Television

This week, Logan Roy’s family and associates gather for his funeral, pausing all grudges so they can pay conflicted respects to the man.‘Succession’ Season 4, Episode 9: ‘Church and State’When people talk about TV or movies as visual medium, they’re usually referring to pretty pictures or striking compositions. But you know what’s also an important part of visual storytelling? The simple reaction shot.It wouldn’t take much retooling to turn any given “Succession” episode into a radio play, since most of the show’s “action,” so to speak, is in the dialogue. But boy would we ever miss those reaction shots. What these actors can do just with their faces — and what the directors and the editors can do with how and where they use them — is sublime.This week, Logan Roy’s family and associates gather for his funeral, temporarily putting aside all grudges so they can pay their respects to a giant of a man. Kendall insists, “Today is just about today” (a phrase that should be etched into the family crest for the eternally capricious and opportunistic Roys). Throughout the day, these folks talk a lot — especially during the service, as one Roy after another rises to say a few words. And again, a lot of what’s really happening in the story is in the reactions.Before the funeral even begins, the whole vibe surrounding the event is unsettled because of the postelection unrest in the New York streets (described by Tom as “a bit Tiananmen-y”). Kendall is furious when his ex-wife Rava (Natalie Gold) takes their kids out of the city for their safety. He is nearly as irritated when he learns his assistant Jess (Juliana Canfield) intends to resign, because of the potential violence that Jeryd Mencken and ATN have unleashed. “You have no idea how things will turn out and it’s very juvenile,” Kendall grumbles.But once everyone’s inside the church, the mood softens. The tone is set by the Roy siblings’ mother, Lady Caroline Collingwood (Harriet Walter), who takes it upon herself to ask Kerry — who brought an attorney, just in case anyone tried to bar her from the funeral — to sit with her, Marcia, and the fabled Sally Ann. (Caroline introduces Sally Ann as “my Kerry.”) These ladies share the bond of having loved a very difficult man; and when Marcia reaches out for Kerry’s hand, Kerry sobs.Then the service begins, with a surprise. Logan’s fiery liberal brother, Ewan (James Cromwell), ignores his grandson Greg’s attempt to stop him from taking the pulpit. Ewan first shares some touching stories about Logan: about how they comforted each other as boys when they crossed the Atlantic during World War II; and about how Logan blamed himself for their sister dying of polio, which he was convinced he brought home from the boarding school he hated. With that out of the way, Ewan finishes by torching Logan’s legacy, saying his brother fed “a certain kind of meagerness in men.” (The ever-sycophantic Greg, after his grandfather sits back down: “That was a good hard take that you gave.”)Here is where the reaction shots really start to become a factor. During Ewan’s takedown, we see Roman looking stricken. He came into this day feeling creepily upbeat, planning to follow his election night coup with a real grown-up eulogy for his father, in front of some of America’s most important people. But Ewan’s commanding, authoritative words shake him. Roman has never had this kind of spotlight; and now his siblings expect him to “say the other side” of the Logan Roy story.He can’t. Roman starts to give his generic “great, great man” speech, but then freezes and asks his family to bail him out. He breaks down in front of everyone, gesturing at the coffin containing his father and whimpering, “Get him out.” It’s another shattering performance from Kieran Culkin. (The face to watch during Roman’s meltdown is Gerri’s. She looks genuinely pained for her former protégé.)So Kendall fills in; and because he has lots of experience with throwing together sentences that his social peers can understand, he does a fine job. He acknowledges the pain his father could cause but he also celebrates how Logan made “bloody, complicated life” happen. “If we can’t match his vim, then God knows the future will be sluggish and gray,” he says, as both Mencken and Lukas Matsson look on with what appears to be grudging admiration. For all the gossip about how Jeremy Strong’s intensity on-set can frustrate his castmates, the results are on the screen in scenes like this one, so riveting