I thought it made sense dramaturgically
On Succession, theatre, "the craft," and respecting both your creative choices and your audience. *SPOILERS AHEAD*
**SPOILERS AHEAD for Succession s4 ep 3. If you haven’t watched the episode yet, come back and read this later.**
Last fall, I was in a production of the classic tragedy Phaedra Off-Off Broadway. For those unfamiliar with Greek and Roman drama—and in this case, we were doing an early 20th century English translation of the Roman adaptation of the original Greek play—the plays are often written in verse with lengthy speeches. There are usually no real delineations of where scenes begin or end and no real act breaks. Everything is done via dialogue. And often the most important plot points—especially the deaths of kings and other powerful figures—happen offstage and we learn about it from the Chorus or another subordinate character, usually someone called a Messenger who describes the events in vivid detail. Part of the reason for this was because it made plays easier to stage, but perhaps more importantly, it also put the emphasis back on the moral and dramatic themes and how the other characters reacted to the tragedy. In this way, the Greeks established very early on that the true hallmark of great drama is not in how you act but how you react.
Succession has received plenty of comparisons to various Shakespearean plays (King Lear, Henry IV, etc), but on occasion—and by occasion, I mean episodes featuring a wedding or big party like Kendall’s 40th birthday—it goes bigger, sadder, and something closer to the Greeks. Jesse Armstrong and his talented team of writers are so good at crafting these moments of operatic tension and emotion while still channeling them through all the subtle nuances of each character. Sure, Logan Roy (the unmatched Brian Cox) is a king in his own mind, but the series has also built him up to sort of mythic, god-like proportions. He’s Zeus: powerful, terrifying, vengeful, but also loving and protective of his children in his own messed-up way.
Which is why his sudden death offscreen on a plane to Europe to negotiate one last deal while his adult children were miles away on a boat in the Hudson felt so utterly shocking despite the inevitability of his death the series title promises must happen. We don’t see Logan Roy collapse onscreen, we—like the Roy siblings—get the news via a messenger, which is a phone call from Tom (Matthew Macfadyen continually proving why he won an Emmy for the role). By choosing to not show us “the violence” of Logan’s death onscreen, Armstrong and the rest of the writers put us emotionally on the same page with the siblings who all react with varying degrees of horror, grief, denial, and confusion as Tom calmly relays what’s happened and still happening. We can barely see the chest compressions happening in the background of the plane. It’s the real-time reactions of Kendall (Jeremy Strong), Shiv (Sarah Snook with what should be her Emmy-winning performance), and Roman (Kieran Culkin) for the remainder of the episode that keep us, the audience, in tension with them and are too riveting to look away from. Like Greek drama, the reactions are far more important than the action that caused them. And that deliberate choice to keep Logan’s death offscreen delivered not just some of the best acting I’ve seen on television this year or any year but one of the best episodes of television period.
I wasn’t at all surprised when the episode’s director, Mark Mylod (who has directed many episodes throughout the 4 season of the series), explained in the behind-the-scenes featurette following the episode and in subsequent interviews that he had the actors do a single 30-minute unbroken take of all the scenes on the yacht because “it felt like it had to be literally real-time…well, you see the results, if you’ve seen the episode. There is an intensity to it.” Kieran Culkin described it as “doing a one-act play.” A good director understands both a) what the material calls for and b) the best way to get the best possible performances out of their actors. While they also shot the sequence in chunks as well, Mylod understood the actors and the script needed to go through the entire emotional journey without breaks to capture that intensity he described.
Part of why I think Succession is so consistently excellent is because pretty much all of the actors—including the ones in smaller supporting roles—come from the theatre. And with all due respect to many of the brilliant actors without formal training/theatre experience, theatre really does prepare you differently. It demands a different kind of energy, focus, and stamina than doing film/TV where it’s a lot of hurry up and wait and scenes shot out of order. The immediacy of theatre means you have to go through the entire emotional arc of your character for a couple hours every night. It’s both energizing and subsequently exhausting, which is kind of the point, because being alive (and fully present in the moment) is both of those things. Because all of the actors on Succession have backgrounds in theatre, it made it possible for Mylod to get the performances he needed by having them do the 30-minute take. Knowing you have actors who have the tools to really dig into the text & make super nuanced choices while sustaining their energy through difficult and/or long scenes also gives writers & directors freedom to do their best work. Succession is an embarrassment of riches as a result.
When I was doing Phaedra last fall, I had my work cut out for me, because I knew the most difficult part of doing classical theatre is making sure you’re understood by the audience in spite of the flowery language/verse. My first and primary goal was to make sure that even if audiences found the language a little impenetrable on the surface, they could very clearly understand the subtext and emotional essence of the words via my delivery and actions. If you understand what the action is behind the words and can convey that clearly, smart and perceptive audiences will understand what’s going on whether they get all the words or not. It’s about doing your homework as an actor, putting it all out there, and trusting that audiences will get it.
