Succession (TV Program)

Ken tries to have it both ways with a birthday party that is both absurdly over the top but disownably ironic. Unfortunately for him, it is more tragedy than farce.Season 3, Episode 7: ‘Too Much Birthday’The streaming services have been cluttered lately with “anatomy of a failure” documentaries, which detail the downfall of formerly white-hot companies like WeWork and LuLaRoe. In nearly all these docs, there’s a scene like Kendall’s 40th birthday party in this week’s episode of “Succession” — some preposterously lavish and borderline cultish shindig, celebrating a business culture about to collapse under its founding genius.In the case of the event Shiv calls “KenFest,” the party is like an endless version of that scene in “Citizen Kane” in which the brash young media magnate Charles Foster Kane dances and sings along to a jaunty pop song about himself. Moments like these are equal parts awkward and reckless. They’re a grand illustration of the whole concept of “hubris.”“Too Much Birthday” is an often very funny episode, which curdles into devastating drama by the end. But most of all, it is a triumph of production design. Nearly every set reflects some aspect of Kendall Roy — whether he intends it to or not. A lot of the décor is meant to straddle the line between amusingly ironic and cockily sincere. If a guest considers some piece of design to be over the top, Kendall can always say, “But it’s funny, right?”Here are just a few of the attractions awaiting those guests:As they walk in, they are greeted by a big sign above the door, reading “The Notorious KEN Ready to Die.”Once they enter, they pass video-screens showing wriggling sperm before heading through a passageway made up of pink, pillowy folds, leading to a coat-check room where a greeter in a nurse uniform says, “You’ve just been born into the world of Kendall Roy.” (Shiv, looking back at what is clearly meant to symbolize her mother’s birth canal, says: “Cold and inhospitable. Seems to check out.” Kendall, hearing his younger brother’s concerns about the tastefulness of this display, says: “Roman, relax. Yes, you can take it home with you.”)Behind a curtain inside, there is a room containing giant-size mock-ups of newspaper front pages, predicting pathetic futures for Kendall’s family. (Connor, who is now up to 1 percent in the Republican presidential polling, is livid at this little joke. “What if McCartney tweets this?”)There is a “compliment tunnel” filled with lush greenery and actors saying nice things about anyone who enters. This hilariously flusters Tom, who came to this party to cut loose but ends up finding Kendall’s flourishes irritating. (To be fair, Tom thinks he “took the wrong drugs in the wrong order.”)There is a room flanked by video screens depicting a raging fire, which appear in the episode right as Kendall receives his “birthday present” from Logan and Roman: a sentiment-free greeting card and a term-sheet listing the amount Waystar is willing to pay him to leave the company forever.And then there is the treehouse.This episode is credited to the screenwriters Tony Roche and Georgia Pritchett, with Lorene Scafaria in the director’s chair. I don’t know if credit for the treehouse goes to one of these people or to the series’s creator, Jesse Armstrong, or to someone else; but it is a conceptual masterstroke. This week, all the Roy kids reunite to fight about whom their dad wants to be in charge. And here is Kendall, standing in front of a literal treehouse, built in the middle of his party, telling his siblings they can’t come in.Kendall’s pettiness is, to some extent, justified. When Roman, Shiv and Connor first show up at Kendall’s party, he seems genuinely happy, giving them hugs that appear to be heartfelt. But then he learns the real reason Shiv and Roman are there.Waystar needs to upgrade its streaming platform by partnering with the tech company GoJo, run by the mercurial Lukas Matsson (Alexander Skarsgard), who earlier that day skipped a meeting with Logan and sent his underlings. Kendall has Matsson — whom he calls “the Odin of codin’” — stashed away in his treehouse, where any illicit thing he needs is supplied by Kendall’s own “one-man dark web.” (“He’s not a good guy,” Kendall says to Matsson about his drug dealer. “Enjoy.”)When Roman and Shiv try to enter, Kendall personally blocks them, saying, “The treehouse is cool and you’re not cool.” He calls his siblings Nazi-lovers while he is “a defender of liberal democracy.” As his brother and sister argue that landing GoJo could raise the family’s net worth, Kendall replies, “I have to weigh that against the consideration that no losers are allowed.”Ultimately, Roman weasels his way into the treehouse anyway, where he appears to connect with Matsson. Roman pitches Waystar’s library of broadly popular entertainment and news content (not the “gay moms” or “wheelchair kids” the other media companies are selling); and he talks up GoJo’s platform, which unlike Waystar’s doesn’t take over 30 seconds to load a page. Matsson seems amenable to some kind of deal, so long as he never has to interact with the meddling, out-of-touch dinosaur Logan. (“When will your father die?” he asks earnestly, to which Roman chuckles and then mutters, “We’re laughing here, but that is my dad, so …”)This is the second “Succession” in a row where Roman notches a big win; and he is not gracious about it. He skewers Shiv, who has been excluded from the offer to buy Kendall’s shares, shielded from the decision to send private investigators to harass Kendall’s children and is absent when Roman gets a tentative yes from GoJo. Roman also insinuates that Shiv might be annoyed by rumors that the Justice Department is ending its investigation into Brightstar without sending Tom or anyone else to prison. If true, that would squelch her secret hope that the wicked Waystar dudes might be shoved out of her way by the long arm of the law.Shiv can take comfort, though, in knowing that on this show, no Roy thrives for long. Roman is likely overestimating how much power he has to make deals on his father’s behalf; and it is possible that deep in his bones he senses something is off. That may explain why he later tries to goad Kendall into hitting him and then gives his brother a shove in the back that sends him sprawling. Maybe Roman is trying to hasten his own inevitable comeuppance.It’s too bad for