Here is a tough ask: work for 50 hours a week and then spend your evenings watching people argue in an office. On Succession, where the writers room's dedication to business accuracy increasingly feels like being stuck in a meeting that could have been an email, a slightly tiresome, to-do list vibe has crept into the experience of watching the show. Watching it this weekend with the heroic professional duty summoned when answering an email on a Sunday night, I wondered: When did Succession start to feel like work?
This week's episode, “Living+”, took us past the halfway point of the show's final season, but, for the third week in a row, offered little in the way of the portentous drama that the show's tight four seasons have made their trademark. Kendall did a presentation for imprisoning the elderly with his new business venture, Shiv (divorcing, pregnant, ousted) continued to unravel, Matsson sent a bad tweet. Even Roman firing the head of Waystar Studios, then Gerri, felt like the kind of signposted moment of theatre that the show has previously avoided.
For Succession writer Lucy Prebble, the tedious, undramatic nature of high stakes business on the show has always been partly the point. “In the Succession writer’s room we’ll say, 'If this was a soap opera this is what would happen,' so we use that to use a way to think of its opposite," she told GQ last year. “Often that comes down to looking at research, boring dry stuff to make sure you’re returning to reality, but also thinking about the reality of power.”
In past seasons, this anti-soap opera approach has paid off with unexpected moments of knife-edge drama and comedy. Shiv's outburst that she was Logan's pick over dinner with the Pierce family in season 2 offered a jaw-drop moment of relief to the endless hush-hush about who might take over; Roman's accidental, NSFW AirDrop to Gerri in season 3 broke the professional mood with something alluringly puerile amidst so much seriousness.
In Succession's final season the death of Logan in episode three continues to cast a long shadow. The knee-jerk reaction to this mid-season drama seems to have been to circle back to staid business matters, leaving the show feeling as though the air has gone out the room. Instead of incrementally raising the temperature, season four feels the tricky midpoint for a TV show that hasn't worked out what move to make next. At this rate it seems we are laddering up toward the dramatic climax being a conference call.
There is a grim irony to the fact that as work has become worse, workplace TV has gotten better. In recent years, shows like Industry and Severance have done great business using the clinical pressure cooker of the office as a backdrop for strange human behaviour. At its peak, Succession revealed all of the document-burning, desk-flipping and back-stabbing that this kind of work brings out in people. But now, with four episodes to go, Succession's fixation on the GoJo deal feels like a failure to find the right work-life balance. And while it is likely there as a symbol of Logan's legacy that inspires in-fighting, a tedious business acquisition that few viewers truly understand seems at risk of becoming the entire show's legacy.
Several years ago, in a tweet now buried, I remember someone making the point that Twitter described every episode of Succession as the most dramatic moment in TV history. In reality, it was always just ‘this’, followed by a Getty Images stock photo of people in a boardroom. This week, watching a group of Waystar colleagues reading Twitter responses to a business conference, I wondered if perhaps they had a point.
Succession season four is available on Sky and NOW.
