An old man, frail, confused and lost, is feeling his way in the pitch dark. “Where am I?” he asks, breathing heavily. We can’t help, because we don’t know either. Eventually his wife finds him pissing on the floor behind a door.
A younger man is riding through New York City in a limousine, singing along to rap and punching the air. His weedy voice, isolated from the music in his headphones, tells you all you need to know about his essential weakness. On reaching his destination he lights a cigarette, takes a drag and drops it on the pavement.
The old man is Logan Roy, self-made founder of media giant Waystar Royco; the younger man is his son and heir apparent – heir imminent, in fact – Kendall. In Jesse Armstrong’s new series Succession (Sky Atlantic/Now TV), Kendall (Jeremy Strong) is presiding over a major acquisition that is rapidly going south, while Logan (Brian Cox) is adjusting to the location of the en suite in his new place, where he lives with his second wife, Marcia (Hiam Abbass). It is also Logan’s birthday and a family gathering is in the offing – a surprise party Logan knows all about.
The immediate family comprises three other siblings: sister Shiv (Sarah Snook) and brothers Roman (Kieran Culkin) and Connor (Alan Ruck), who have all taken a back seat as far as the company is concerned, at least for now. When Roman drops by the corporate HQ and says, “I’m just so pleased to be out of here. This place was essentially a cage to me”, you know he is planning to worm his way back to the boardroom.
It is tempting to draw real-life parallels. Kendall bears a passing physical resemblance to Donald Trump Jr, although the comparison is invalid for being so immensely flattering to Donny. The Murdoch family is a more obvious fit, or at least it was, before the Disney/Comcast takeover battle blunted the drama of empire and sibling rivalry. Some years ago, Armstrong wrote a film script about the actual Murdoch dynasty that was never produced. Succession appears to be what became of the idea.
The closest parallel is probably fictional. Logan is a modern-day King Lear, clearly bent on dividing not his kingdom but his children, one against the other. His birthday present to himself is the indefinite postponement of the whole matter of succession – suddenly Kendall’s status as heir is no longer apparent. That seems to be the premise, anyway; we could go in a lot of directions from here.
To complicate things further, Shiv’s fiance, Tom (Matthew MacFadyen), is the family business’s “head of global”, while screw-up nephew Greg is looking to redeem himself after getting sacked from the company theme park’s management training programme for being stoned on the job. And for throwing up inside a character costume head. You wouldn’t want to be the guy taking his place.
It can be hard to care about characters who are all slightly different shades of awful, but Succession works brilliantly because it provides you everything you hope is true about a mega-rich family dynasty: the witless cruelty of the entitled, the emotional inadequacy of grownup children of privilege, the complex interplay of machiavellian scheming and simple hurt feelings. At the end of his birthday lunch, Logan helicopters the entire party out to a country compound to play baseball – a perfect format for the acting out of old rivalries and psychological strategies. Tom, until now presented as a largely unremarkable lickspittle, reveals himself to be a complicated little prick. Succession manages to humanise its monstrous characters without letting them off the hook.
As you might imagine from one of the creators of Peep Show and The Thick of It, the writing is savage, the dialogue sharp and foul-mouthed. Although funny in places, it is also scary, as any drama peopled by monsters ought to be. The solidity of the whole thing leaves you confident that the financial machinations are all perfectly plausible, without having to bore you with too much business talk.
Above all, Succession is reassuring, in that it seems to argue that wealth and power offer no respite from the obligation to live one’s life in mortal fear – poor, bare, forked. The next time you are annoyed by the arrogance of some ageing media mogul, try imagining him in the middle of the night, confused and alone, pissing all over an expensive carpet. I find it helps.