Roman, then, that Kendall is already too beaten down to stand up for himself. From the moment he gets Logan’s term sheet, Kendall starts to spiral — first slowly, and then in a hurry. He abandons his plan to sing Billy Joel’s “Honesty” in front of his guests while hanging from a cross. He falls into a maudlin mood, making what may be references to tragic F. Scott Fitzgerald characters (and, yes, “Citizen Kane”) by promising to buy his girlfriend, Naomi Pierce, “a diamond the size of the Ritz-Carlton and a couple of newspapers.”The real triggering moment for Kendall, though, is when his ex-wife tells him to keep an eye out for a present from his kids, wrapped in rabbit-patterned paper. The missing gift eats at Kendall — almost as much as it bothers him that his brother Connor refuses to pay him the simple respect of taking off his coat at the party. Finally, he starts tearing through his pile of presents until he breaks down sobbing. Here is a man who seemingly has everything, except for some cheap handmade trinket that represents his children’s love.Surely somewhere off in the distance, an old man is whispering, “Rosebud.”Due DiligenceShiv is getting concerned about Logan’s possible affair with his assistant Kerry, while Roman thinks this is actually one of the most normal things an aging oligarch could do. Shiv’s instincts may be right, though. After Matsson skips the meeting, Logan is swayed by Kerry’s blithe encouragement to ditch GoJo.The Roy family also questions Greg’s romantic interest in Kendall’s public relations agent Comfry (Dasha Nekrasova). Their skepticism ranges from Tom’s relatively mild comment that the relationship would be “like a haunted scarecrow asking out Jackie Onassis” to Ken’s savagely calling Greg “a human tapeworm” (and then refusing to clarify whether he’s kidding). But while Comfry may have to feed damaging intel about Greg to the press — something he clumsily forgives in an exaggerated southern accent, for some inexplicable yet delightful reason — she is so annoyed with her boss that she agrees to a date anyway. Her assent may be rooted in “rancor or pique,” but Greg will take it.Kendall has a grand vision for his party, hoping that even “the imagineers” and “the D.J. crew” will enjoy themselves as they work. (“No boundaries if you’re cool,” he insists.) He is especially stoked about the group of kids he hired to perform Wu-Tang Clan covers; but when he cancels his performance, he has to drop “tiny Wu-Tang” too. (Genuinely remorseful, he says, “Tell them they’ve got it all ahead of them, yeah?”)Kendall’s siblings show some crack comic timing when they ask him who’s at the party and he answers, “Who isn’t?” Without missing a beat, they rattle off a list: “Your dad.” “Your mom.” “Your wife and kids.” “Any real friends.” More

Kendall had hoped to be the kingmaker, but we all know whom that role belongs to.Season 3, Episode 6: ‘What It Takes’“Succession” is sometimes described as a political satire, but politics is more the show’s milieu than its subject. The Roys run a right-wing media empire, so they spend a lot of time around politicians; and the family members themselves, at least on a performative level, have fiercely held ideals. (Or fluidly held in the case of Kendall and Shiv, who have lately sort of switched sides.) Rarely has this series engaged in as much sustained commentary on the sorry state of modern politics as occurs in this week’s episode.The title, “What It Takes,” is likely a reference to Richard Ben-Cramer’s nonfiction account of the 1988 U.S. presidential race, in which he examined in-depth the biographies and the campaigns of two Republicans and four Democrats, considering what drove these men to run. The book explores the gulf that often opens up between the candidates’ impressive credentials and how they sell themselves to voters and the media.In the “Succession” version, the guys vying for the Republican nomination at a Virginia gathering of conservative thought leaders aren’t exactly the best and the brightest. Up for consideration at an emergency meeting of the Future Freedom Summit are: Vice President Dave Boyer (Reed Birney), the “steady old plow-horse,” who’s like a second-rate copy of his retiring boss; Rick Salgado (Yul Vazquez), a moderate Reaganite elitist trying to convince the base that he’s now a big tent, blue collar populist; and Jeryd Mencken (Justin Kirk), a slick-talking nativist who says of a diversifying America that he supports integrating “new elements” but, “C’mon man, slowly.”Bringing up the rear is Connor Roy, about whom his own brother Roman says: “Sure, I dunno, yeah. Wait, but like, really?”This meet-up in Virginia has been called “the ATN primary,” hastily arranged after the cable news network tossed out the Raisin. Next on the ATN agenda: telling their largely Republican viewers which puppet they should be devoted to now. (Cue Greg: “But is that, like, constitutional?”)Logan shrugs off the hype and drama, saying, “I need to keep my spoon in the soup.” But he clearly has more on his mind than just deciding, as an ordinary American citizen, who would make a great president. He wants someone who will throw some administrative roadblocks in front of the tech companies who are stealing ATN’s audience. More important, he wants someone who’ll squelch the Justice Department’s investigation into Brightstar.So the Roys gather in their suite, debating their options and seeing which candidate will be the most pliable. Maybe it’s Boyer, who hustles when Logan calls him up and asks him — not entirely jokingly — to “run me over a Coke” and also to “fire the deputy attorney general.” Maybe it’s Salgado, who can go deep into the weeds on policy. Maybe it’s the up-and-coming firebrand Mencken, who calls ATN “dead” and compares it to an afternoon pudding cup in a nursing home. Or maybe it’s Connor, who … OK, who are we kidding? It’s not Connor. (Although Greg does politely say, “I think I could see myself spoiling my ballot in his favor.”)Logan will make the final call, as Roman (a Mencken man) and Shiv (a Salgado supporter) play the devil and angel on his shoulder, whispering suggestions. Connor is in the room, unwaveringly backing himself. And Tom and Greg are there ostensibly as “family,” though both know that no one will pay attention to what a couple of potential jailbirds say. (Greg stays mostly quiet, “minimizing the Greg window.” But he does