A show about fake ultrarich people played by less rich people watched by poor people. A show that has pretensions about flagellating the rich while still somehow revelling in their debauchery and parasitism, a sort of recursive self-awareness that is supposed to somehow absolve the characters (and the irl rich?). Somehow it is both the sale of anti capitalism back to the anti capitalists whilst also scratching a Keeping Up With the Kardashians itch for watching the inter-familial spats of our feudal overlords.
A contemporary Game of Thrones where everyone is bad and there is no good and it’s just a TV show so it doesn’t matter, which handily conceals the fact that our everyday reality is literally this show, and that the stakes in real life are actually weighty and have moral and material value and can easily be viewed as right and wrong.
Along with a healthy dose of “their daddy was mean to them so it’s not their fault they’re all disgusting bourgeois pigs”.
What the fuck. We desperately need prolekult. I’m so sick of this two faced culture that sells our own hatred back to us and pokes the reward centres in our brain - “hey you just watched a pithy comment that could KIND SORTA be construed as anti capitalist on a million dollar show on a billion dollar network, you’ve done your leftism for the day!”
What stage of capitalism is it when everyone is so widely aware capitalism sucks that the most successful business model is pretending you agree that capitalism sucks?
AAAAAA
Halfway through the pilot I realised, yes, it’s probably good, but rich people in NY? I’ve seen that already.
I think the shows I enjoyed most in the past few years all took place outside of the clichéd NY/LA settings. Righteous Gemstones, Justified, Fargo. Recent Breaking Bad discourse also had me curious if it’s success is not partly explainable by its setting of New Mexico not California as they intended.
At least in House of the Dragon they have dragons and by the end of the show almost every character will have been killed or imprisoned.
No one is supposed to like the characters. The intention is that you’ll empathize with them viz their fucked up relationships to one another.
I don’t wanna empathise with the ultra wealthy. I don’t know if I’m even capable. They’re so alien to me. It’s like empathising with an amoeba
They’re not aliens though? Even the hyper rich are still human beings. It’s the same with being asked to empathize with any anti-hero. Think about the main character in a movie like Nightcrawler. Or, like Hannibal Lecter. The Succession cast is no doubt systematically worse than either of them, but you can argue they’re personally more honorable.
I like it when the Succesion man says “You dont Succesion me… I Succession you!”
I think it’s pretty funny, and I don’t think it’s meant to be anything really intended as anti capitalist. Poking fun at the rich is a very old joke.
