It was however many days/months/years? into the Great Melbourne COVID-19 lockdown of 2020, when every day felt identical, just with different weather, and there was naught to do each night but stream TV shows and movies. But fresh content has slowed to a trickle to the extent that (as I can only imagine, as TV has trained me to), like someone fresh out of prison, entertainment media that once held no appeal had suddenly become enticing. Such was the case for me with the TV show Succession – given a new gloss in my mind upon learning to my surprise, nay shock, during an appearance on Chapo Traphouse, one of America's 'dirtbag left' podcasts, that Adam McKay (The Big Short) was not only a producer of the show, alongside Will Ferrell, but also directed its pilot.
And so it came to be this world-weary reviewer, who's filled the pages of newspapers, magazines and websites with his various pop-cultural dissections, stood at the base of a mountainous two seasons of critically-acclaimed, award-winning prestige drama, wondering just what awaited him in the sole piece of #resistancetv that seemed hospitable to him – the only one he had the fortitude to brave. The Handmaid's Tale adaptation being about as appealing as free-climbing an ice wall without so much as crampons on my boots. Maybe Ötzi the Iceman would have had the fortitude to get more than ten minutes into Miss America before begging for the sweet embrace of the crevasse, but this reviewer would've happily rappelled into the abyss. So Succession it would be, and probably Succession alone. Whatever awaited there nonetheless piqued my curiosity.
Would it be suffused with the same Dad Energy of Billions, the series it seemed most similar to upon initial reconnaissance? Would this too become a hate-watch of an overly-written, highly produced “victory lap for neoliberal hypercapitalism,” as a friend put it over a chat session, as I steeled myself to scale this outcropping of the global entertainment industry whose control it was orientated around?