and real.Shiv follows with her own impromptu eulogy, mostly focused on how terrifying Logan could be when she and her siblings were little kids. Like Culkin and Armstrong, Sarah Snook nails her big moment, playing this speech so that it sits right between “here’s a funny story about a grumpy old man” and an accusation of abuse. Shiv calls her father “hard on women” — and the shot of Kendall that follows is a reminder of his own issues with Rava and Jess.It is interesting to hear Shiv give such a harsh assessment of Logan’s parenting after what she had said to Matsson before the funeral. Readjusting their strategy for a looming Mencken presidency, they have decided to show they can play ball with a neo-fascist. Step 1: Promise that GoJo-Waystar will have an American CEO … like maybe Shiv. But when Matsson mentions that he heard a rumor about her being pregnant, she concocts a version of motherhood where she is “emailing through her vanity cesarean” and her kid “will never see her.” It’s positively Logan-esque.Post-funeral negotiations: Strong and Justin Kirk in “Succession.”Macall Polay/HBOAfter the funeral, the scramble for Waystar begins. Kendall capitalizes on his eulogy momentum by authorizing Hugo to start leaking to the media about Matsson’s shaky standing with the Waystar board. (“You’ll be my dog, but the scraps from the table will be millions,” he tells Hugo about the state of their business relationship. “Woof woof,” Hugo replies.) He also coaxes his father’s former bodyguard/confessor Colin to come work for him. He too is becoming more Logan-y by the minute.But as it turns out, Shiv’s play has juice. Kendall realizes he may have miscalculated when he corners Mencken at the post-funeral reception and the presumptive President-elect intimates that ATN may need him more than vice versa. “I thought you were the sound system,” Mencken says to Kendall. “Now you want to choose the track?” It doesn’t help that Kendall is interrupted by a succession of embarrassing family members: first Greg, then Roman (Mencken: “It’s the Grim Weeper!”), then Connor.It’s no wonder that Mencken seems relieved to talk with Shiv and Matsson, who seem … well, cooler. They both encourage him to broaden his thinking, with Shiv reminding him that Logan was more about “money, winning and gossip” than ideological purity and Matsson talking up the potential advantages (including “fun”) of allying with a “thought leader” tech bro. So as we head into the “Succession” finale next week, Kendall and Shiv both, seen in the right light, seem to have an edge in the fight to become the new Waystar CEO.So where does that leave Roman? Still reeling from his funeral disaster. As Kendall asks for his brother’s help in the coming board battle against Shiv, he chastises Roman bluntly for screwing everything up. Roman then leaves the reception to crash one of the protest marches happening outside, where he yells at and gets smacked around by the angry leftists.This suits him just fine. When it comes to reactions, Roman would always rather people look at him with anger than with pity — or, worse, with indifference.Due diligenceHere’s another one for the “Kendall can’t stand to see his family get bullied” file: When Mencken makes fun of Roman’s crying jag, Kendall immediately shuts that joke down.And here’s another brilliant reaction shot: When Kendall speaks at the funeral about how Logan “made” him and his siblings, the editors cut to Lady Caroline, looking a bit peeved.There is not a lot of gut-busting comedy this week, though the Roy kids do get in some good riffs while gawking at Logan’s tomb, an ornate shrine he bought from a dot-com pet supply guy. Shiv calls the seller “cat food Ozymandias,” asks whether her dad was “in a bidding war with Stalin and Liberace,” then suggests the grave could be a tax write-off because, “It’s technically a residence.”The tomb has plenty of room for more family members, should any of Logan’s children want to spend eternity with their problematic patriarch. Connor pipes up and says he wouldn’t mind a top bunk. Kendall hesitates, saying, “I had trouble finishing a scotch with him.” And Roman? “He made me breathe funny,” he says.Shiv, bothered by how little she really knew — or perhaps wanted to know — about her father’s character, asks Frank and Karl, “How bad was Dad?” They reassure her that he was “a salty dog but a good egg,” adding, “What you saw was what you got.” Then after she leaves, Karl half-shrugs, looks at Frank and asks, “Right?” Frank, halfheartedly: “Right.”Shiv, as the funeral ends and the cemetery prepares to inter her father: “I’m intrigued to see how he gets out of this one.” More

