When the third season of “Succession” premièred, a couple of weeks ago, some viewers watching on HBO Max experienced a glitch: instead of being brought to the first episode of the new season, they found themselves rewatching the first episode of the entire series.
The series, a brilliant tragedy-satire of the corporate élite, created by the British comedy writer Jesse Armstrong, is centered on the question of who will succeed Logan, a fearsome Rupert Murdoch-like mogul who closes roughly seventy per cent of his interactions with the epithet “Fuck off!” Although Kendall is initially presented as the heir apparent, it soon becomes clear that he is not cut out for the job, and that neither are his equally power-hungry siblings: Shiv , an ingenuous arriviste who, long-limbed and blunder-prone, provides much of the show’s comic relief.
“The Incans, in times of terrible crises, would sacrifice a child to the sun,” Logan told Kendall, who agreed to assume culpability for the scandals in order to stabilize the company.
Logan, who is holed up in Sarajevo in order to guard against extradition, continues to shuffle his underlings like cards, picking one and then another as potential successors and also as possible prison-bound scapegoats.
Kendall lands a couple of victories, including securing the star defense attorney Lisa Arthur During a secret meeting, which, in a nice, infantilizing touch, takes place in Kendall’s tween daughter’s bedroom, he nearly persuades his siblings to team up with him against their father.
In the hands of less able custodians, this kind of narrative rehashing would become bland, but as I watched the new season it felt as if “Succession” were becoming more pleasurably itself with every episode, drilling down even deeper into its core as a study of the human thirst for domination.
He is also obsessed with tracking the public’s response to his newfound reputation as a whistle-blower, asking Greg to “slide the sociopolitical thermometer up the nation’s ass and take a reading.” The hapless sidekick checks Twitter and notes that Kendall is “the No.
The Gen X grunge anthem is intended as a righteous signal of alliance with the women who’d suffered at the hands of Waystar, but it comes off as a cheap gimmick, an act of solidarity that is just as canned as Shiv’s largely decorative role.
All attempts to undermine Logan’s empire are toothless, whether they take the form of rote jokes served on a late-night show called “The Disruption” , who puts the C.E.O.
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