stick around because while he’s a registered voter, “I just feel like you maybe get a bigger vote in here.”)Tom and Greg — especially Tom — are responsible for some much-needed comic relief in what is otherwise a fairly dark and occasionally disturbing episode. Tom at first default to poking fun at Greg, saying the young man will like this summit because, “It’s a nice safe space where you don’t have to pretend to like ‘Hamilton.’” But the truth is that Tom genuinely appreciates being able to talk with someone who understands his prison anxieties — unlike Shiv, who is sick of hearing him obsess about it.Tom and Greg grab a meal at a local diner because Tom has been trying to get used to the bland, starchy food he has been told he will be served behind bars. Greg spills his fears that, “Because of my physical length, I could be a target for all kinds of misadventure.” He also mentions the rumor he has heard that sometimes prisoners humiliate their cellmates by using their pillowcases as toilet paper. (“I know,” Tom interjects. “I’ve read the prison blogs.”)Later, Tom returns to what appears to be the same diner with Kendall, who has stealthily rolled into Virginia in hopes of sowing dissension in the Roy ranks. Kendall thinks he can flip Tom, who is in dire need of an ally. He warns his brother-in-law that while Logan may seem all-powerful and that Shiv may seem loyal, Tom can’t really count on either of them to save him from incarceration. Tom appears too resigned to his fate to fight. (“I have of late decided not to tarry too much with hope.”) But he does listen to Kendall … and maybe he actually hears him.What Tom doesn’t know, though, is that Kendall right now is flailing. He bombed at the shareholders’ meeting. He is not welcome at the Future Freedom Summit, given that he accuses the attendees of “burning books and measuring skulls down in Nuremberg, Virginia.” And he has just fired Lisa Arthur, “the best lawyer in town” (a designation he puts in quotation marks himself), because she seems more interested in cooperating with the feds than with aggressively countering Waystar. “Turns out she’s a toxic person,” he says to his assistants in explaining his decision to cut Lisa loose.Kendall had hoped to be the kingmaker whom future presidential candidates would have to court. Instead, it’s Roman who gets to corner Mencken in the bathroom of the Roys’ suite, in an absolutely riveting and more than a little terrifying scene. In a few intense minutes, Roman takes the measure of this man, to see just how committed he is to the whole neo-fascist agenda. Is he really willing to borrow ideas from Franco or Travis Bickle or “a very naughty boy named H?”Roman would like Mencken to be just obnoxious enough to fire up the base, but with a little bit of a wink so as not to scare off the center. His ideal is “Deep State Conspiracy Hour” but, “y’know, funny.” He also reminds Mencken that while ATN may seem like yesterdays news, they did just topple a President — and then immediately rattled the Justice Department with a rumor that the deputy A.G. is pursuing a personal grudge.Shiv is appalled that Roman and Logan would even consider Mencken, especially when Salgado is more palatable and less potentially dangerous to the whole American experiment. Roman of course belittles her choice. (“I think you’re so brave for picking the brown man.”) And when she tells her dad that Mencken is widely hated and begs him to “look at the climate,” Logan wryly replies: “The climate said I should step aside. I guess I’m a climate denier.”The episode ends with an echo of the “Succession” opening credits as the Roys gather for a group photo with their new Chosen One. Shiv tries to refuse, but Logan presses her until she relents and says, “I’ll be in the photo but not right next to him.” He sighs, “You win, Pinky.” But this is not even remotely true. Not wanting to be exiled like Kendall, Shiv has edged closer toward supporting a political philosophy she genuinely thinks is dangerous.What it takes, indeed.Due DiligenceIs it possible that Roman orchestrates the whole Mencken-anointing maneuver because his mother hurt his feelings? At the convention, a guest congratulates him on some news that catches him by surprise: His mom just got engaged to some British rando. (“A crooked-tooth turnip-man,” Roman speculates.) Shut out by one parent, perhaps he felt all the more compelled to impress the other. In the meantime, he takes comfort in learning that at least neither Shiv nor Kendall knew that “new dad just dropped.”Roman and Shiv spend some time on the plane down to Virginia engaging in their favorite pastime: Is Dad sleeping with the help? The latest possibility is Logan’s assistant Kerry (Zoë Winters), who is unusually comfortable with sharing her opinions about which candidate ATN should back. She also laughs with Logan about memes he shows her on his phone. (Trying to join in, Roman says: “Oh yeah, yeah. Well-played, the internet.”)Apparently a convict’s toilet is a stair-machine, a bench, a fridge, a lover, a brother and a priest. It’s also a toilet. (“So that’s a big part of prison?” Greg asks.)In addition to choking down bad food, Tom endures a shipment of funky-tasting wine in screw-top bottles. (“You kind of have to meet it halfway,” he says, hopefully. “There’s lots to unpack.”)Ever wondered what kind of movies Waystar’s entertainment division produces? Apparently it’s schlock like “Dr. Honk,” a comedy Roman once greenlighted about a man who can talk to cars. These are the people who are picking the next president. More

