The Success of Succession
The acclaim heaped upon the TV series
‘Succession’ is an almost perfect example of the paucity of wisdom and
demonstrable lack of taste of so-called TV critics. The near universal praise
for this mediocre drama is only comprehensible by accepting that those who find
the programme commendable are seriously lacking in sound judgement and artistic
appreciation
The drama is a very long-winded account of an
ageing, insensitive and bullying media mogul (Logan Roy) and his four scheming
children, who all jockey for position in an attempt to win his favour and
inherit his corrupt media empire.
All the characters in this interminable saga are
odious in the extreme, not one of them possesses any quality which could even
be loosely described as admirable. They are all stock stereotypes of evil,
grasping capitalists with not a moral bone in their expletive ridden bodies.
The script is littered with so many and such
frequent profanities, that if all the swear words were removed the drama could
have been reduced by several episodes. In fact, the level of swearing is so
invasive as to prove intrusive and detrimental to the dramatic flow of the
dialogue.
In many scenes the degree of dramatic torment is so exaggerated as to become cartoonish and totally unbelievable. The episode in which the father (Logan Roy) dies on an aeroplane delivers an opportunity for the four children to indulge in the most childish and over-acted display of phony grief ever witnessed in any TV drama. Their individual responses to the news of their father’s demise are without exception risible in the extreme.
For any drama to be truly engaging it requires characters who in some measure can elicit our empathy and understanding, so that we are able to learn something enlightening about the world, or discover within ourselves some new appreciation about the complexities of the human condition, Unfortunately, ‘Succession’ serves only to illustrate the shallowness and mediocrity of much of modern TV drama. It certainly does not deserve its plaudits, or its ubiquitous hype.
