Alexis Soloski, NY Times - Perhaps you allied for a time with Alan Ruck’s libertarian dingbat, Connor; Jeremy Strong’s rap fan Narcissus, Kendall; Sarah Snook’s knives-out girlboss, Shiv; or Kieran Culkin’s red-pilled Pinocchio, Roman, the youngest son, still dreaming of becoming a real boy. They were all wounded. They were all suffering. They were all mostly terrible….
Opposites of Midas, they injured anyone they touched,
unless those anyones were also armored in their own wealth and privilege.
Another show might have offered characters to contrast this — an innocent,
someone genuinely good. Not this one. Everyone was venal. Everyone was for
sale. Nearly every relationship was a transaction. This was a place where
altruism went to die. . .
Although “Succession” was set and shot in beautiful spaces, those spaces were typically rendered airless, sterile. Few of the characters seemed to enjoy their made-to-measure suiting, their palaces in the sky….
In making these characters easy to watch and difficult to hate, the show ultimately encouraged a kind of cheerful nihilism, a gleeful desire to see what they might break — democracy, one another — in each new episode. Beneath the Shakespearean insults and the Upper East Side penthouses, there was something empty at the heart of “Succession.”
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