The problem with staking everything on one imposing figurehead is that eventually they get old and senile.Season 3, Episode 5: ‘Retired Janitors of Idaho’There was a moment in last week’s episode of “Succession” when Kendall was standing on Josh Aaronson’s patio, reminding Josh of their longtime friendship and boasting about his upcoming birthday party — acting like a big shot, in other words. Kendall had come to the meeting to show he could be the commanding, charismatic figure to lead Waystar into the future. And for a few seconds at least, he had his host’s undivided attention.Then Logan walked through the door, and Josh literally pushed Kendall aside to greet the old man. Point made: Logan is still Waystar’s star.This week’s episode is titled “Retired Janitors of Idaho.” It refers to the faction Roman fears will determine the fate of the Roy family if the Waystar shareholders get the chance to vote on the company’s leadership. Nearly all the action takes place in a luxury hotel and conference center, where the powerful people are sequestered in stew-rooms, scarfing down snacks and strategizing. The general feeling among the Roy loyalists is that Logan needs to address the assembly, calming their nerves with his star power.“Just get the body up there,” Karl says.But just as Logan broke down physically in front of Josh last week, this week his body failed him again. He has a urinary track infection; and when his assistant isn’t around to remind him to take his pills, Logan becomes disoriented. He calls Shiv “Marcia.” He asks to go the bathroom seemingly every few minutes. He does not appear to know where he is or why he is there. And he is convinced there is a dead cat under his chair.So no, there will be no Logan Roy wow factor at this shareholders’ meeting. But the Roys have an even bigger problem. Before Logan loses his wits, he gives the order that they should reject the big peacemaking deal their opponents have offered them. But did he really know what he was saying at the time, or was he already slipping? (Roman: “Can we just give him some cranberry juice and then ask him about the deal again?”)This of course is the problem with staking everything on one imposing figurehead. Leaders can flag. They age, they weaken. While the Roys are making multibillion-dollar decisions based on their patriarch’s mumbling about imaginary cats, Sandi Furness (Hope Davis) is in a suite nearby, consulting with her own father, Sandy (Larry Pine). He has chronic medical problems, too, leaving him mostly immobile and inaudible. When Sandi meets with Shiv to try to find what Gerri likes to call “a deal-space,” each of these two highly intelligent, highly capable women claim, “I just do what my dad tells me.”Instead of bringing their own fresh ideas to the family business, Sandi and Shiv are left defending the decisions their clearly diminished dads are making, even when those choices seem driven more by spite and paranoia than by sound business sense. Sandy, for one, seems motivated primarily by a desire to make a deal that robs the Roys of any of the trappings of power. First, he asks to be granted the right to veto any decision to make a Roy family member a future chief executive. Then, when he gets a begrudging “yes” to that, he comes back with a demand that the Roys give up their private jets. (Roman: “First they came for the P.J.s, and I said nothing. …”)As for Logan, even though he is under criminal investigation and in danger of losing control of everything he has built, he still refuses to believe that he is not holding all the trump cards. Any time the Sandy and Stewy side offers a concession — just to avoid the uncertainty of a vote — Logan sees it as a sign they are scared. Before he lapses into incoherence, he suggests either calling their bluff or leaking to the press that they’re wavering, to show the shareholders who is really the boss.One of those shareholders is Logan’s own brother Ewan: another old man stifling a youngster. In Ewan’s case, he is making life difficult for Greg, who has disappointed his grandfather by signing onto the Waystar joint defense agreement, throwing his lot in with the people Ewan calls, “My brother and his gang of crapulous shills.” He informs Greg that he has changed his will, giving all of his money to Greenpeace. (“Even my part?” Greg asks. “That was the first part,” Ewan replies.) Trying to shake his grandson up, he says, earnestly, “Your life is not a bagatelle,” adding: “You need to take yourself seriously, kid.” Greg nods, then later asks someone else, “Do you think it’s possible to sue a person … a grandparent, for example … in a way which is, like … in an affectionate way?”The last old man playing a major role in this story is the president of the United States — “the Raisin” — who has been feeling real pressure ever since ATN pivoted from backing him unconditionally to questioning his mental fitness. The Raisin calls the Roys, asking to speak directly to Logan, who is still indisposed. So they pass him off to Roman, who is the closest thing to “bootleg Logan.” After Roman bumbles through the small talk and is sworn at by the commander in chief, he gets the news that the president is withdrawing his re-election bid.This is not really how the Roys wanted their whole “Is the President secretly senile?” maneuver to work out. Their access to the Oval Office gives them crucial leverage in their business deals — and, they had hoped, in the Justice Department’s Brightstar investigation. They have outsmarted themselves and are losing a major asset. (Roman, with maximum irony, looks on the bright side: “It’s kind of nice to know we can puppet-master the whole American republic project.”)The outcome isn’t much better with the agreement Sandi and Shiv hurriedly hammer out: The Roys will eat the P.J.s, the Sandy and Stewy side will get four seats on the board (including one for Sandi), and Waystar will grab another seat as well (possibly for Shiv). When Logan regains his faculties, he is peeved, certain that any agreement that satisfies Sandy must be a dud. He can’t say what he would have done differently. He just knows it would have been better.But the real loser from all the frantic deal making is — as it so often seems to be — Kendall, who never gets to be in any room where a final decision is made. Early on, he boasts to Stewy that his suite is “the real annual meeting,” insisting he has back channels to everyone who matters. But Shiv ignores him when calls to offer insights and gossip, Roman screams at him when he pops by the main Roy room, and even Stewy busts his chops a little, saying, “Shouldn’t you be standing on a rainbow soapbox somewhere screaming, ‘Time’s up!’