Succession

[WorldForgot]

Power, politics, money...it's all in the family in this provocative, funny series about a highly dysfunctional dynasty. When Logan Roy (Brian Cox), CEO of one of the world's largest media and entertainment conglomerates, considers retirement, each of his four grown children follows a personal agenda that doesn't always sync with those of their siblings--or of their father.

Nominated for XIXAX awards and never had a thread!

With each season the show hits new comedic strides, which in turn sweeps the drama under the rug too much at times. This dynamic, family drama meets wealth-porn comedy, totally makes it a winsome comfort watch. Yes, ish gets sad, but you've always got two or three family members dissing out enough quips that it won't turn away the Roman-ites.

On “Succession,” Jeremy Strong Doesn’t Get the Joke

That August, Strong, who was living in Los Angeles with his fiancée, went to film “Detroit.” He had done deep research for the role, watching military documentaries and practicing marksmanship at a shooting range. He arranged to miss part of his wedding-week festivities for the filming. But, after one day, Bigelow fired him. “I was just not the character that she had in her mind,” Strong said. “It was a devastating experience.” (Bigelow says that the character wasn’t working in the story; after Strong pleaded with her, she came up with another part for him, as an attorney.) Then he flew to Denmark to get married, staying at a castle called Dragsholm Slot. That’s when he got the call that the “Succession” people had cast Kieran Culkin as Roman.
[...]

Strong’s dedication strikes some collaborators as impressive, others as self-indulgent. “All I know is, he crosses the Rubicon,” Robert Downey, Jr., told me. In 2014, Strong played Downey, Jr.,’s mentally disabled brother in “The Judge.” (To prepare, he spent time with an autistic person, as Hoffman had for “Rain Man.”) When Downey, Jr., shot a funeral scene, Strong paced around the set weeping loudly, even though he wasn’t called that day. He asked for personalized props that weren’t in the script, including a family photo album. “It was almost swatting him away like he was an annoying gnat—I had bigger things to deal with,” a member of the design team recalled.

“I think you have to go through whatever the ordeal is that the character has to go through,” Strong told me. This extreme approach—Robert De Niro shaving down his teeth for “Cape Fear,” Leonardo DiCaprio eating raw bison liver for “The Revenant”—is often described as Method acting, a much abused term that, in its classic sense, involves summoning emotions from personal experience and projecting them onto a character. Strong does not consider himself a Method actor. Far from mining his own life, he practices what he calls “identity diffusion.” “If I have any method at all, it is simply this: to clear away anything—anything—that is not the character and the circumstances of the scene,” he explained. “And usually that means clearing away almost everything around and inside you, so that you can be a more complete vessel for the work at hand.”

Talking about his process, he quoted the jazz pianist Keith Jarrett: “I connect every music-making experience I have, including every day here in the studio, with a great power, and if I do not surrender to it nothing happens.” During our conversations, Strong cited bits of wisdom from Carl Jung, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Karl Ove Knausgaard (he is a “My Struggle” superfan), Robert Duvall, Meryl Streep, Harold Pinter (“The more acute the experience, the less articulate its expression”), the Danish filmmaker Tobias Lindholm, T. S. Eliot, Gustave Flaubert, and old proverbs (“When fishermen cannot go to sea, they mend their nets”). When I noted that he was a sponge for quotations, he turned grave and said, “I’m not a religious person, but I think I’ve concocted my own book of hymns.”

[Drenk]

Great show. The living proof that our best modern directors are old cowards who refuse to deal with our reality, which is a fucking gold mine of characters and situations and...things to look at...

The characters grabbed me from the pilot, and it simply got better with time, they're all specifically twisted. The actors are perfect. Just perfect. Nobody is a showman, and yet their faces were made to catch the light.

There's a sense of eeriness emanating from the fact that this world is, well, very luxurious and « crazy » and showed from various angles and locations, but not only: the language of Succession isn't realistic, it's almost its own idiom, strange sentences, strange meanings...But you buy it. You believe it. It's realistic and completely false. It's...

