On Tue, Dec 14, 2021 at 10:11 PM PGage <pga...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Can you at all out into words what it is you like about spending time with > them? I keep wondering if I am just looking at it the wrong way. I just > detest the people, and am not charmed by the snappy dialogue- and > particularly do not find Roman funny or endearing. > > Objectively, they are all awful people. But that's not what I'm always looking for from a show. You're not supposed to like these characters. But you are supposed to believe in them. And they're drawn richly enough that I do. Indeed what this show is brilliant at is making me interested in these otherwise terrible people. That's hard to do. Sure, we've had anti-heroes forever. It's even become a bit of a TV cliché - from Tony Soprano to Vic Mackey in The Shield to Walter White in Breaking Bad. But those shows are about us kinda liking the bad boys. This is something different.
Strangely, these feel as real a bunch of TV characters that I can think of in any show ever. That comes through in the writing and the top-notch performances. There are awkward silences; there are bits of dialogue that are incoherent and don't feel as though a writer has written them (although for the most part, they very much have). Literally every character feels properly fleshed out, and not just a means to an end. And the show repeatedly leaves massive gaps in telling us exactly what's going on. We have to work to keep up - it doesn't hold our hands. and you just don't get exposition dialogue lazily dumped on us. We're treated like adults. It's a show that you absolutely cannot be scrolling through your phone while you watch it - not if you want to fully appreciate it anyway. Part of my love of Succession is certainly the sphere they operate in. Media has become so dominant in recent years, and I have always been obsessed with it. Here's a fictional company that has at its heart a Fox News-alike channel that from their perspective is just a means to an end to make money. And the characters know it intrinsically, but just don't care. On this week's episode, one of the throwaway lines spoke of turning on the "bigot spigot" when referencing their news channel, and their happiness in getting into bed with extreme right wingers. Sadly, it's vastly more authentic than, say, ACN in Aaron Sorkin's The Newsroom - a show that itself could have been designed perfectly for me. Literally just this week, Fox News has lost Chris Wallace, coming just a couple of weeks after their streaming sibling turned up the "bigot spigot" to the max with Tucker Carlson's "documentary." Another reason for me loving the show is that you can follow a pretty clear through narrative from the British show, The Thick of It (from which the movie In the Loop, was a spin-off), through Veep and then finally to Succession. Jesse Armstrong, who created Succession, worked as a writer on the previous two shows, both created by the peerless Armando Ianucci. While the former two are easily classifiable as comedies, I'm not sure exactly where I'd place Succession, and it's probably reductive to attempt to define it clearly as a "drama" or a "comedy." It's definitely not a "comedy-drama" either. But it does have much more humour - and frankly, more laugh out loud moments, for me anyway, than most "comedies" I watch on TV. But Malcolm Tucker on The Thick of It and Selena Myers in Veep were pretty obnoxious too. I lapped them up. I suppose I can sit at arm's length from these characters and be enormously superior about their incestuous behaviours, and yet there's the dawning realisation that this really isn't that far removed from reality. It's going to be interesting to see Adam McKay's new movie, Don't Look Up, which from reviews, seems to be covering related ground, in perhaps a more slapstick manner. On another level entirely, one of my favourite film genres is the screwball comedy - especially those of the 30s and 40s. Howard Hawks' Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday are comfortably inside my top ten films of all time. Now what Succession doesn't have, which are essential ingredients in a screwball is a love story at the heart of them. Characters have relationships in Succession, but there's little in the way of love. However, both have lines delivered at 100 miles an hour, with lines that pass by so fast that you almost have to re-watch them to catch them. One final note on the Jeremy Strong thing - I thought this piece by The Guardian's Hadley Freeman, who herself interviewed Strong ahead of the start of this season, was very fair, and on the money - https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/dec/10/madness-in-their-method-have-we-fallen-out-of-love-with-actorly-excess Adam -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TVorNotTV" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to tvornottv+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tvornottv/CAD_sJGD4YBDFRQNjMT%3DYHnea5RF580q0NHB2OpFT_bevJ0YBQA%40mail.gmail.com.