?” In danger of being left out of the day’s narrative altogether, Kendall makes a sad, desperate final showboating move, storming the stage in front of the shareholders to speak up for the Brightstar victims.In one last twist of the knife, Logan asks for a quick end-of-the-day meeting with Kendall but then ghosts him, leaving his son sitting completely alone in a tiny room. Kendall tries to call his dad, but Logan blocks his number — permanently.So just as Logan has no access to the Raisin, Kendall now has no access to Logan. And both men are about to find out whether their power has more to do with who they are or who they know.Due DiligenceKendall must still have the Beatles on the brain because when he gets a phone call from one of his kids, he answers with, “What’s goin’ on, wild honey pie?” (That call has to do with whether or not his daughter’s pet rabbit should be allowed to eat a bagel. Kendall says it is probably OK. He is wrong.)Kendall insists to Greg that he’s not mad about his cousin’s signing the joint defense agreement. But “as a pal,” he says, he feels obliged to warn Greg that “I may have to burn you.” Greg briefly wonders, “How bad will the burning be?” but then immediately says, “Even as I ask that, I can tell.”Speaking of old men outstaying their welcome, while all the back room negotiations are raging — and while Logan remains incapable of making a public appearance — Frank is left to vamp onstage for the shareholders, spouting banalities for what must’ve felt like an eternity.I confess to having a moderate obsession with what people eat (or are served and then don’t eat) in movies and TV shows. For me the most poignant moment in this episode came toward the end, as the cater-waiters disposed of all the uneaten nibbles on the various buffets. So many squandered pastries. More

After last week’s punishingly bleak episode, this week “Succession” brought some much-needed comic relief alongside the ongoing melodrama.Season 3, Episode 4: ‘Lion in the Meadow’Last week’s punishingly bleak “Succession” episode was maybe the roughest since Season 2’s “Hunting” (a.k.a.“Boar on the Floor”). But as often happens in this series, this week’s episode pulls back a bit, bringing some much-needed comic relief alongside the ongoing melodrama. In “Lion in the Meadow,” the Roys take a break from scorching the Earth and get back to more subtle power plays, using schoolyard insults and small gestures of disrespect to needle each other. It’s all so oddly delightful.The pettiness comes early and often. When Kendall has to join a Waystar conference call to strategize about the upcoming shareholders’ meeting, he uses an unprintable variation on “Little Lord Fauntleroy” as his sign-on (which is then repeated, hilariously, when he abruptly hangs up). Later, when he’s asked to talk with Logan briefly on a private airstrip tarmac, before they both meet up with a nervous Waystar investor, Kendall zooms off to get to the meeting first, leaving the message, “Tell Dad, ‘Meep-meep’ … It’s from ‘Road Runner.’” For the most part, that’s the level of the attacks and counterattacks this week.The investor in question is Josh Aaronson (Adrien Brody), who owns about 4 percent of Waystar — a holding which, he complains, has lost 10 percent of its value since Kendall started giving news conferences. If Josh is going to back the Roys over Sandy and Stewy at the shareholders’ meeting, he needs to know how far this family feud will go. Does Kendall really want his father in jail? Does Logan really think his son is a mentally ill drug addict? How does this all end? Can the Roys maybe “close up the outrage shop”?There’s another reason Josh invites Logan and Kendall to join him at his sprawling estate. He needs to know if they think of him as a smart guy who knows what to do with his money — and is thus owed some respect — or as some speculator who got lucky, and who only has value because of what he can buy. Is he really an important part of their business? Is he a part of this Waystar family?The biggest chunk of this episode features these three guys putting on a show for each other. Josh tries to tease a little honesty out of the Roys, while Logan and Kendall pretend they’re still a loving family running a viable business, and wielding acumen no outsider can match. What makes these scenes so absorbing is that it’s not too hard to imagine Kendall, and maybe even Logan, wanting to believe the fantasy they’re selling. As they sit side by side in their matching black baseball caps — with Logan saying he can still see his son in charge of Waystar someday, and Kendall lovingly calling his old man “geezer” — they almost seem to be playing roles they wish were real.It doesn’t last. The first few times Josh steps away, the Roys maintain stony silence. Later, as they walk back to the main house through some exhaustingly bumpy hills, Josh leaves the two behind and they start making threats, each insisting the other is playing with a weak hand.Then Logan gets physically ill and the game is up. Josh makes it clear he can only back the Roys if Logan is running things, and seeing the patriarch stumble spooks him — as does Kendall’s attempt to keep talking business while his father is sick. The first cue that these three weren’t on the same page came earlier in the day, when Kendall called the Beatles a “great band” and Josh and Logan both said they’re just a “good band.” The lines were drawn then. Kendall never could convince Josh to cross them.Beyond the vigorous one-upmanship on the beach, what makes this episode so lively is that much of it is spent with the two most reliably comic “Succession” characters: Greg and Tom.Greg is persuaded to meet with Logan, who offers him a drink and then exasperatedly calls in his assistant to sweeten the nervous, indecisive kid’s cocktail with Coca-Cola. (The sound of the soda can opening is like a tiny rebuke to Greg’s manly ambitions.) Logan lets his great-nephew know that he has a little leverage over Waystar right now, and that he needs to use it wisely. Greg, though, is too shaky to assert himself. He keeps getting distracted by his beverage, calling it “strong for a man” and reflecting on the hard-drinking olden days, saying, “I don’t know how you did it back in the ’60s. Different times indeed. Better times? Not for all.”As for Tom, he’s been spending his time lately trying to pick out a good prison for himself and indulging in gallows humor, laughing that his co-workers are calling him “Terminal Tom.” Finally he breaks down in front of Shiv, dropping his fake-courage and musing anxiously about his future life behind bars.