Generally speaking, if you don’t like a TV show from the first episode, watching further on faith that it might improve doesn’t make much sense. There are other shows to watch and other things to do. And yet, you’ll sometimes hear some TV snob insist that this or that show only gets good half a season in, or two seasons in, or whatever, and that it’s worth it to soldier on.
This is one of those times. While I’m usually loathe to recommend someone sit through a few episodes of a show that isn’t entertaining them, there can be more to the story. Because if I hadn’t pushed through the first few dour hours of HBO’s high-powered business drama Succession, I wouldn’t have experienced one of the best TV series of the 21st century.
The first episode of Succession isn’t terrible…
…but it might be the worst episode of the show
Succession is about the incredibly wealthy Roy family. The patriarch, Logan Roy (Brian Cox), runs Waystar Royco, a massive media company. His adult children are all various levels of spoiled and entitled, but when Logan suffers a stroke on his 80th birthday, it looks like one of them will inherit control of the business sooner or later. Deciding which one will take the rest of the series.
Logan has his stroke in the very first episode, which gives it a solid structure. But the episode itself, “Celebration,” has a lot of problems. One of them is unforced: executive producer Adam McKay directs “Celebration” and fills it with shaky camerawork and fast zooms that are supposed to evoke the look of a documentary, but which just end up distracting from the drama. McKay has directed movies like The Big Short and Don’t Look Up, so he’s a talented guy, but he had the wrong idea here. He would never direct another episode.
A bigger problem is that the cast of Succession is large, the world is dense, and it’s hard to establish all of that in just one episode, or even in three. By the third episode, we’re still getting introduced to important players like private equity investor Stewy Hosseini (Arian Moayed) and learning the very specific way the Roy family interacts with each other. Without that context, a lot of them just come off as flatly detestable. For instance, in the first episode, the family is playing a softball game (which itself feels strange; once the show finds the voices for the characters, it’s hard to picture how they ever would have done something like this). When Logan’s son Kendall (Jeremy Strong) storms off, his youngest son Roman (Kieran Culkin) asks the groundskeeper’s son to step in, and promises to give the boy a million dollars if he hits a home run. Roman even writes out to check to show that he’s being serious. When the kid fails to make the home run, Roman gleefully tears it up in front of him.
Now, this would be detestable behavior no matter when in the series it happened, but later on, we know how badly Roman tends to sabotage his own happiness. We know that growing up with a distant, emotionally (and possibly physically) abusive father like Logan did a number on all of his children, and we know that they live in an impenetrable bubble of super-wealth, so it rarely if ever occurs to them to treat ordinary people with dignity and respect.
Most importantly, we learn that we’re not really supposed to like the characters in Succession. We can be compelled by them and even sympathize with them, but they are not good people. Once we settle into that understanding, Succession makes a lot more sense, becomes a lot funnier, and gets a lot easier to watch. But it takes a few episodes to get there.
Things starting picking partway through the first season of Succession
And the board meeting in Episode 6 clinches things
The fourth episode, “Sad Sack Wasp Trap,” is when things begin to cohere. The characters are back together again after dealing with the fallout of their father’s stroke, and we see that Logan has no intention of giving up control of the company, even in his weakened state, which frustrates his kids.
It’s around here that the Roy family dynamic really starts to gel. The members of the Roy family are family…but they’re also business rivals. They have a very hard time expressing actual affection because they’re so used to dealing with each other in a transactional way. Every character is a protagonist in their own story and a villain in everyone else’s.
“Sad Sack Wasp Trap” also pairs up Logan’s nervous grand-nephew Greg Hirsch (Nicholas Braun) with corporate ladder climber Tom Wambsgans (Matthew Macfadyen), who for most of the show is married to Logan’s daughter Shiv (Sarah Snook). It’s immediately clear that Greg and Tom have terrific chemistry, something the show would take advantage of for the rest of its run.
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Succession kicks into overdrive in the sixth episode, “Which Side Are You On?” Kendall Roy tries to convince a majority of board members to vote to remove his father Logan as CEO in light of his erratic behavior since his stroke…but he fails. Logan manages to bully enough members into voting the other way, and then fires everyone who voted against him, including his own son.
It’s here we see that all the politicking and scheming on this show actually has consequences. From there, the series takes off and never looks back. If Succession hasn’t hooked you by this point, you can safely assume it never will.
Succession just gets better from there
We’re still looking for a Succession replacement
Succession would continue to knock it out of the park (with apologies to the groundskeeper’s son) for four seasons, with the final season notching a win as the best. It was the kind of show that made HBO the undisputed king of prestige TV, a title that it’s increasingly in danger of losing.
That’s not to say that HBO doesn’t have plenty of great shows worth watching, but it may be a while before a relevant, sharply written drama like Succession will captivate people en masse again. Creator Jesse Armstrong did create a spiritual sequel of sorts called Mountainhead, a movie about four billionaire friends who go on a secluded weekend retreat, but it’s not the same.
“Keep watching until it gets good”
Although it’s still bad form to recommend that someone keep watching a show they aren’t enjoying, there are shows out there that take a while to find their footing. The Wire, another great HBO series, suffers from that problem. Parks and Recreation is a terrific sitcom that a very lackluster first season. Maybe the lesson is to at least look up whether a show improves before dropping it entirely. Otherwise you could miss out on something fantastic.
- Release Date
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2018 – 2023
- Network
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HBO Max
- Showrunner
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Jesse Armstrong
- Directors
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Mark Mylod
- Writers
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Jesse Armstrong
