DETAILS TELEVISIONIn a suite at the Gleneagles hotel, extremely
foul language is being deployed – and then
some. I’m on location with Succession, the
HBO series about Rupert Murdoch-esque
media tycoon Logan Roy, and before me a
meeting of the Roy children is veering into
absurdity. Kieran Culkin glugs an entire bottle
of mineral water, unscripted; in the next take,
he has impromptu sex with a window, prompt-
ing approving laughter from the crew. This is
now the established shooting method of almost
every partly improvised sitcom. Popularised by
the likes of Curb Your Enthusiasm, it involves
giving actors a few takes to ad-lib freely after
the scripted version of a scene is in the bag. Yet
watching Culkin mime explosive farts seems at
odds with the fact that Succession is routinely
compared to King Lear. The dissonance of its
parts and ambition is fascinating. I love the
show, but struggle to describe it. It’s incredibly
funny, but I’m not sure it counts as a comedy,
extraordinarily involving, with almost no like-
able characters. Why and how does Succession
work? And what... is it exactly?
Showrunner Jesse Armstrong, the person
most qualified to answer, is coy. “I don’t put a
word on it. Talking it out feels like throwing
away my creative being.” While I accept that
art has mystery at its heart, I prefer things to
be definitive, so keep asking around. “I don’t
think of it as a comedy. It’s deeply sad with
farcical bits, at points almost a thriller. Hard to
classify,” struggles Matthew Macfadyen. He
plays excellently named Tom Wamsgans, fiancé
to Roy daughter Siobhan and somehow the
second-lowest status character in the show.
“The intent is not to make you laugh, but to
make what the characters are going through feel
so true you can’t not laugh,” tries Nicholas
Braun. Ah, now we’re getting somewhere. He
admits he couldn’t place the tone of the show
either when he landed a part in the pilot as Greg- the first-lowest status character, a hapless
Laurel to Tom’s Hardy. Braun is right, gags are
not king here. While the most risible behaviour
of the wealthy is lampooned, fierce attention is
paid to preserving their reality. Unlike scatter-
gun workplace burlesques such as 30 Rock or
Brooklyn Nine-Nine, the show is a pointed cri-
tique of its environment and characters, with
every action having real consequence.
While most TV comedy uses emotional
warmth as its engine, Succession is the oppo-
site. Everyone uses everyone. The constant
power play is dynamic, if viscerally chilling.
“We chase winter,” Braun notes wryly. The
locations have been moving north the past
few months as the seasons have turned. The
icy feel is manifest in the palette of the show:
transparencies of boardroom glass and frosted
exteriors; the score, too, is glacial and lone-
some, piano notes descending amid silence,
like snow on snow.
It’s frequently subzero for the Roys. The first
series followed the unfeeling patriarch’s
children as they jockeyed for position after he
un-decided to retire as CEO. When he is hos-
pitalised with a brain haemorrhage, the man’s
only defence from his carnivorous offspring ishis Lady Macbeth wife, Marcia, who he knows
has her own mysterious agenda. Spurned heir
and sometime crack addict Kendall attempts to
throw his father out of his own company,
before committing an act so morally heinous it
weirdly draws the two of them closer. Even
somewhat-moral losers Tom and Greg,
wheedling their way into the family business,
orchestrate a cover-up of serious crimes on
cruise ships. And then there’s Logan Roy
himself: a fountain of dark energy who, like an
Ibsen character, manages to be powerful even
when offstage. By the second series he has got
his mojo back and is making his full return.
As the day wears on, I see material being gen-
erated right down to the wire. There are always
two writers on the floor who offer up pages of
alternative jokes for the cast to fling at each
other. Today, when he’s not overseeing episodeeight’s filming, Armstrong will disappear to the
writers’ room to pen episodes nine and ten – of
a series due to air in two months’ time.
The show’s live-wire energy is also a product
of the free way in which it’s shot. After secur-
ing necessary angles, today’s director, Mark
Mylod, will offer the camera operators “a
freebie”. It’s a take in which they too can
improvise, picking up whatever interests them.
It provides unexpected options for the edit, but
also has a more immediate effect: it cuts out
the deadness that can creep into shoots, which
are by nature long and repetitive.
Scottish actor Brian Cox, who plays Logan,
has another idea about what makes the show
special. I run into the formidable man in a cor-
ridor while I’m asking everyone where the
toilets are. I apologise for my bad first impres-
sion. (He says nothing, by which I understand
I have made no impression at all: a very Logan
Roy meeting.) By Cox’s reckoning, the show
gets its energy from the bin fire of our current
politics. It is a satire of our leaders – those who
manipulate the media yet are exposed by it too.
“Look at Trump, who talks about taking on the
NHS but has no idea what the NHS is. You can
be fearful of these people, but the whole thing
is also ludicrous.” The show operates in a simi-
larly prismatic way. It can be funny or deadly,
depending on which angle you look at it.
The Overton window of comedy, the sense of
what we’ll accept as funny, is always shifting.
Ambitious long-form writing has helped us
identify with unlikeable characters over time
and find the lols in the diabolical. Have shows
such as Breaking Bad, Transparent, even BoJack
Horseman ushered in an age in which genre
classifications are meaningless? Armstrong sug-
gests as much. “I wouldn’t have a problem with
you describing The Sopranos as a sitcom. The
pitch is ‘a mob boss in therapy’.” As for Succes-
sion, it’s a show about inequality – though not
how you might expect. It’s about how one priv-
ileged family’s trauma affects us all, at a global
level. It’s also a collection of great fart jokes.
Shakespearean tragedy, soap opera, Swiftian
morality tale or steroidal sitcom, take your pick.
They all go into making the most singular series
on television.Jeremy Strong, Succession’s No1 son Kendall RoySUCCESSION SERIES TWO IS ON SKY ATLANTIC AND
NOW TV FROM 12 AUGUST. I NEVER SAID I LOVED YOU BY
RHIK SAMADDER (HEADLINE, £15) IS OUT ON 8 AUGUST.SUCCESSION is the BEST, WEIRDEST,most (^) UNDEFINABLE show on TV right now.
We can't really explain it! But nor can its stars! Story by Rhik Samadder
09-19DetailsSuccession.indd 55 09/07/2019 11:36
SEPTEMBER 2019 GQ.CO.UK 51