I think about this a lot when I’m watching Succession, because despite my day job working in an investment banking company, I do not know all the particulars of business. I never took a business course in college (or even personal finance in high school which I think should be required for everyone!) and I’m not sure I have any interest in getting an MBA at any point in my life despite the fact I think about going to grad school like once a week. This is all a long-winded way to say I don’t know what the fuck they’re saying, but girl I am living. All the business talk—deals, mergers, demographics, stock bumps, etc—feels impenetrable to me in the same way Shakespeare, Greek, or other classical verse plays feel impenetrable to modern audiences, but I still get the high stakes of it all because of the actors’ delivery and actions. In the case of this past Sunday’s episode, it’s a perfect example of what the series does best: it’s not necessarily about the content of the information but about how it’s conveyed between the characters and the audience that raises the stakes. We understand what’s going on because the actors do and make strong choices that translate those things to the audience. Good actors know how to do that.
(Side note: How poetic to have the Roy Siblings becoming unmoored by their father’s death while they’re literally on a boat scrambling for concrete knowledge of what’s going on via phone calls and texts.)
There are a million and one things I love about Succession, but I keep coming back to the fact that it is a series that refuses to infantilize its audience in a time when media literacy is particularly bad (leading to a whole industry of YouTubers who do explainer videos) and a lot of exhausting people online think plot is more important than any other part of art. Armstrong sticks to his creative instincts and trusts in the intelligence of the audience to pick up all the nuances of the relationships regardless of the finer plot points. And as a result, Succession rewards its faithful, perceptive viewers over and over again if they give themselves over to the emotional experience regardless of whether they know anything about the media industry (or being an asshole billionaire). It’s not really about business at all; it’s about broken people who happen to be a family.
Succession is rewarding on so many levels because it’s the best possible result of what happens when you respect “the craft.” Every artist and crew person is given the space and freedom to do their work at the highest level and with passion. You can feel and see that pay off when you watch the show and its subsequent behind-the-scenes featurettes where everyone is enthusiastically talking about their work. As a creative person, I like hearing people talk about how they arrived at a certain acting choice or why they wrote a certain line of dialogue. Learning how they got from point A to B to C enhances my enjoyment of the end result.
And yet, Succession has also become a bastion of pretentiousness to a particular and possibly growing cross-section of critics and regular folk alike who seem hostile to any earnest attempt to talk passionately and precisely about art and its creation as a form of expression rather than a neatly-packaged, easily consumed corporate product. After Jeremy Strong—perhaps the current most prominent face of the frankly dull and somewhat meaningless at this point Method Actor debate—correctly used the word “dramaturgically” to describe how the events of this past Sunday’s episode fit within the larger dramatic context of the show’s world/story arc, everyone from Kendall Roy fangirls to Vulture meme-ified and used the screenshot as yet more evidence of his “pretentiousness” rather than bothering to a) look up what the word meant and b) consider he’s an actor who takes his job seriously and is using layman’s terms that I’ve heard in every acting class I’ve taken since I was 18 years old. Is Jeremy Strong pretentious? Maybe a little, sure, but this growing insistence that speaking passionately and earnestly about art—especially acting—while also using terminology specific to those fields is somehow “bad” and “pretentious” feels symptomatic of the hollow way Late Stage Capitalism tells us to think about and consume art.
What’s ironic is the cynicism with which so many people respond to earnestness and art is not unlike the way the Roys and their corporate stooges at Waystar-Royco respond to genuine displays of emotion and creativity. If it doesn’t make them money or get them ever closer to the top of the corporate ladder, they don’t care or find any value in it. These billionaires are rich and sardonically funny but they’re absolutely miserable husks of human beings who are so out of touch with their genuine feelings that they can barely hug each other without what seems like Herculean effort. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from watching Succession, it’s that no amount of money or cynicism can shield you from your deepest, darkest feelings—not grief, rejection, pain, unhappiness. You can buy more, consume more, but it will never fill those emotional holes inside of you. Capitalism is where passion, creativity, and earnest emotion go to die faster than Logan Roy in the bathroom of a private jet.
Sometimes, I feel silly for caring so much about a TV show, but then I remember it’s really okay and actually necessary to care about good art, whatever form it arrives in. Art reminds us to feel, challenges us to look differently at the world, asks us to consider our choices. And when it’s made with so much love—the way Succession clearly has been by all who work on it, “pretentious” or not—it’s something to celebrate and be grateful for. I imagine I’ll feel a lot of grief when this series ends if only because it’s a been such an exquisite and agonizing (in a good way) pleasure to experience such high caliber work. But art, such as life, is—to use another pretentious word—ephemeral. It’s fleeting. All good things must come to an end the way sometimes your billionaire dad dies the day of your ostentatious wedding (Sorry, Connor).
And you know what? In the end, it will all make sense…dramaturgically.
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