HBO's Succession - Season 2 and Beyond

i know tom is supposed to be flailing after logan's death but they're really painting him as a totally incompetent boob in these episodes, just clumsily trying to glom on to anyone who could potentially be beneficial to his career. i don't think i love it, he's a goober but he's not a moron

are we sure hes not

lol @ the idea of IKEA-ing Fox News though.

Also, Shiv doing coke while pregnant.

I don't think she did though! I thought she just picked up the vial, put the top back on and absently played with it for a bit.

Ah good catch

I enjoy a bit of cringe but man, Tom at the table of Swedes took the biscuit. Remember when we were mocking creased Carhartts ughhh

She wants to put him in a kilt like a fucking Bay City Roller

^ lol'd at that and Roman's "OK Popeye.."

Kendall writing MORON and saying “This sounds like drama,” the three fucketeers…a lot to like in this one

lol have we ever seen ray and mark before this episode?

At least one of them - the one who possibly not uncoincidentally looks and acts a lot like Gerard from Peep Show - has been in one or two episodes before. I think the Boar on the Floor episode?

yeah he was the one Logan nearly had pissing in a bucket

poor ray or mark

pretty sure it was Ray

poor ray

so difficult to stop sending your frozen blood at peak "it's a joke"

― Enumerated funks of Walsh, Joe. (Sufjan Grafton), Monday, April 24, 2023 10:39 AM (eight hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

^this

hes maybe lying about the blood sitch idk

He seems pretty nutso

And yet outsmarted Tweedle Dumb and Dumber

nah mattson’s so completely a-social he doesn’t even know how to lie about shit like that. and “shocking truthtelling” is his alpha game.

love shiv’s 3 point plan
point 1: uh stop sending your blood to people?

maybe you could stop sending a frozen block of your blood to people

why was shiv being nice to tom when in their immediately precedent scene together she was at his throat? the only consequent thing that happened is the increased offer, but even in that scene she expected it to go through?

ep made me wonder if Mattson has things worse than frozen blood, and he wants to own the most news to control the narrative.

with ATN carve out removed and Shiv threatening Cyd (via Mattson?), my biggest swing is Cyd has some dirt?

or maybe Mattson buys it, the boys ran it for 1 week lol, and Shiv backs out of Pierce bc Mattson makes her head of the waystar royco part of royjo

Every scene of SUCCESSION:

Kendall: What’s the play, the vibe? Marco Polo titfucking us around the Cape of Good Hope?

Shiv: I mean…sure, if your nose is sewn onto the back of your ballsack(scolding look)

Roman: (raises eyebrows)Looks like we’re takin a looong whiff of taint

— Kristi Yamaguccimane (@wapplehouse) April 24, 2023

they are not serious people

why was shiv being nice to tom when in their immediately precedent scene together she was at his throat? the only consequent thing that happened is the increased offer, but even in that scene she expected it to go through?

― sean gramophone, Monday, April 24, 2023 10:12 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

just spitballing but it seems like she likes to be the dominant one in their relationship. obv she was mad that he helped logan but also that made tom more powerful than her. then since logan died tom has been flailing but so has shiv, she doesn't really have much power right now either. but now she feels like her influence with matsson is what pushed the deal through, she's feeling powerful again, higher up than tom.

basically as long as she feels like she's higher up than tom, she feels more sympathetic towards him.

Excellent read

Maybe Shiv or even Tom on her behalf will end up orchestrating something with ATN like breaking a legit scandal that costs Mencken votes on election day, enough for him to lose and be tarnished. Shiv is then caught on whether to take the credit or deflect blame onto Tom but ends up feeling and/or acting like she alone decided the election. Something like that might be a fun outcome for her character but Mencken's lack of appearance so far this season suggests the election storyline isn't going to be that pivotal.

There at least four different outlets doing Succession recap power rankings, and three of them agree that Shiv is top dog among the sibs this week. (Vulture gives a slight edge to Roman, tho as much by accident as anything.)

https://hunterharris.substack.com/p/succession-power-rankings-hanna-barbera
https://www.theringer.com/succession/2023/4/25/23696454/succession-season-4-episode-5-power-rankings-matsson-shiv
https://www.avclub.com/succession-season-4-episode-5-power-rankings-1850369739
https://www.vulture.com/article/succession-kill-list-power-rankings-season-4-episode-5.html

Since the stuff about Braun came out his character is suddenly unfunny and cringe (“Norwegian wood…”)

Mencken's lack of appearance so far this season suggests the election storyline isn't going to be that pivotal.

really really hope this is true

like we don't even know who's running against mencken right? let's keep it that way

Apparently there is/was a movie version of Cat Person starring Nicholas Braun? You can't make this shit up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_Person_(film)

Mattson's house was the same one they used in Ex Machina apparently

ah nice love that movie

Oooh yeah I meant to look that up! My wife guess it was that house.

i was wondering if it was the same house!

Roman finally became a man in this episode! It added 5bn to the deal and Kendall didn't entirely hate it. Proud of you lad

Kendall: What’s the play, the vibe? Marco Polo titfucking us around the Cape of Good Hope?

Early in the last episode Kendall says he is "balls deep" on something and it sounds so completely stupid and out of place. I kept mimicking him saying it throughout the rest of the episode.

It added 5bn to the deal

I think it added $5 to the per-share purchase price. No idea what that actually translates to in the fictitious valuation of the company, has anyone thrown around an actual dollar amount for the total deal? If so I don't remember.

you'd figure the election will get its own episode, given how much they've been teasing it in the script.

The table read of the pilot episode of “Succession” took place in Manhattan on November 8, 2016: Election Day. That evening, the cast and the rest of the team gathered at the home of Adam McKay—an executive producer of the show, and the director of the pilot—for a party that was expected to celebrate the victory of Hillary Clinton. Matthew Macfadyen, the British actor who plays Tom Wambsgans, told me, “We watched the results come in, and everyone wandered off into the night—good for storytelling, bad for humanity.” Armstrong’s most significant memory of the occasion was how quickly attendees accommodated to what initially seemed to be earth-shattering news. “It was such a shock—then five, ten minutes later, everyone’s living in a new reality,” he said. Even in calamity, he observed, many people are “quite oriented towards how it affects them, and what they will do next.”

inspired by this bit of timing, maybe

roman risking it all to trash matsson was very satisfying, bc he was right. as much as they all want to pose like "it's just business," matsson was definitely trying to use logan's death (and an artificial deadline) to push the deal to his advantage.

skarsgard is so good

Loved the “break the ice” breakfast with the division heads. Delicious cringe

Skarsgard's choice in roles seems like it's 80% "ooh, this could be fun" and I appreciate that

very good at playing charismatic, creepy weirdos

that seems to be the skarsgard family niche

nice to include representatives from both the skarsgard and culkin families

I got an instagram ad starring Kieran Culkin the other day for expensive sneakers