The rise and fall (and rise again?) of Jeremy Strong’s Kendall keeps the stakes high in Succession’s second season
At first glance, a saga about the Game of Thrones-style battles to succeed the patriarch of a Murdoch-esque business empire seems like the last thing I’d want to watch in this day and age. I mean, who are we supposed to be rooting for in a family of assholes and monsters? And I’ve had issues with shows where the ensemble is made up of entirely awful people (see my past reviews of House of Cards and Veep for example), but admittedly, Succession is the one that pulled me in- I may still have my moments of hatred towards an occasional character, but the trick of creator Jesse Armstrong’s writing (aside from the Veep-like constant snark; the series could qualify as a comedy), is to make you sympathize with one character for one episode while rooting against another, and changing it all around from week to week as you watch these family members do battle under the thumb of their monstrous father’s manipulations.
Let’s talk about that monstrous father for a second. All hail Brian Cox, who plays media tycoon Logan Roy, the Rupert Murdoch stand-in, with so much effortless dominance that it’s quite a feat of acting. He’s arrogant, he’s abusive, he’s manipulative, he’s deceitful, he’s entirely in control of his business and his children, and Cox plays him without an ounce of sympathy. If anything the writing dodges some of the evil that men like Murdoch spew every second of their shameful existence in this world by avoiding portraying any explicit racism and misogyny coming directly out of Logan’s mouth or by letting us see those kinds of actions (only obliquely referring to past events), but Cox gets around that by letting the audience know, through his subtleties of delivery and force, that this guy is bad. And he’s so good at it that this bad, bad man is kinda the reason you want to watch. At least it is for me. Get the Emmy statue engraved right now. I’m sure he’ll be taking it home next year, and deservedly so.
Sarah Snook gets a lot more to do this year as Shiv embraces her family’s company with evil ease
But there’s a larger ensemble, and even though the various Roy kids flatten under their dad’s iron fist and never manage to spark too much sympathy, the one that comes closest is Jeremy Strong as Kendall, who turns in a quietly amusing performance (and even affecting at times) this season as a pathetic hangdog so utterly defeated by his Chappaquidick incident last year (covered up by Daddy of course) that he gives himself up to Logan entirely, doing and saying whatever he says, whatever he wants, until that killer twist in the season finale, which is built up all season long and makes you desperate to see what happens next (am I actually rooting for poor little rich boy Kendall after what he did? Maybe I am, which tells you how skilled the writing is on this show, and how it can jerk you around).
Keiran Culkin and Sarah Snook continue to be good as Roman and Shiv, who get their own storylines, especially Shiv, who firms up into the whole Ivanka thing with ease (the haaaate, I can feel it growing), while Culkin gets the bulk of the zingers from the scripts. Shakespearean stakes aside, the show’s not quite as smart as it thinks it is, with one Kavanagh hearings-inspired episode that was a particular trigger for me and included some highly ludicrous actions that would never, ever have taken place in reality, and you can’t help but think about reality when a show wants you to believe it’s knee deep in the weeds of corporate takeovers and board meetings and the like. It wants you to think this stuff is really happening with the Murdoch family, and tries to make you understand this world without glorifying it. But…it’s still entertainment first, and whenever British writers have their hands in something American politics adjacent, I can always tell where they just don’t get it (cough, race, cough). Even so, the show succeeds where it matters most this season- the personal fight between Logan and his kids, and it pulls off the trick of making me feel very highly invested in where it’s going. For that I salute them, and I salute Brian Cox most of all. Well done, sir.
Grade: A-
Logan Roy loves playing his kids against each other and would rather die than give up the business to any of them
