Warning: Spoilers for Succession season four, episode seven to follow.
Rarely do onscreen relationships and alliances change as rapidly as they do on Succession. On last week’s ‘Living+’, we saw Shiv (Sarah Snook) and Tom (Matthew Macfadyen) improbably repair their estranged marriage over the course of four scenes. In Sunday’s ‘Tailgate Party’ – titled for the election-eve power party Shiv and Tom host at their tony triplex – the duo go from a cozy breakfast to a verbal knife fight on their balcony, in plain view of the heavy hitters present.
And it’s not a traditional Succession argument, where the characters speak in emotionally guarded, subtext-heavy sentences. Shiv and Tom are both so hurt that they finally unload all of the unsaid truths they’ve been holding inside for four seasons. Tom’s most hurtful line? “I think you are incapable of love, and I think you are maybe not a good person to have children.”
The line stings particularly because we know that Shiv is secretly pregnant. Rather than respond with a quippy dagger, all the character can say is, “Well, that’s not very nice, is it?”
The exchange was as brutal to watch in person while filming, “Tailgate Party” directors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini say – though even they did not know at the time that Shiv was pregnant.
On a Zoom call Thursday, Berman explains she and Pulcini were aware that Snook was pregnant in real life while filming the episode. But at that point, the scene from episode four “where she is on the call with the doctor and it’s revealed to the audience that she’s pregnant was not written,” Berman says. “We knew that Sarah was pregnant. But we didn’t know that Shiv was going to be pregnant. We didn’t have that specific piece of information when we shot it.” Berman says that series creator Jesse Armstrong later told her and Pulcini that Snook’s pregnancy would be written into the series, but “we didn’t know when the audience was going to find out.”
Even so, the exchange made the filmmakers wince—knowing that Shiv and Tom had previously discussed the possibility of having children, and that Shiv’s mother, Caroline (Harriet Walter), had stung her last season by telling her a version of the same thing: “Some people just aren’t made to be mothers.”
The storyline being added late may explain why Shiv’s pregnancy has not been acknowledged in ‘Kill List’, ‘Living+’, and now ‘Tailgate Party'. (Though 'Living+' director Lorene Scafaria had a theory for why Shiv might not be bringing up the subject, previously telling Vanity Fair, “There’s still a lot for Shiv to unpack, between losing a parent and having a child—the two biggest seismic shifts in someone’s life—plus whatever complications she’s feeling for Tom.”) Others on the series have credited the writing team’s deftness as well: “There’s an incredible fluidity to the show,” Alexander Skarsgård told VF this week. “There are a lot changes from day one to day 97—Jesse and the other writers are very nimble. If they see something on the day that they respond to and find interesting, they might lean into that more…. There would often be quite significant script changes late because they would constantly tweak stuff—get excited about something and then explore that storyline a bit deeper.”
Berman says that filming that particular Tom-Shiv exchange “felt horribly brutal, but we didn’t know how brutal it would be” with the storyline addition.
Pregnancy or not, Pulcini says, “The party is intended in a way to present themselves as a couple again to the most powerful people in the country. The intentions are there—but the scorpion present hints that things are going to go awry. I don’t think Tom made the right choice with his gift for her.”
When Berman first read the fight scene, which she says probably took up seven pages in the script, “it felt very Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. It was incredibly uncomfortable to shoot for everybody, because it’s so raw. They go there in a way that people in Succession don’t really—saying directly what they mean.”
“So much of Succession dialogue is half committal,” adds Pulcini. “There’s so much subtext in every line. To get a scene like that, especially between these two, was so exciting. The characters have been through such a labyrinth…. Lines that direct in Succession are very powerful.”
Shiv and Tom aren’t the only characters to break up in the episode. Gerri (J. Smith-Cameron) also officially finishes her relationship with Roman (Kieran Culkin), after the youngest Roy sibling fired her on the previous episode.
“Talk about Tom and Shiv having a horrible breakup,” says Berman. “Gerri and Roman had a connection—obviously it went to weird places, but in a lot of ways she was his confidante. When he has that scene with Gerri telling him, ‘I’m done’—and saying, ‘I could have taken you there’—he realizes that he overstepped by firing her. Then he goes into a more quiet, background place [in the party]—he’s mourning not just his father, but now the loss of another person who was probably closer to him than his father.”
Adds Pulcini, “Obviously Roman can never really say ‘I’m sorry,’ but he’s trying to say, in his way, ‘I’m sorry and it’s gone too far….’ It’s brutal and it’s ugly, but it’s a goodbye scene in a lot of ways. There’s obviously some kind of interesting affection between these two, so it was tough [to film] because it was so multilayered.”
Most of the episode takes place within the titular tailgate party. “We had to choreograph it and draw up little diagrams about where people would be,” says Pulcini. “We had to reshoot things because we forgot that this person wasn’t in the room, or should have been in the room…. When these characters are trapped in the same space, everything goes awry. The supposed trust between the siblings comes completely undone in that space.”
Pulcini says that some of the funniest moments they had to cut involved Connor (Alan Ruck) trying to sell Willa (Justine Lupe) on moving overseas for an ambassadorship in a prospective Mencken administration. “The writers were coming up with all of these wonderful, horrible selling points of them making this move. Someday, someone should publish a book of all of the best Succession lines that were cut.”
After his ‘Living+’ success, Kendall (Jeremy Strong) continues to go rogue in ‘Tailgate Party’. Berman and Pulcini say that they spent a fair bit of time with Strong talking about his encounter with ex-wife Rava (Natalie Gold), and how learning of his child’s bullying would affect him throughout the episode.
“There is still that piece of him that thinks he’s on the right side of things,” says Pulcini. “Even though it doesn’t really come to a head, he carries that with him through the night. But of course he can’t resist going for the win, whatever direction that takes him in. There’s a moment where Nate [Ashley Zukerman] tells him, ‘You’re not Logan.’ And he means that as a compliment—like, ‘It’s a good thing.’ But that’s devastating to Ken. It doesn’t land the way Nate meant it to…the only thing he’s taking from the conversation is that he’s being challenged. And it sends him off into a different direction. By the end of the episode, he wants to be bigger than his dad ever was, going ‘reverse Viking,’ shedding his brother and sister, and trying to start this new alliance with Frank [Peter Friedman].”
The Roy siblings’ fatal flaw, Berman says, is that “they can’t not overstep.” (See: Roman spontaneously firing anyone who didn’t speak to him with respect in “Living+,” and Shiv dangerously aligning herself with Matsson.) “Kendall has a little bit of success with his Living+ presentation, which everybody thought was going to be a disaster. And instead of taking encouragement from that and saying, ‘Okay, maybe I’m good at this,’ he goes all the way to ‘I’m going to be better than Logan Roy, and I’m going to do it at this party. He alway oversteps to a point of self-sabotage.”
