trio of main characters weren't focused on anymore

trash ass Rashomon just making me watch the same scene four times in a row, dumb as hell bro

idk how we got to prosumer tv culture but it is truly the worst

they want formula they think thats how it should be

This show is closest to sopranos in how it wasn't holding anyone's hand and guiding them narratively, it followed the characters down their paths and focused on the information that was important to them at any given moment. No more ebba stuff because the kids didn't need that anymore, they didn't care about her any more than Mattson did. No more gojo numbers because it didn't work as a tool anymore, and it had already shifted the numbers on the board at that point. No more candidates because the kids were just trying to get the company and politics wasn't their focus, esp now that Mencken was going to let the sale go thru. Plus we heard just enough about it in the background, Mencken maybe being in trouble in Wisconsin, and willa's reaction to shiv's comment with respect to that giving us just enough and all we needed to know. Why do so many people need things explained to them.

Not even explained but they just want closure on every narrative thread.

These are the people the Star Wars universe depends on.

i dont like this show cause it didnt give me what i want is obviously a baby opinion but its taken to a whole other level when people decide the show is formally bad because it hasnt given them what they wanted, there are all these youtube videos of guys explaining how to tell a story the right way, talking about what are the stakes

and people consume this media as if theyre screenwriters when theyre actually screen watchers, they do want to know how the sausage gets made

It's not a puzzle-box narrative. The only answer the show has implicitly promised its audience is who succeeds Logan. And the finale did that. The rest (at least far as the GoJo deal goes) doesn't matter.

yeah. succession had a purity of storytelling that is unfamiliar to like a whole generation of these goobers

The type of people who wanted the Scooby-Doo ending for zodiac

Guess they shouldn't have cut this scene after all:

JIMINEZ opens the Waystar Royco board room, interrupting the vote:

JIMINEZ: "Hey guys, so glad that tough election fight is over and resolved. Phew! Anyway, my good friend Ebba just sent over some updated GoJo numbers for their Asia market and everything is all clear. Glad to have those threads all tied up!"

JIMINEZ winks at the camera and EXITS as "Curb Your Enthusiasm Theme" plays

do y’all want to be exposed to the worst succession finale take

This show is closest to sopranos in how it wasn't holding anyone's hand and guiding them narratively, it followed the characters down their paths and focused on the information that was important to them at any given moment.

Remembering that Sopranos' last season had a couple scenes involving selling hazardous chemicals to some Middle Eastern folks, which made it seem headed toward a 9/11-type climax, only to have an AJ love interest and a drawn-out diner scene.

do y’all want to be exposed to the worst succession finale take

hit me

YES BRING IT

https://www.thewrap.com/hbo-succession-season-four-series-finale-review/

spoiler: bill wyman wishes it were a show about competent businesspeople making epic deals. bill wyman wishes succession were ben affleck’s air

the worst part of it is when he tells you how he’d write the show and it’s so embarrassing

I'm not surprised that Wyman has come up with the worst Succession take because he is very dumb and an awful writer, but after I hate read his abysmal Pink Floyd song rankings a couple of months ago, I can't donate another moment of my life to reading his sloppy garbage because life is Too $hort.

i'll admit i did think a few times "this person's far too incurious and dumb to be cracking jokes this good" but yknow in real life richard iii probably wasn't very eloquent either

yes had i not been sent this piece directly i would’ve been blissfully unaware of it so protect yourself if you can

Not only do the loose ends about the election and the deal not matter to the show's narrative, but the not-mattering is also sort of the point, I think? The characters' constant status-jockeying is what drives the story week to week, but the show, it seems, is ultimately less interested in how specific moves are made than in the emotional impact of spending your life in cutthroat pursuit of power. Who knows whether Tom will even last as CEO, but all of them will remain broken people.

Yeah there’s always people out there who want to know more GoJo details and it’s like why who gives a fuck when there’s backstabbing family drama

I dunno -- thinking about Roman's wal-mart t-shirt is at least on par entertainment-wise for me as the torrid faux-murdoch dynamics.

The show’s own perspective and the perspective of its own writers are not necessarily the same and for lots of things but especially Succession it’s probably useful to consider through the Doylist-Watsonian perspectives, basically shorthand for:

When a creator answers a question about their work, should they provide an In-Universe answer or a Real Life answer? The former is the Watsonian perspective, the latter Doylist.

The terms reference Sherlock Holmes:
Watsonian commentary relates to Dr. John Watson, Holmes' friend and supposed chronicler of his adventures in-universe. Doylist commentary relates to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the Real Life author of the Holmes stories.

Simply put, if you were to ask a question about Sherlock Holmes, you would probably get a different answer depending on whether you asked Dr. Watson or Sir Arthur.

Doylist or out-of-universe or exegetic commentary considers the work as a created object, and prefers exegetic explanations with particular attention to the author's intentions. Doylist explanations are things like "The author changed his mind" or "The actor died, so they had to retire the character" or "They didn't have the budget for an animatronic puppet, so they changed the character to an ordinary human". Doylist tropes include:

The Sun doesn’t run the UK, nor does Fox entirely set the media agenda in the US, but it was hard not to feel, at the time the show was coming together, the particular impact of one man, of one family, on the lives of so many. Rightwing populism was on the march across the globe. But in the fine margins of the Brexit vote and Trump’s eventual electoral college victory, one couldn’t help but think about the influence of the years of anti-EU stories and comment in the UK press, the years of Fox dancing with its audience, sometimes leading, sometimes following, as the wine got stronger, the music madder. It was politically alarming and creatively appealing: to imagine the mixture of business imperatives and political instinct that exist within a media operation; to consider what happens when something as important as the flow of information in a democracy hits the reductive brutality of the profit calculation inside such a company. How those elements might rebound emotionally and psychologically inside a family as it considered the question of corporate succession.

I think the show does care about politics, but it's a thematic concern rather than a narrative one. It doesn't matter whether Mencken actually becomes president or not; it only matters that he could.

exactly

i mean they research the hell out of all their details so that’s probably what hooks in people who want to follow the political/business threads but omg i so don’t want to watch THAT show. like imagine if they did tie up all these loose ends how muted the inter-character drama would then become bleh

I'm 2/3 of the way through season 4 and am disappointed that these are all going to be movie-length episodes. I want to get through it to know what people are talking about, but it's such a trudge. I'd rather just watch movies

The constant sudden zoom-ins and zoom-outs are just bad

:(

trash ass Rashomon just making me watch the same scene four times in a row, dumb as hell bro

― Maxmillion D. Boosted (jon /via/ chi 2.0), Friday, June 2, 2023 1:18 PM (six hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Real life lol here

Lucas is such a whiny man-baby

thinking about where the main characters might have gone to college

Connor: Yale
Kendall: Dartmouth
Shiv: Brown
Roman: NYU
Tom: Cornell

in addition to the awful zoom-ins, the show regularly violates the 180 degree rule

Apparently Jesse Armstrong pitched the show as Festen (the Dogme 95 film) meets Dallas.

all of the episodes are around an hour to 1:10 idgi

like, for the whole show