If you haven’t seen Sunday’s series finale of “Succession” yet — spoiler alert! – here are some things was not Happen.
The screen didn’t suddenly fade to black when the Roy family was eating onion rings at a diner in New Jersey. Roman experienced an epiphany while at a hippie retreat in California and dreamed up an iconic Coca Cola jingle. Kendall didn’t wake up in Suzanne Pleshette’s bed.
Exactly where the final episode of “Succession” will rank among TV’s greatest finales is for future pop culture historians to decide, assuming even pop culture historians in the future will bother to pay attention to that sort of thing. Are. Let’s face it, series finales — such as “The Sopranos,” “Mad Men,” and “Newhart” endings — just don’t pack the same punch they used to, even smart ones. , the buzzy, satirically dark drama produced by the network formally known as HBO.
Nearly 2.9 million people tuned in to watch the newly-minted Max say goodbye to the Roy clan last Sunday night. It was a historically strong end to a series that occasionally poked its head above 2.5 million viewers over its four-season run, but still. HBO’s “Game of Thrones” attracted nearly seven times as many viewers for its finale in 2019. Go back even further, to the heyday of network TV, and finales of shows like “Friends” and “Seinfeld” were pulling 20 to 30 times the numbers. ,
Still, despite the ever-diminishing dominance of linear television, “Succession” managed to do something that’s extremely rare for TV shows these days — it got people talking. This super slick, often sick C-suite melodrama may not have drawn nation-uniting, moon-landing-size ratings, but it clearly captured a big piece of the Zeitgeist, which is “water-cooler conversation”. was called. – which is now mostly known as tweeting – especially among the chattering classes on the coasts.
The reason was obvious: The show was great. Wildly written (by Jesse Armstrong and his team of corporate-slang slinging scribes) and superbly acted (by Brian Cox, Jeremy Strong, Sarah Snook, and especially Kieran Culkin, whose every scene was a masterclass in little brother snark) ), it was closing in 2018 on HBO, as “Game of Thrones”, the network’s biggest hit ever, was closing. In many ways, it was a natural replacement. Both shows were essentially built on the same narrative architecture – a family battle for power. But instead of dragons and White Walkers, “Succession” gave us private jets and Swedish internet billionaires.
Though unlike “GoT” — in fact, unlike every other show in the history of TV — “Succession” didn’t feature a single likable character. Every member of the Roy family was a total stinker. In any other era, that wouldn’t have made the series watchable. Conventional TV wisdom holds that audiences have always needed at least one character to root for and identify with, one Tyrion Lannister among all the Baratheons and Starks.
But we do not live in any other era. We live in mean, bitter times. Today, with wealth inequality close to golden age levels, it is rarely There is a deep gulf between the rich and the poor, and never ceases to cause both envy and displeasure on the part of the rich. And that’s the secret sauce that made “Succession” so addictive; Viewers can enjoy the spoils of exuberance — helicopter taxis, luxe corner suites and posh mountain resorts, $600 cashmere baseball caps — while at the same time relishing the schadenfreude of watching these pathetic one-percenters mess up their lives.
With “Succession,” viewers can try and eat its king crab tagliolini, too.
Aside from hating the ultra-wealthy, there was another reason “Heirship” was so much fun to watch — and such a vivid snapshot of our current culture. In interviews, Armstrong always denied that the show was based on real people, specifically Rupert Murdoch and his brother. Who knows, it might even be true. But the fact that its plotlines were so authentic, or at least authentic-adjacent, gave the all-romance a palpable vibe that made it feel like a reality episode weekend.
All the craziness that has revolved around politics, media, and business in recent years — from the crazy lies of the right-wing media to the rise of Elon Musk as the new Dark Lord of the Internet — is in “slightly skewed fictional form” succession. It somehow made the real world a little easier to process. it’s still happening after the finale George Takei posting on Twitter Just a few days ago House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is “an ambitious, empty, ass-kissing pain sponge who only gets where he is because all other options are too bad.”
In other words, said Takei, “Tom Wambsgans.”
