Succession Returns: Why We No Longer Love Lucy

By: Sean C. McLane

This past Sunday, Succession, one of HBO’s most critically acclaimed episodic dramas, returned for its third season, scratching an itch for content hungry fans after the pandemic repeatedly pushed back filming and production of the show. With this third season, we return to a cast of characters featuring some of the most elite, evil, and power-hungry personalities ever shown on television. Succession follows the Roy family, owners of the media conglomerate Waystar-Royco, loosely based on the Murdoch family and their company News Corp, owners of outlets like Fox News and various tabloid magazines.

 Opening this third season, the Roys are in turmoil, facing attacks that threaten the one thing they hold above all else, control of the company, which brings with it unprecedented power, influence, and immunity. While previous seasons featured antagonists such as women who have been sexually assaulted under WayStar-Royco’s watch, journalists, and the US congress, this season features a civil war, as Kendall Roy, son of the Roy family patriarch and CEO of Waystar Logan Roy, closed the season two finale by publicly denouncing his father for covering up sexual harassment and criminal activity directly, the first act of war in what is shaping up to be a bloody battle.

While the events of the show are absolutely horrid, featuring manipulation, exploitation, and megalomania as common attributes of everyday life, they are portrayed on screen with the heavy usage of comedy and absurdity, allowing you to like and actively root for people who are very clearly terrible. This is not a new idea or execution, but it is done expertly well, featuring incredibly sharp and intelligent dialogue performed by an ensemble cast. This has led many to consider Succession alongside some of the best TV shows of all time, including series like The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, and Mad Men. While Succession is still running its course, and probably shouldn’t be a contender yet, it is so undeniably good that many have already placed it in their top ten, or even five. 

As I mentioned before, many people consider The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, and Mad Men to be some of the greatest shows of all time, (obviously not everyone, but these are generally seen as landmarks of television storytelling) three shows that each feature an “antihero” or a main character that opposes traditional heroic character traits, often leaning into criminality or morally and ethically ambiguous territory. Succession is no different, with pretty much every character in it’s main cast embodying various combinations of the aforementioned qualities. 

Why are these shows considered the greatest of all time? Does it have anything to do with their antiheroic attributes? I believe it has a great deal to do with them, and I would argue that in today’s entertainment and media landscape, there is little room for a protagonist that has traditional heroic qualities. 

Gone are the days where the nuclear family tuned into one of three stations at night, all crowded in the living room waiting for Johnny Carson to walk out to that famous introduction. The modern television viewer lives in the modern world, and is continually challenged by the moral and ethical questions that go alongside living in that world. People do not want to see Lucille Ball  or Andy Griffiths have all their issues resolved within 30 minutes, life is simply not like that, and it’s no longer how we watch and relate to film and television. The modern viewer looks for not only an entertaining plot, but characters and themes that relate to their world. Let’s look at the main characters of the three previously mentioned shows for some clarification on what I mean here.

Tony Soprano, of The Sopranos, the man who started it all, is an objectively horrible person. He is a mafia boss who murders, lies, cheats, steals, and commits adultery constantly. He is also a sociopath with deep trauma stemming from his relationship with his mother. Tony is a reflection of the world in which he inhabits, a world full of all of the things he does, but struggles for acceptance in it, as he is held back by his mental health issues. As the show was released in the early 2000s, this reflects changing attitudes to mental health and care that we continue to see into the present, while also questioning the roots of behavior and choice. Don Draper, of Mad Men, is a little better than Tony, but only because he genuinely seeks to better himself, constantly failing. Draper lives through the 60s, and his personal struggle mirrors that decade, a decade often attributed to massive social change and upheaval. Draper is both the culmination of the changing times, including sexual promiscuity, substance abuse, and free thinking, while also representing the old guard, failing to recognize the need for change when it doesn’t affect him, seen through diminishing women co-workers and not caring about Civil Rights issues. Finally, Walter White, of Breaking Bad. Walter White is a victim of the American Medical System, as well as the capitalistic greed of the business world. Walter has continually been stripped of power and reduced to a shred of his younger self, a promising scientist. Walter begins to engage in criminal drug manufacturing, and becomes engrossed with the potential for power and control that it offers, until it all swallows him whole. 

All of these characters are definitions of an anti hero, but they’re also cultural icons and landmarks, as the traits they possess and the failures they go through remind us of ourselves. While most of us aren’t manufacturing meth or running a mafia outfit, we still struggle with the difficult questions our world presents. How will we pay this outlandish medical bill? Would a life of criminality be easier than being taken advantage of by the white collar criminals who go without punishment? How do I keep up in a world that constantly grows and changes around me? 

While Succession isn’t the first example of characters or a story in the antihero tradition, it continues the tradition expertly, bringing late stage capitalist issues to the forefront through the depiction of the perpetrators of those injustices. Coupled with expertly written scenes and masterful performances that take on an art of their own, Succession will without a doubt be remembered as one of the greats. (Assuming their success is continued, and they don’t fall into the Game of Thrones trap) Succession fulfills another chapter in the television story, which has grown from its inception as a fun way to spend a half hour with the family to a major medium for works of art, potentially a greater medium than even film, that reflects and influences our culture, society, and paradigms of thought.