“What if I forget to burp the toilet wine?” he frets. “How late can I read? When is lights-out?”There’s a good contrast between the Logan/Kendall/Josh scenes — featuring three guys comfortable with flexing — and the much sillier confrontation in this episode between Tom and Greg. When Tom tries to get his former lackey to make a clear decision on what he wants, Greg finally admits that he’d like to be moved into a leadership position in Waystar’s theme parks division. Tom then moans again about jail before trying to wrestle with Greg, snarling, “Let’s fight like chickens!”Greg refuses, shouting, “I don’t want to do it,” prompting Tom to reply, “Neither do I, Greg!” He tries to turn this into avuncular advice saying, “You’re so hard to riff with. That is a big career obstacle.”But that “neither do I” may be the most honest moment Tom has had in this show. Guys like Logan genuinely enjoy a bloody fray. Guys like Tom only like it when they’re winning.Due DiligenceThe three other Roy children all get moments in the spotlight this week, too. While Kendall and Logan are strutting by the sea, Shiv is back at the office hustling to execute some of her dad’s big plans. These include interfering with ATN’s editorial independence by suggesting the news team take a harder line on the presidential administration. For her trouble, she gets a cranky phone call from her father, who is annoyed that the other executives are complaining about her. “I don’t need another toothache,” he growls. Logan also reminds Shiv, somewhat ominously, that no position he takes is set in stone. “Nothing is a line,” he says. “Everything, everywhere, is always moving, forever.”Meanwhile, Connor is still figuring out what he can ask for in exchange for being publicly loyal to Logan. He nixes Shiv’s idea that he become a host on one of Waystar’s travel and cuisine shows, because he still has presidential ambitions and he doesn’t think that spitting out wine on cable TV is going to help his numbers in the Rust Belt. Currently his team is angling for 2024; Connor assumes the current president — who everyone calls “the Raisin” — is going to get re-elected. But who knows? Maybe if Connor resumes his campaign in earnest, he can also help with Shiv’s White House problem.As for Roman, he is initially distracted by the news that Gerri is going on a date. (“With who?” he asks, incredulously. “Montgomery Clift? The Ghost of Christmas Past?”) Once he gets past that, he suggests a particularly nasty way to take down Kendall: By locating “Tattoo Man,” a down on his luck guy his brother once paid to tattoo his initials on his forehead, while the siblings were on an “ironic” New Orleans bar crawl. The man has since had the tattoo removed, but Roman eventually persuades him to provide Waystar with an old picture, which Gerri suggests Roman keep under wraps for now. She advises him to start asking himself, with every bold move or dirty trick, “How does this advance my position?” More

There was plenty of petty Roy cruelty to go around in this week’s brutal episode.Season 3, Episode 3: ‘The Disruption’“Succession” is often a “fun” show, where all the sniping and the slip-ups of the rich and the arrogant generates some incredibly entertaining schadenfreude. But any given episode — like this week’s “The Disruption” — can be brutal, as the characters we hate to love fall hard.The problem with the Roy family right now is that as far as they’re concerned, coming out ahead in their epic public squabble matters more than saving their company or avoiding federal prosecution. Yet just because they’re preoccupied with petty power games doesn’t mean the F.B.I. is going to wait for them to finish clobbering each other.This is exactly what Kendall’s attorney Lisa Arthur warned him about last week as he bopped around his ex-wife’s apartment, feverishly pitching a coup to his siblings. Lisa has been trying to help the government, to keep her client out of jail. Meanwhile, it turns out that Kendall has been doing exactly what Logan always assumed he was doing: using the Brightstar cruise line scandal as “a play,” to outwit his father and to reinvent himself as a progressive hero.So everything inevitably implodes this week, not just for Kendall, but for his father and for Siobhan — and in a roundabout and sickeningly sad way, for Roman. The first third of this episode is a bit of a romp, as the Roys rapidly punch and counterpunch. And then the walls start closing in.First: the not-so-playful sparring, which keeps getting rougher by the minute. At Waystar, Logan and his loyalists are annoyed at Kendall for an interview where he made noises about “planting a flag” within the company, while saying of his family, “I’m just really happy in my head space and I hope they’re happy in theirs.” Roman mocks this mercilessly around the office, tossing around the term “head space” with glee. (Imitating his brother, Roman adds, “I love my kids, uh, Blur Face and Who Cares.”)Shiv, though, thinks it’s time for a more aggressive public response to Kendall, whose accusations and self-aggrandizing declarations are dominating the business news. She starts by attending the annual gala benefit for the Committee for the Protection and Welfare of Journalists, where she waves away an ATN hater by reminding him her dad’s business has kept a lot of local newspapers alive. She’s defending Logan the only way she knows how: through the wishy-washy talking points she can half-convince herself she believes.Then Shiv runs into Kendall; and it’s here where this episode starts to take a turn. He offers a meek quasi-apology for his misogynistic rant during their last meeting. (“I maybe threw a couple of ugly rocks.”) But when she tries to get him to promise he won’t cause an ugly scene by coming into the Waystar offices, he smirks. Seeing his sister doing the kind of thankless public-facing hack work that used to be his job prompts him to say, earnestly, “Look at this. It’s you now. I’m sorry for you.”Worse than earning her brother’s pity, Shiv may have given him an idea. Kendall does in fact decide, almost on a whim, to show up at the Waystar building, hoping to generate some more positive publicity through an open act of rebellion. The whole sequence where Kendall comes in, just before an employee “town hall” Shiv has organized, is incredibly tense, as no one is quite sure what legal right they have to remove him.This is something that pops up a lot in this episode: the proper chain of command in this new reality where Logan is pretending, for legal and PR reasons, that he’s no longer in charge. Can Gerri swing a deal with the Israelis without Logan’s approval? Does Waystar’s security have to follow Logan’s orders when Kendall — still technically an employee