The Failures of Prestige and Victories of Succession

What made Succession stand apart?

Prestige TV gets a bad rap from the commentariat these days—I would say cultural critics, but sometimes it feels like they’re the baby thrown out with the bathwater. Obama-era cultural critics, too soft and doughy for the cultural moment, allowed the bland bourgeois aura of ‘prestige’ to blanket a series of fading corporate time-wasters, an atrophied ‘format’ in which its Artistic Value is presumed rather than earned. We’ve all been recommended a TV show that we know isn’t really good, but it has some of the hallmarks of what’s been good before, and you sit through a few episodes before giving up.

There is some irony that many of the people hard on adult-oriented prestige television have spent the last few years lamenting the loss of adult-oriented prestige cinema of the 1990s—but as someone exceedingly tired of indoor appointment television as our major water cooler conversation subject, I get it. At least you had to go out to see The English Patient. The momentum in the cool/trendspotting end of the zeitgeist is away from TV. We overdosed on the indoors. Netflix and Chill sounds like the foundation of a tedious existence.

Succession, though, was great. How did it resist the pull of gravity? As a major fan of Jesse Armstrong’s series Peep Show, I think a core piece of the puzzle is the way Succession embraced an unpopular tonal affect and showed its mastery of that gesture. Rather than leaning on burned out signifiers of prestige, the show embraced some of the most discomforting and humiliating parts of human experience which television has historically shied away from—likely on order from above for years, and then in the peak TV era, purely through force of programmed habit. Just look at the most widely referenced scenes of the show: “Boar on the floor.” Kendall’s rap verse. The moments of unsettling powerplays within the Shiv-Tom romance. These are the deepest, more unique shades of the show’s paint palette, the moments that cut most deeply, and echo culturally afterwards.

In the finale, the piece that exemplified it for me was the siblings’ meltdown, particularly a series of interlocking affects cohering into something singular and real: Kendall’s raw expression of anguish is a calculated effort at garnering sympathy, but he can’t control it, an effort at persuading his sister to protect him that fails spectacularly. In that moment, Shiv moves decisively—she’s unconvinced, uncompelled, and Kendall is suddenly completely powerless, regressed to a childhood relationship with no adult to adjudicate “fairness,” only the incalculably complex injustice of the universe. The ugly, nauseating feeling in your stomach—that’s how you know the show is working.

After watching Peep Show, I used to feel like someone had just massaged out the the knots in my back, or that I’d shaken a blanket while making my bed to remove the wrinkles. There’s a weird form of brutal self-improvement to seeing these unflinching portrayals of simple formulas performed on screen—and to Succession’s great credit, the show always seemed in control of each gesture, each expression, each movement designed for maximum clarity. This was necessary in part because dialogue was the exception—these are characters deceiving themselves, at the heights of a business built on interpersonal deception, and like an inversion of Peep Show, in which we hear each character’s inner dialogue, the script in Succession is often, to quote Roman, very deliberate “bullshit.” The show’s gestures were self-evident because the characters seldom were.

Critics of the show expressed the concern that its unlikeable characters make the show difficult to watch, but I think it’s more likely this willingness to artfully convey very human, extremely real moments of humiliation and discomfort and weakness which makes the show difficult for some people to appreciate. It’s also what makes it stand apart. It’s much easier for shows to ape the formal innovations of prestige past and bank on audiences’ uncritical acceptance of the format than it is to recognize something which boldly embraces the under-explored. Prestige TV can so easily depend on tired tropes to reassure our lazier impulses, but Succession challenged you watch yourself with your eyes open and demand a full accounting.