HBO's Succession - Season 2 and Beyond

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

None of the technical shit is noticeable to me, except it's just really well done idk.

Last episode is 88 min but that's the only markedly long one, and it flies by

thinking about where the main characters might have gone to college

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

― Dan S, Saturday, 3 June 2023 09:41 (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

another reason to love the successionfashion account, which tells us that Tom likely went to U of Minnesota https://www.instagram.com/p/CrOKlluPRBl/?igshid=ZWQyN2ExYTkwZQ==

also my new favorite detail is that the ball cap kendall wears in barbados is from Sandy Lane hotel golf club in barbados & available exclusively to players at the golf course only <3

also lol @ kendall golfing but you know he totally would do it

actually i bet all 4 of them could hang on a golf course. do i want a golf episode? maybe?
weird.

ugh nvm it’s probably his mum’s hat or stupid peter’s or something lol

love that detail. And yes they should’ve had a golf episode! Logan def golfed imo. All of the kids hate golf except Connor.

I walked past Cherry Jones (aka Nan Pierce) on the street in Dublin this morning. That was weird.

Hope you asked her if she sold so we can finally get some closure

Jesus, the finale is even an article in the Guardian today. I really didn't think it was all that hard to grasp. Anyone who didn't understand Shiv's decision has never had her brother stand with his finger an inch from her face saying "but I'm not touching you".

I'm 2/3 of the way through season 4 and am disappointed that these are all going to be movie-length episodes

they aren't? the last episode is like 90 minutes, the rest are about an hour

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

― Dan S, Friday, June 2, 2023 9:41 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

i noticed this (for the first time in all four seasons) in the matsson/tom seen in the final episode.

Many xp but the fake India numbers storyline was sewn up. The mistake was made public and any hit to Gojo's stock would have baked into the half stock deal. If anything, it made the deal better for the board. More stock to cover the purchase price.

of all the lines idk why this dumb one sticks w me

pic.twitter.com/36oPh5S1Zq

— no context succession (@nocontextroyco) May 23, 2023

Good interview here about the finale and the whole series with Jesse Armstrong (and Frank Rich). Yes it’s Terry Gross, but if you read the transcript you don’t have to hear her voice if she bothers you.

https://www.npr.org/2023/06/05/1179595456/jesse-armstrong-succession-interview

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

Another influence Mark Mylod mentioned in directing it: Altman, specifically Gosford Park.

read somewhere the idea of never telling the actors where the camera might be?

I think Armstrong or Mylod mentioned that with respect to the funeral episode, in which the camera occasionally zoomed in on a specific person in the pews for a reaction shot. Apparently they used more cameras than usual for that episode, stationing them at various places around the church.

I read somewhere that they also had Cox there in the church during filming, so people wouldn't jump to conclusions about whose funeral it was.

Late as usual, just finished last night. Beautiful ending. So much psychological truth running through the veins of this show. I feel a little bit sorry for those who thought they were actually watching ballers ball for four seasons and were just waiting for the inevitable big W at the end.

Two lines that seem to have gotten lost in the shuffle:
'Uh, the colors go well.'
(upon being confronted with a prior confession to murder) '...Which?' (Mark Strong is sooooo goooood at capturing the affect of a wounded four-year-old, in this case muttering a confusedly guilty response as if someone had finally discovered that he was the one who broke the lamp)

That ending seems more perfect the longer I contemplate it, a crystalized moment of the show's tendency to present its characters as simultaneously abhorrent and pitiable.

I also just finished a few days ago. Kendall's fate gave me big Vic Mackey at the end of The Shield vibes. Of course both were haunted and eventually undone by crimes committed early in their show's run.

Took me a while trying to think which character Mark Strong had played in Succession…

He's so method that he physically transformed into an entirely different actor.

I finally finished it, and agree with Old Lunch and Moodles.

As much as I didn't love the filming, the final storyline ended up being way more complex and nuanced than I thought it would be, and the acting in the last few episodes was pretty great.

This is quite brilliant https://t.co/h9HW3Sr5jt

— J. Smith-Cameron💙 (@j_smithcameron) July 13, 2023