Well. This is the violence of that world. A lay-off of fifty people is abstract, just a sentence in an office. No gunfight. No noise. Succession explores all the stupidity, insanity of violence of the world depicted.

Its third season is certainly its weakest, and I hope HBO will let them end the show with season 4, but it's nonetheless a constant pleasure to witness such a peculiar TV Show.

[Robyn]

I'm only on s01e7, but all I can say is that the trailers doesn't captures the overall tone of this show at all. Not at all what I thought it would be.

[WorldForgot]

There's a sense of eeriness emanating from the fact that this world is, well, very luxurious and « crazy » and showed from various angles and locations, but not only: the language of Succession isn't realistic, it's almost its own idiom, strange sentences, strange meanings...But you buy it. You believe it. It's realistic and completely false. It's...

Dang I like how you phrase it here. In part what I feel Season 3 lost was the subtlety of dialogue that Sznz 1 & 2 had, where the intentions were shrouded in bureaucratic or politic mechanisms. Now it's a bit more on the nose, a lot more "gif-able" of  a script, but I'm still into the characters so much I don't mind.

[Drenk]

The last thirty minutes of that Succession finale were top-tier, just magnificent work. And I have way less criticism about the season as a whole now.

[Jeremy Blackman]

https://twitter.com/jga41agher/status/1470418664637841421

I still haven't watched Succession, but I like this and assume it's clever.

[WorldForgot]

This show fits the HBO slate so fkn well. Last night's finale nearly convinced its audience that catharsis was in site, only to pull the rug out from under all of us and send the characters hurling back to a hell they knew only before the show's onset.

"You come to me with love?"

In a way it's tough to single out one performance or character, because every member of the family has a fully formed interior life that's occluded dietetically, but at the ready for us to analyze thanks to the edit and framing. There's shades of Coppola and Vinterberg in its cinematography, and allusions to the classics in its dialogue; all without sacrificing a very modern and sexy appeal. It highlights how selfishly-wired we may be as a species, and I'll selfishly admit that I want two more seasons and not just one.

[Robyn]

I caught up and finished the season three finale today as well.  Was expecting the characters to arrive here sooner, so the wait for season 4 will suck even more now!

Jeremy Strong is the stand out for me. Even when Kendall has sucked or been in annoying business bro mode, Strong has still miraculously made you root for him at times, and I don't think it's all down to everyone else being even worse.

[WorldForgot]

BBC program on Acting -- Brain Cox discusses three major plays and the crux of Tragedy

[WorldForgot]

'Succession' Adds 9 To Season 4 Returning Cast, Including Alexander Skarsgård, Dagmara Domińczyk, Arian Moayed, Hope Davis & Juliana Canfield

Dagmara Domińczyk, who was a series regular for the last two seasons after recurring in Season 1, playing Waystar Royco head PR and legal team member Karolina Novotney, was conspicuously missing from the returning cast list released in conjunction with the Season 4 production start in June. She will be back.

Also set to return are several popular Succession recurring players, Alexander Skarsgård whose character, tech CEO Lukas Mattson, is pivotal to the Season 4 story arc; Arian Moayed as Kendall's frenemy Stewy Hosseini (he was a series regular in Season 2 and recurred on Seasons 1 and 3); Juliana Canfield as Kendall's intrepid assistant Jess Jordan; Annabelle Dexter-Jones as Kendall's media heiress love interest Naomi Pierce; Hope Davis as another media heiress, Sandy Furness' daughter Sandi Furness; and Cherry Jones reprising her Season 2 role as Pierce family matriarch Nan.

Additionally, Justin Kirk, who guest starred as controversial right-wing Congressman Jeryd Mencken who earned ATN's endorsement in Episode 6 last season, will be back for more, as will be another guest star from the same episode, HBO veteran Stephen Root as Ron Petkus, the lecherous organizer of the Future Freedom Summit.

It is unclear how many episodes any of the actors will be back for. Three of the returning recurring guest stars, Skarsgård, Moayed and Davis, are currently nominated for an Emmy for their performances in Season 3 while Jones won for her role in 2020.