Be careful how many episodes you watch in a sitting. As the old joke says of Scotch whisky, one hour of “Succession” is fine. Two may be too many: without intending to, you are liable to start mimicking the foul-mouthed way the characters all talk, threatening to “beast” a housemate for leaving the top off the toothpaste, or grind their bones for burning the toast, or jam a Mont Blanc down their throat. Only with added expletives.
Since it was first broadcast in 2018, funny swearing has been at the heart of the success of “Succession”. But the lurid slurs exchanged by the members of the ultra-rich Roy family are the least of their vices. In their reptilian world, alliances, friendships, even marriages are made or betrayed purely out of self-interest. Weaknesses and secrets, even the darkest, are opportunities for blackmail—swiftly forgotten, since the victim would have done the same. As they backstab each other for control of Waystar Royco, a media conglomerate, monstrous Logan Roy (Brian Cox, pictured) and his children fend off outsiders—rivals, prosecutors, regulators—like some medieval hilltop clan. They are all borderline psychopaths, for whom only yacht-owners count as real people, and more or less equally hateful.
And yet, as in the punchline of the joke about whisky, though two episodes may be too many, three are too few. Anyone who swallowed their scruples to make it that far into the first season is probably devouring the third as it airs now. Like fealty to a reprobate politician, attachment to the Roys is a one-way valve. However hard they try—and they do—nothing will put you off.
The show is all the more triumphant for being so high-risk. For the whole poisonous set-up violates a cardinal rule of 21st-century storytelling: that at least some of the characters, and ideally the protagonist, should be likeable. As authors of edgy fiction who inadvisably read their Amazon reviews can attest—or screenwriters told by commissioners to tug the heartstrings harder—punters and tastemakers increasingly adhere to this law. “Succession” offers up no one. Even Connor Roy (Alan Ruck), a deluded flake who wants to run for president, wields a switchblade when the need arises. Greg (Nicholas Braun), Logan’s out-of-his-depth great-nephew, is not so much of a doofus as to turn down a chance for extortion.
Bravo. Likeability is an odd requirement, as well as a sterile and stifling one. From Iago to Humbert Humbert and Tom Ripley, many of art’s greatest characters are irredeemable villains. They throng fairy-tales and children’s books, which help induct youngsters into the moral complexity of the universe. All the stranger that many adult readers and viewers now seem to want fiction to shrink their moral horizons rather than expanding them. Crime dramas pass muster because they supply a fantasy of justice. Unpunished, remorseless wickedness—like the Roys’—is becoming a no-no.
It may be that the atomisation of modern life means that, more than ever, people look to stories to provide surrogate friends. Perhaps viewers in the multimedia age feel bombarded by enough cruelty already. Some censorious types seem to confuse the portrayal of nasty views or behaviour with an endorsement of them. If those are the tests, the new series of “Succession” fails them as spectacularly as did the previous two.
True to form, the Roys unblinkingly sell out their children, spouses, parents and siblings. Once again political principles are just an affectation (adopting them means being derided as “Woke-a-hontas”). Mercenary as they are, even the put-upon retinue of consiglieres, lawyers, executive assistants and publicists are scarcely sympathetic. There is a pronounced strain of graphic, incest-based insults: nowhere do fewer taboos hold sway than in the execrations of the Roys. They are above all that.
It’s delicious. And it proves something important. Just as, beyond considerations of genre, the main distinction among stories is between the good and the rest, so for characters the real divide is between the well-drawn and the fuzzy, not whether or not you’d ask them to babysit. At the end of the second season, Logan smiles enigmatically when his oedipal son Kendall (Jeremy Strong) double-crosses him live on television. For the audience, too, the Roys are at their most entertaining—in an artistic sense, their most likeable—when they are most conniving. Sometimes, in the viewer’s smile as in Logan’s, there may even be a trace of admiration. ■