and a shareholder — tries to pass through? Can the staff refuse to admit representatives of the court bearing subpoenas? Can Logan threaten his old buddy, the President of the United States, with bad ATN coverage if the Department of Justice doesn’t back off?This question of authority extends to what Logan asks of his children. He gets annoyed that Shiv would rather take on the job of publicly attacking Kendall than defending her father. The “I wuv my Daddy” gig falls to a reluctant Roman, who agrees to do an interview with ATN Business but then nixes nearly every question about his childhood. (Roman finally makes up a story about going fly fishing in Montana with his pop, then later admits his genuinely happy childhood memory actually happened with Connor.) Logan would rather Shiv play the sweetie-pie and his son be the assassin, but Roman says attacking Kendall “makes me feel unwell.” After all, his brother was more of a father figure to him than his actual father — who, in a painful scene, insinuates that Roman is a weak-willed worm.Sarah Snook in “Succession.”Macall B. Polay/HBOAs for why Shiv can’t bring herself to hail her dad, this is addressed in another remarkable moment, where she tries to get Logan to admit to what actually happened at Brightstar. All he will say is that no one will ever find any evidence that he knew anything about “all of this hullabaloo” — and that he was just trying to shield the family from harm.I’ve written before about how Kendall uses nonsense biz-speak to express how he’s really feeling, but it’s worth taking a moment to consider how Logan uses softening or dehumanizing words — like “hullabaloo” — to insulate himself from criticism. He refers to the women hurt in the Brightstar scandal as “Moaning Minnies.” And he shrugs off the cover-up, saying, “Maybe there were some salty moves.”Logan says this after Shiv asks, “Can we talk?,” which is her code for, “Can we drop the act for a second?” Alas, she’s never brave enough to demand total honesty. One of her pet phrases is “Is there a world where ___?” (fill in the blank with some variation on “be honest”), which is her tacit way of acknowledging that no, there is not.All this dancing around the subject ultimately leads the Roys to skip off the edge of a cliff. Kendall thinks he’s controlling the narrative, with his offers to “open the kimono” to business reporters and his willingness to let himself be roasted in person at the late-night TV comedy show “The Disruption with Sophie Iwobi.” (“This is being in the conversation,” he insists, while watching Iwobi skewer him.) And Shiv thinks she can turn things around with her Waystar town hall, where Hugo has tossed aside all the angrier employee comments in favor of what Roman calls “less question-y questions.”But Kendall pulls a cruel stunt during his Waystar visit, arranging it so Nirvana’s “Rape Me” blares through a few scattered speakers while Shiv is talking. She responds by issuing a statement — which Roman refuses to sign — saying the whole family is concerned about Kendall’s drug addiction and mental health issues.And then the F.B.I. arrives. Maybe there was a world where the Roys could’ve avoided what’s about to happen. But it’s not a world where any of them live.Due DiligenceSophie Iwobi is played by the comic Ziwe, who has been a writer and performer on multiple “The Disruption”-like TV shows, including “Desus & Mero” and her own “Ziwe.”The tone-deaf sloganeers in Waystar’s PR department come through again, pitching a series of full-page apology ads with the tag line “We Get It” — a phrase that, as Shiv rightly notes, sounds more exasperated than empathetic.Cousin Greg — or as Tom calls him, the “leggy princeling of ATN” — blows off a work event to hang with Kendall, who he believes is going to buy him an expensive watch. (“I’ve always been self-conscious about my wrists,” Greg confesses.) It turns out Kendall is just hooking his cousin up with a watch-broker and has no intention of paying; but Greg is coaxed into spending 40 grand anyway because he’s told he left his “patina” on the timepiece. (“I don’t have a patina! I shower!”) And then the watch breaks.Tom has his own troubles this week, as he gets legal advice from an old friend who suggests there’s no way he’s not going to see jail time. Accepting the inevitable, he tells Logan he’s willing to sacrifice himself to the feds. Whether he’s being sincere or whether this too is a “play” remains unclear.When Kendall runs into Tom at the Waystar offices, he claps his brother-in-law on the shoulders with both hands — a gesture Tom briefly misinterprets, moving in as though expecting a hug. Whether this moment was scripted or spontaneous, it’s a brilliant illustration of who these guys are.A neat image: As Shiv walks back to her office after the town-hall humiliation, the reflection of New York in the windows as she walks down the hall briefly makes it look like she’s about to step outside and plunge to her to death. More

Kendall makes his pitch. Even with his siblings, he sounds like a guest on “Power Lunch.”Season 3, Episode 2: ‘Mass in Time of War’There’s a mad genius to the way Kendall Roy uses language. Here’s a guy who essentially learned to communicate by listening to cable TV panelists, leadership conference speakers and the macho bluster of his venture capitalist college bros. Now, in an ever-intensifying national spotlight, Ken is tossing around jargon with a frenzied, improvisational flair, like a jazz singer scatting in double-time.In this week’s episode, “Mass in Time of War,” he drops words like “epiphenomenal” and phrases like “let’s clean-slate this” and “detoxify our brand and we can go supersonic.” Even when his siblings ask how he’s doing, Ken answers with a studied earnestness, like a guest on “Power Lunch.” (“Certain amount of regret, but y’know … pretty cleansed.”)