It’s election night in America. Stay away from the bodega sushi.Season 4, Episode 8: ‘America Decides’The day before Logan Roy died, he delivered a fiery call to arms to his ATN staff, letting them know what he expected from the network going forward. The speech was an angrier variation of the populist spiel he had given many times before, in which he insisted that the news should always be frank and unpretentious. He wanted his anchors to tell their viewers “truthful” things they had never heard anyone say before on television. He wanted ATN to be, in a word, “spicy.”Throughout this week’s action-packed, nerve-shredding episode of “Succession,” Logan’s kids argue a lot about what the old man would want them to do, as the presidential race between the Republican Jeryd Mencken (Justin Kirk) and the Democrat Daniel Jimenez (Elliot Villar) comes down to a couple of battleground states. The big sticking point is Milwaukee, where a fire at a vote-counting facility has destroyed enough ballots to tilt Wisconsin from blue to red.How would Logan have handled this? Would he have maintained the policy of “no brass on the battlefield” and left all of ATN’s messaging to the Decision Desk data-nerds? Or would he have seized the opportunity offered by Mencken to Roman, to shape the narrative such that the Mencken camp (and by extension the Roys) are the night’s big winners?To ask what Logan would do, though, is to miss the real crux of the issue. It was clear from Logan’s defenses of ATN that he didn’t care whether his network broadcast the facts. He preferred “the truth” — which has a more flexible definition, depending on who is doing the telling.On this election night, up in ATN’s executive offices, there are two competing truths, represented by the Jimenez supporter Shiv and the Mencken backer Roman. Every time Shiv tries to turn the conversation to things like Menckenite obstructionists in “victory vans,” Roman shouts, “False flag!” and rebrands the ominous vehicles as “fun buses.” The Roys are at an impasse.Roman has a decided advantage, given that ATN already has what Tom calls a “unique perspective” on the news. While the other networks are suggesting that Mencken goons may have burned the Milwaukee votes, ATN floats theories like “electrical failure.” (Roman would prefer to go with “Antifa fire bombing.”) At one point, ATN’s Tucker Carlson-like anchor Mark Ravenhead (Zack Robidas) delivers a rant during the network’s purportedly neutral coverage, attacking leftists for trying to turn the fire to their political advantage.Roman also has Kendall and Tom on his side, to a degree. Kendall is hesitant because he is no Mencken fan. When he mentions to Roman that he fears what a Mencken administration might mean for his adopted daughter, Sophie, his brother mocks him for caring about the ideals of American pluralism. Roman compares their whole argument to when they were kids, when Kendall would play the sober-minded big brother in order to get chicken for dinner, while the whinier Roman wanted steak.Kendall asks, “Because we had so much chicken when you were a kid, we have to elect a fascist?” And although he is being facetious, those kinds of lingering slights are what guides the decision-making this night.As for Tom, he is under pressure to quiet his critics by delivering big ratings for ATN’s election coverage. To get there, he endures glitchy touch-screens and a steady stream of Roys entering the newsroom’s forbidden areas. Tom remains inclined to side with Roman, perhaps because that puts him at odds with Shiv, whom he has not forgiven for their vicious argument at the tailgate party. Even when she tries to win him back by finally telling him that she is pregnant with his child, he stings her by asking if she is lying, as another “tactic.”Shiv has a rough time overall on election night. As the evening nightmarishly shifts Mencken’s way, she has a heart-to-heart with Kendall — in a reflection of the touching Season 2 scene in which he confided to her that he would never be Logan’s choice to run the company. Here, he listens to Shiv’s argument that ATN could slow the Mencken momentum. Their Decision Desk guru, Darwin (Adam Godley), knows from historical data and exit polling where the Milwaukee votes would have gone. They could put Darwin on camera and let him explain why