Television

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

On Sunday night, the Roys pondered whether to sell out democracy in exchange for their father’s kingdom. In the real world, the going rate is usually cheaper.This article includes spoilers for the most recent episode of “Succession.”In Sunday’s episode of “Succession,” a TV network sold out democracy. The most implausible part of the story was how high a price the sellers got for it.In the episode “America Decides,” the heirs to the conservative media empire Waystar Royco helped Jeryd Mencken, a Nazi-curious presidential candidate, claim a violence-tainted election by ordering their cable-news network to call it for him. The multibillion-dollar reward: Mencken would kill Waystar’s pending sale to a Swedish tech bro, handing Kendall and Roman Roy the kingdom after their father’s death.In reality, cable news favors for antidemocratic political forces come much cheaper. But let’s deal with the fake news network first.In the “Succession” episode — which probably should have carried a content warning for anyone who has followed the last couple of presidential elections — the night begins with the Democrat, Daniel Jimenez, ahead in the polls. The results end up tight enough to be decided by a highly convenient, apparently intentional fire in a Milwaukee vote counting station, which incinerates enough pro-Democratic ballots to swing Wisconsin to the Republican Mencken.After watching the previous episode, I sketched out a scenario in which the Roys’ network, ATN, has to take sides in a contested election, with the fate of the deal at stake. This doesn’t make me Nostradamus. “Succession” is predictable in the best way. It simply sets up conditions, gives characters motivations, then lets them act in their interests. It’s only as unpredictable as you fool yourself into believing it is.So there’s chaos and opportunity. There’s a fire and an election call that, while not carrying the force of law, would determine the narrative advantage in a legal (or extralegal) showdown.For America, it’s the choice between remaining a country where elections are won with ballots or becoming one where they’re won with torches. For the Roy siblings (minus Connor, conceding the end of his libertarian vanity campaign), it’s a golden jump ball, and each one of them reacts in character.Roman, who has always vibed with Mencken’s edgelord energy, sees no reason not to get on the good side of a history-smashing win. Roman knows who Mencken is, better than any of the Roys do; in Season 3, it was to him that Mencken expressed his openness to borrowing ideas from “H,” his pet name for Hitler. But what’s a little fascism between friends?This had to be a rough episode for Team Roman, the “Succession” fans who love his broken-toy impishness and “Clockwork Orange” banter. He is funny, even while electing a white nationalist, telling his sister, Shiv, “It’s only spicy because if my team wins, they’re going to shoot your team.” That’s exactly what has always made him dangerous. Does he endorse Mencken’s worldview sincerely or ironically? Does it matter? Does an ironic arson fire burn any cooler?His siblings respond with different flavors of ineffectiveness. Shiv, once a Democratic operative, is horrified at the “nightmare” of a President Mencken. But not horrified enough to sabotage her own schemes. Given the chance to ask the Jimenez campaign to promise to kill the Waystar sale — a deal she has been secretly working against her brothers to make happen — she fakes a call instead, and gets caught out. It’s a double-or-nothing bet with democracy as her stake, and she loses.Kendall, meanwhile, resists with the force of a wall of Jell-O, telling Roman, “I don’t necessarily feel good about this.” Necessarily: On “Succession,” statements of principle are always hedged.Kendall knows the stakes too. He wants to be good, or to be seen as good, and his daughter recently had an upsetting run-in on the street with an alt-right racist. But he also wants to win his company back. As often happens when he can’t reconcile his self-interest with his self-conception, he shuts down like a glitching robot, until learning of Shiv’s betrayal pushes him to push ATN to call the election.Respecting their viewership: Nicholas Braun, left, and Matthew Macfadyen in “Succession.”Macall Polay/HBOHis anger at Shiv is a reason, but it’s not the reason. As usual on “Succession,” this is about the money, and the dysfunctional family competition in which the money keeps score. As the brothers argue, Roman accuses Kendall of “big brother”-ing the election call, using seniority to get his way, just as Kendall did at dinner time when they were kids.If only little Roman had gotten steak, we might have gotten democracy.In our reality, of course, the ordinary pressures of the cable news business might have sufficed to force the call, deal or no deal, steak or chicken. As we just saw in the Dominion voting machines libel trial, Fox News — the none-too-subtle real-life analogue to ATN — indulged election theft hoaxes simply to try to hang on to its existing audience (at an eventual cost of hundreds of millions of dollars so far and potentially more).“America Decides” plays as if the writers committed the pretrial discovery file to memory. The episode follows Tom Wambsgans, Shiv’s estranged husband and ATN’s head, through an ulcer-making election night. He is sleep deprived and coked up, under pressure to deliver big ratings for the Roys and scary antifa stories for his audience, which is getting raw, uncut propaganda from ATN’s farther-right competitors.This was much the dynamic at work in the internal messages disclosed in the Dominion suit, which showed Fox stars and executives freaking out over competitors like Newsmax, who were gaining traction by embracing the election-fraud lie. (And of course, Fox’s worries stemmed from viewers’ fury over election night, particularly about the network calling Arizona for soon-to-be President Biden.)Asked why ATN isn’t reporting the evidence that the ballots were torched by Menckenite brownshirts, Tom says, “We need to respect our viewership” — phrasing almost verbatim from the Fox messages. “Respecting this audience whether we agree or not is critical,” the host Sean Hannity texted after the 2020 election.So ATN brings out its sneering alt-rightist, Mark Ravenhead, to insinuate that the fire was a false flag, while Tom suggests booking an egghead historian to tell viewers that everything is fine and normal. “Succession” has always had a feel for how the shamelessness of extremists defeats, and is enabled by, the flaccid reasonableness of centrists.Of course, ATN, like Fox, operates in a larger media environment, and the episode is less clear on how election night is playing elsewhere, especially on PGN, the in-world analog to CNN. There’s a brief clip suggesting that PGN, and presumably other mainstream news, is treating the election as undecided while the legal process plays out. (On a story level, this suggests that the election and Waystar Royco’s fate may have a few turns yet to take.)In our reality, mainstream outlets have their own pressures and owners. CNN, which is part of Warner Bros. Discovery, has a new head, Chris Licht, and a reported new corporate mandate to reposition after years of pugilistically covering President Trump.CNN spent the 2020 campaign trying to learn the lessons of 2016 by scaling back on airing live Trump rallies and assertively fact-checking him in detail. Now — knowing full well that the former president tried to overturn a democratic election — it seems determined to spend the 2024 campaign unlearning the lessons of 2020.Thus last week, CNN granted Donald J. Trump an hour of live TV to be as dishonest about the attempts to overturn the last election as you knew he would be if, at any point in the last few years, you watched CNN. While the town hall moderator, Kaitlan Collins, interjected corrections, he boisterously played his “rigged election” hits to a cheering crowd.CNN got a spectacle; the former president got a live platform for another dominance-politics performance. The morning after the town hall, Licht reportedly told the CNN staff: “Kaitlan pressed him again and again and again and made news. Made a lot of news.” And, he said, “that is our job.”Here, life echoes “Succession” once more. At the end of election night, with ballots burning and Mencken delivering a dog-whistley speech about making America “clean,” Roman insists that nothing he or ATN did that night was that bad or consequential. “We just made a night of good TV,” he says. When the smoke clears, you can always tell yourself that you didn’t start the fire. More