“Mass in Time of War” feels more like the second part of last week’s installment than it does a typical “Succession” episode. The Roys don’t travel anywhere special or gather for any major event; they’re just continuing in the same crisis mode they were in when the season began. Logan is still in Sarajevo, fretting over his inability to get any of his progeny on the phone. And the kids? Well, they actually do get together someplace unusual: the bedroom of Kendall’s daughter, Sophie. (Roman, feigning shock after Ken calls his siblings to her room: “He remembered his kid’s name.”)Once Roman, Siobhan and (surprisingly) Connor are huddled up, Kendall makes his pitch, with buzzwords flying around the room. His argument is a mix of the self-righteous and the pragmatic. On the one hand, he tries to hold himself up as the family’s noble truth-teller, finally calling for an end to decades of privileged, exploitative, chauvinist “vibes” at Waystar. He applies the most pressure to Shiv, getting under her skin by saying he’s doing what she failed to do as the Roy’s “token woman wonk woke snowflake.” “Right now, I’m the real you,” he needles.But Kendall also makes a persuasive case that the only way for the Roy children to save Waystar and to hold onto to any kind of sociopolitical clout is to oust Logan, who is weak enough right now that a unified front from his sons and daughter could finish him.Indeed, we see signs of Logan struggling throughout this episode. Last week, he was ordering his team to retain three “white shoe” law firms and to get a bunch of the other top attorneys tied up with conflicts of interest. This week, Logan has trouble getting anyone from his family to check in — with the exception of his wife, Marcia (Hiam Abbass), who comes back in part because she hates his kids and would love to help destroy Ken.And then there’s this: On their own, the younger Roys appear to be flailing. Although Siobhan pretends to keep her husband in the loop, he has to hear from Greg that she has sneaked away to Kendall’s ex’s apartment. She unconvincingly reminds Tom that she loves him — and he responds in kind, adding, “Good to know we don’t have an unbalanced love portfolio” — but she hesitates to tell him anything about who’s in line to become Waystar’s new “King Potato.” And when she finally does return to Logan, he promises to give her a fancy corporate title of “president” that can mean “whatever you want it to mean” … which, in Logan-speak, means it’ll probably be meaningless.Even more pathetically, Roman gets a similar runaround from Gerri. When he shows up at her new Waystar chief executive office, cracking his usual bad-boy jokes about how she chained herself “to a fire hydrant that spews out cultural insensitivity and sperms,” she quickly hustles him right back out the door. She offers him vague assurances that she plans to start working him into the quarterly earning calls “as a signal,” though it seems fairly obvious that the newly empowered Gerri is in no hurry to cede anything to Roman, of all people.Kendall certainly sounds sure of himself. But as we’re reminded in a couple of key scenes while he is away from his siblings, he is still beholden to Waystar’s insurgent board members, Stewy (Arian Moayed) and Sandy, who poke at him by sending a model of a Trojan horse to his wife’s apartment. And as Ken is urgently trying to chart a bold course for Waystar’s future, his lawyer is trying to get him to focus on the Brightstar scandal and his potential legal liabilities.As for Connor … well, he’s Connor. He seems to answer Kendall’s request for a meeting in part because he is happy to be included and in part because Logan made him fly home on a disappointing international flight with “a selection of heavily refrigerated cheeses.” Why did Ken want Connor to be a part of this? It may be because he’s less interested in securing Waystar’s legacy than he is in humiliating his father in their big game by taking all of his pieces of the board.Still, there are two problems with Kendall’s “we’re all in this together” plan. For one, he still thinks it makes the most sense for him to be the one sitting at the head of the table after the coup, and neither Siobhan nor Roman agree. Two, they’re all terrified of Logan — who rattles them when he sends a box of doughnuts to their “secret” meeting. “I don’t think he ever fails or ever will,” Roman admits.One by one, the siblings file out, each taking an insult from Ken with them. First Connor is out (“You’re irrelevant”), then Roman (“You’re a moron”) and then Shiv, who is told she has gotten this far only because “girls count double now” … thus revealing just how committed Kendall really is to “changing the cultural climate.”Yet during all of this running around behind other people’s backs — “Judasing,” as Kendall calls it — the person who may ultimately hold the key to everyone’s future is absent. Greg, who confesses to Ken his wariness, saying “I’m kind of too young to be in congress so much,” rejects Waystar’s chosen lawyer and takes advice from his moralizing grandfather, Ewan Roy (James Cromwell), a man who considers Ken to be “a self-regarding popinjay.” They end up in the office of an old left-wing lawyer (played by Peter Riegert), who tells Greg that his two priorities will be his client’s well-being and to “expose the structural contradictions of capitalism as reified in the architecture of corporate America.”In a way, this is exactly what Kendall wants to do. That is, if he actually believes all the words that keep tumbling, endlessly, out of his mouth.Due DiligenceLogan is insistent on having familiar faces around him and all but demands that his inner circle bring Marcia back into the fold. As Hugo eventually explains to her, “We would love to get back, visually, to the Logan we all know.” Marcia’s lawyer, though, lets Hugo know this will be a costly return — albeit less expensive or embarrassing than a divorce and a corporate board breakup.Perhaps in reaction to his humiliating phone call with Logan last week, Roman goes full brat in this episode, making inappropriate comments to Gerri (“How are your daughters? You got pictures?”) and responding to Kendall’s request that he not touch anything in Sophie’s room by immediately putting his hands near various objects on her dresser.Something about Roman’s presence brings out the brat in Shiv, too. As Kendall pontificates about how Waystar is “a declining empire inside of a declining empire,” she interjects with, “Unsubscribe.” Then she hits Roman where he lives, suggesting that he can’t keep preening around like a stud unless he’s willing to, y’know, consummate. (When he storms out, Shiv shrugs. “It’s not my fault he has a sex thing.”)File this away for later: Marcia reminds Logan that he has damaging dirt on Kendall. He waves off that advice, saying, “You drop some bombs, you get burnt too.” But if Logan starts to lose, badly? It could be time for the nuclear option. More