ATN won’t project a winner in Wisconsin.But two things get in the way. The first is that Kendall really wants the next president to kill the GoJo deal, which Roman insists Mencken will do. So Kendall asks Shiv to take one more shot at persuading her ex-lover Nate to get Jimenez to make that same promise. Instead, she merely pretends to make the call and then lies to Kendall, saying that the Jimenez people are open to considering his proposal. This sets up the second impediment: when Kendall calls Nate to iterate more clearly what Shiv claims to have said.There is some phenomenal staging in this episode, a lot of which involves people passing phones back and forth — and at one point even holding one phone up to another so that the people on the lines can speak to each other. But the best phone sequence is Kendall’s call to Nate, which plays out mostly unheard on the other side of one of ATN’s enormous office windows, as Shiv looks on with dread. After Kendall gets the word from Nate that Shiv never called him, he walks over to talk to Greg, who Shiv knows is aware of her consultations with Matsson.Kendall, feeling betrayed by the sibling he trusts most, spits some icy words in Shiv’s direction and then tells Tom to make the call for Mencken. ATN really is about to help elevate an authoritarian to America’s most powerful public office because one spoiled brother is in a snit.Although this episode is incredibly entertaining, it does cut uncomfortably closer to real-world politics than is typical for “Succession.” This show always features characters and ideas inspired by real political figures, but the creator Jesse Armstrong uses these mainly as the backdrop to the Roys’ family drama — and as a way of satirizing generally the blinded arrogance of the powerful. Here though, the way the election plays out is so much like the specific circumstances of 2016 and 2020 that it might stir up bad memories for anyone who sweated and fretted through those nights.That’s ‌OK, though because while Roman may “ironically” make racist comments in the newsroom and may assure Shiv that “nothing happens” when terrible people take power, Armstrong is showing here that the pettiness of the Roys and their ilk does have repercussions. Everything for this family is about banking a win in the moment, regardless of whether it might later turn into a loss. That’s what their father taught them: Take what you can, when you can, and let someone else clean up after.So as the evening ends — with ATN having called Wisconsin and the presidency for Mencken, without having let Darwin explain that this is all just “pending” — Roman sums up what happened in terms Logan Roy would have understood.“We just made a night of good TV.”Due diligenceTom has a bad election night, too, ending with Greg handing him his phone and saying, “A lot of very important people want to scream at you.” This is a great episode though for fans of the sicko Tom-Greg dynamic. Not willing to entrust the “Gregging” he needs to anyone other than Greg, Tom keeps his lanky lackey close at hand, relying on him for everything from a quick bump of cocaine (Tom: “This is not a thing. It’s not going in a book.”) to double-shot coffees. Tom lays out a doomsday scenario in which Greg fails to keep him from getting drowsy, Tom miscalls the results in Colorado, China invades Taiwan, the world blows up and “We’re back to amoeba.”One of Tom’s non-Greg assistants makes the mistake of bringing bodega sushi into the office, which Tom nixes (“Tonight my digestive system is basically part of the Constitution!”) but Greg sloppily eats, ultimately leading to a stray smear of Wasabi ending up in Darwin’s eyes. Greg makes matters worse by pouring lemon La Croix onto the affected area. (“It’s not that lemony!” he insists.) True to Tom’s dire warnings, it is while Darwin is briefly incapacitated by foodstuffs that the Roys start making the decision to call the election for Mencken.Once Connor learns he lost Kentucky (“Alas Kentucky, Willa … alas vanity”), he scrambles to appease Mencken, offering to “concede in his direction.” So we get the wonderful spectacle of Connor delivering a peppery kiss-off speech in front of a sign bearing his campaign slogan: “Enough Already!”Just because ATN declared Mencken the winner doesn’t mean the election is over. The mess in Milwaukee needs to be resolved; and it could all end with Wisconsin flipping to Jimenez. In other words: Once again on “Succession,” a big deal remains unclosed. More