The Success of 'Succession'
What can writers learn from bad people doing each other dirty for four seasons
Dear Writer,
I came to HBO’s Succession late. Like… two weeks ago late. Everyone was talking about it so I consumed the entire thing quickly and caught up the day before the last episode aired. If I’d been watching from the beginning in real time as the episodes released, I think I would have lost interest a while back, but the opportunity to binge and then ride the cresting wave of the cultural zeitgeist made the show accessible to me in a way I doubt it would have been otherwise.
As a writer, I take my lessons from all the stories I engage with. There are crafty lessons to be learned (conflict, structure, character building) that can point to a certain level of success in the storytelling—depending, of course, on how you define success—but stories are so much more than that. The simple “I like it/I don’t like it” response is where we start, but things get interesting when we start asking why we respond to it the way we do, making room for curiosity when other people respond to a story in a different way, be it general opinion or even intensity of response (“I love it/I hate it”). There is so much to learn about ourselves and others by taking a curious stance when looking at responses.
So let’s learn a bit with this one.
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I didn’t love it. My response to Succession was one of lukewarm, “Okay, fine.” For the most part, I really didn’t care who “it” was. As much as I was rooting for anyone—which wasn’t much—I wanted Greg just for the pure irony of it. In the end, though, I think for Greg to get it would have been bending the story world past its breaking point. Tom, the Dolt Who Saw Reality, was probably the best choice. He’s not talented or clever, but he understood the reality the landscape in a way that put him in the right place at the right time more often than anyone else so… fair enough, right?
Except for the parts I loved. I was in for Roman and for Gerri and for Roman and Gerri. That was the only relationship I cared about even a little bit.
But who cares? My personal response isn’t as interesting as the fact that this show somehow came up and grabbed the whole world for a while. Look, when I was a kid and there were three networks to choose from (in the pre-prestige age of cable) everyone watched the same thing no matter what because there were no choices. In 2002, there were 189 scripted shows; in 2022, there were 599. So back in the day, when everyone gathered to talk about what happened on Friends the night before, it wasn’t saying so much about Friends as it was about the fact that it was just… on. Now, when everyone talks about the same cultural phenomenon, it means something.
What does it mean? Who the hell knows? But I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t make a guess.
At its core, I think Succession is about the difference between what something appears to be and what it actually is. From the news network ATN pretending to be a legitimate journalism outlet to the sparkling fantasy of cruises being an actual miasma of sexual assault, racism and death to Greg opening the show by literally barfing through the eyes of a Goofy analog at a Disney Theme Park analog. Logan is a man who built the thing we worship most in America—success, wealth, empire—and he is also the most broken piece of human garbage on the show… and that is not a low bar. Succession is a show about the false gods we worship, and what happens to us while in pursuit of the very things that will damage us the most.
For a long, long time, the carrot of money and success has been dangled on a long stick in front of a treadmill, and only now are we beginning to realize that the system is designed only to dangle the carrot, not to award it. The carrot is made of non-biodegradable plastic and for the very, very few who do grasp it, it immediately poisons them and everyone around them until darkness is all there is. I think Succession, at its core, is an acknowledgement of this reality.
But what does a writer learn from this show? Honestly, this show illustrates how powerful a solid central narrative conflict is. As I lay out in How Story Works, a central narrative conflict is a mutually exclusive conflict in a zero-sum game; if one person wins, the other of necessity loses. Since sharing CEO duties at Waystar Royco meant nothing—as illustrated by the brief sharing of duties between Roman and Kendall that was satisfactory to no one—we had, a the core of a show a rock solid CNC, which gave us the stage upon which danced themes that are very relevant to our society now.
And that, my friends, is how it’s done. Stories that resonate are easy to fall into, and a solid central narrative conflict will pull your audience in. From there, you can write about greed and the emotional strings a bad parent can effectively pull on children who were emotionally abused from day one and as long as every storyline returns to the central narrative conflict touchstone often enough to keep us connected to it, the audience will keep returning to find out what happens.
Not a bad lesson, for a show that was not bad even if it wasn’t entirely enjoyable.
Everything,
L