A show about fake ultrarich people played by less rich people watched by poor people. A show that has pretensions about flagellating the rich while still somehow revelling in their debauchery and parasitism, a sort of recursive self-awareness that is supposed to somehow absolve the characters (and the irl rich?). Somehow it is both the sale of anti capitalism back to the anti capitalists whilst also scratching a Keeping Up With the Kardashians itch for watching the inter-familial spats of our feudal overlords.
A contemporary Game of Thrones where everyone is bad and there is no good and it’s just a TV show so it doesn’t matter, which handily conceals the fact that our everyday reality is literally this show, and that the stakes in real life are actually weighty and have moral and material value and can easily be viewed as right and wrong.
Along with a healthy dose of “their daddy was mean to them so it’s not their fault they’re all disgusting bourgeois pigs”.
What the fuck. We desperately need prolekult. I’m so sick of this two faced culture that sells our own hatred back to us and pokes the reward centres in our brain - “hey you just watched a pithy comment that could KIND SORTA be construed as anti capitalist on a million dollar show on a billion dollar network, you’ve done your leftism for the day!”
What stage of capitalism is it when everyone is so widely aware capitalism sucks that the most successful business model is pretending you agree that capitalism sucks?
AAAAAA
I watched the whole first season and it doesn't get any better (probably should have quit earlier but loads of people were telling me it was the best thing since sliced Sopranos so I tried to stick it out), and it's not even like the characters fall into the "love to hate" catagory, they're just annoying as shit.
This is not uncommon for Iannuchian characters though, everyone vile and completely self-interested. Do you like Veep or The Thick of It? My mother has a similar objection to all three shows. No likability anywhere
Strangely I do quite like The Thick of It and Veep (although I haven't seen as much of Veep tbh), as well as other shows about rich arseholes like Mad Men, I just felt that Succession's characters weren't engaging (or funny) enough to hold my interest, I suppose.
They are definitely less funny, and its just not enough of a comedy overall I think, too trapped in prestige-y drama to fit with those others.
But like all “show don’t tell” media, it’s a Rorschach test, so it also supports the “being rich is so cool because look at the cool stuff they have” interpretation.
Mad Men, similarly, got a lot more people interested in being 1950s-LARPing douchebags than it got people disgusted with the era and the douchebags roaming it.
I like it when the Succesion man says “You dont Succesion me... I Succession you!”
The way he Succeeded all over the guy right after that was :chefs-kiss:
What stage of capitalism is it when everyone is so widely aware capitalism sucks that the most successful business model is pretending you agree that capitalism sucks?
Capitalist realism bro
They are just engaging in supercharged hollywood slop production as a necessary stepping stone
At least in House of the Dragon they have dragons and by the end of the show almost every character will have been killed or imprisoned.
Wait isn't succession about how incompetent and fucked up the characters are. Like they're not even good at doing the one thing they should be good at
:dead-dove-1:
Me watching Downton Abby on PBS, knowing its wrong but also feasting on the slop.
:dead-dove-2:
This thread is full of leftists subtly talking themselves into supporting the Hayes Code lol
First world leftists are so alienated from the idea of a genuine proletarian revolution -- though not entirely wrongly so -- that they can only imagine getting into power as like a Blanquist takeover where all media needs to be managed personally by the party from above rather than destroying the material and social bases for reactionary thought in the first place.
every proletarian revolution thus far has had censorship of the reactionaries why would we be free of the same need?
Gonna still need to censor and re-educate the reactionaries post revolution, comrade.
How does one destroy the material and social bases for reactionary thought in one fell swoop? Doing that presupposes a proletariat so conscious and developed that those material and social bases probably already stopped existing in such a scenario.
Then again the rich are just as trapped by the logic of capitalism as the poor, perhaps there is a somewhat realistic idea presented there? However the fact we only see one side of this depicted makes shows like this almost the reverse of the rich forcing the poor to dance for their amusement. Except of course it isn’t the real ultra wealthy on display, just their stand-ins.
I think it’s pretty funny, and I don’t think it’s meant to be anything really intended as anti capitalist. Poking fun at the rich is a very old joke.
It's written well with good performances ¯_(ツ)_/¯
My biggest problem with the show is that it has become too reliant on Brian Cox. Without him it would fall apart, but the whole premise of the show is he's dying. At the end of season 3 he seems to be as strong and mentally fit as ever and rarely does he display any symptoms of a "dying" man with dementia.
Yeah that threw me off after he seemed to have done sort of dementia festering in the first season
What stage of capitalism is it when everyone is so widely aware capitalism sucks that the most successful business model is pretending you agree that capitalism sucks?
I don't know, but most people are still bought-in and think this bullshit is working, even as the world collapses around them. I do not have much hope for the west.
It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. cf. every film and tv show where there's society-collapsing events with giant robot wizards destroying the world but it all goes back to present-day status quo capitalism before the credits roll.
society-collapsing events with giant robot wizards destroying the world but it all goes back to present-day status quo capitalism before the credits roll.
:I-was-saying: My mecha-laden novel trilogy ends with terminal-stage capitalism being destroyed and gone for good, for what it's worth.
i watched all of it. and this other show called "Industry" on HBO, which is all about like the people who manage rich people's money to make them more money. they're all assholes. certainly, it gives backstory and nuance to their assholishness, and how the broader social relation that created them perpetuates itself.
with Succession, the only character i sort of appreciate as a human is dumbass Greg. mostly because he is new to the inner circle of parasitic fuck ups. his ambition is clumsy, naked, and incompetent. i like to laugh at greg trying to get rich and i like to laugh at him fucking up by trying to get too rich. i hate the rest of the family. i hate the rest of the hangers on, the sycophants, the company people. they're all swine. Tom Wamsgams is the most openly sociopathic, which is amusing because he's played empathic heroes in other roles. incredible range on this guy as an actor. i can't wait to learn what the story is behind Tom, because the shit he says and ultimately does in the most recent season is more dark-hearted and self-loathing than any character i can think of.
i think an important thing to recognize is that just because someone had trauma doesn't make them reasonable or acceptable. traumatized people traumatize others, but not all traumatized people turn into assholes. is it sad that roman got locked in a dog cage and tormented until he pissed himself during a mental breakdown as a child? sure. is that kind of abuse why he's a complete shit now? probably. but roman isn't a child anymore. he and every one of these fucks is accountable for who they become. he's a grade A fucking asshole and if he were drowning in front of me, i would throw him a barbell.
i too am watching this show, rooting for everyone to die in agony. and frankly, they are all in agony mostly anyway, so lmao. i think the simple analysis of the show that makes it watchable to me is that it's a story of the succession of an evil empire during the sunset of an evil king and every candidate/heir is a piece of garbage that will cruelly betray any of the others for a chance at power. so, i root for the messy, embarrassing collapse of the empire.
Industry isn’t really a finance show though. It’s just Love Island set in London finance.
Succession, at the very least, is structured in Hamlet/Macbeth but (correctly) equating monarchy to corporations.
yeah industry is different for the reasons you say, but similar in the sense that I loathe pretty much everyone and want to see them all fail.
