One of the best things about social media is how easy it makes it to get excited about stuff. Seriously. Being a grown up is very tedious. I once saw a three year-old on a train stand on his seat and yell out the window, HELLO, TRAIN! IT’S ME! at a passing train. It was absolutely glorious. When was the last time you were that excited about a train? About anything?
I can tell you when a lot of adults were last that excited, because it was immediately after they watched the season 3 finale of Succession. I’m not here to write one of those Why The Thing You Like Is Actually Shit, You Big Baby articles that The Guardian loves, but it’s important that we face up to the fact that Succession is perfectly cast, features some absolutely killer dialogue and also is mostly filler. What did we get from the episode where they all go to ‘pick the next president’? That the Roys are very powerful and willing to tolerate Nazis, something we already knew (and that the left love a conspiracy theory as much as anyone else which, again, we already knew). What did we get from the episode with Kendall’s birthday party? That Kendall feels very sad and disconnected from the people around him, and that Roman can be a huge dick. Again, we knew this from roughly scene one, episode one, season one.
When it’s not telling us things we already know, the show has an equally bad habit of creating subplots and then abruptly dropping them. Remember when Roman and some of the other execs were held hostage for a while in season two? Well, never mind, because neither do any of the main characters. It was pure filler. And take this season: is Greg still suing Greenpeace? We don’t know.
What we do know is that the suing-Greenpeace sublot played beautifully on social media. Greenpeace tweeted Nicolas Braun, the actor who plays Greg, about it. He tweeted them back. Save the Children got involved. We loved it. It was way better (and way different) than all those weird times McDonald’s pretended to be depressed and some other sandwich shop pretended to be supportive.
OHMYGOD. SUCCESSION, we said. WHAT A FINALE. DID NOT SEE THAT COMING. NO SPOILERS BUT [Edvard Munch’s The Scream but it’s an emoji]x5. We shared screenshots of Roman shrinking into himself after accidentally sending his dad a dick pic, and compared him with the British Prime Minister’s (former) Press Secretary. We shared parody videos, wrote lyrics to the theme tune and put them on our Soundcloud. We did this even if we didn’t watch the show, or halfwatched it while scrolling, or if we don’t really know what Soundcloud is or what it’s for.
It’s social media that made this possible, of course: the kind of shared experience in which you can participate without having to do very much. Maybe just skim-read a recap. Don’t even do that, just tweet something like ‘Ugh, everyone’s talking about #Succession. Am I going to have to watch all three seasons this weekend so I can join in?’ and, miraculously, you have joined in.
Succession‘s flaws are exactly what makes it perfect for this kind of engagement. The actual big moments are sufficiently well-executed that it allows us to skim over the repetition and filler, but social media greases the skids for us, allows us to rapidly weed through the nonsense and get to the Good Stuff. The filler is, by its nature, forgettable, and that works perfectly because social media is, by its nature, forgetful, with trends coming and going at intoxicating speed (and this is so even if the underlying technology has an unfortunate tendency to remember). There’s a rapid, nearly instant, collective agreement on what’s good, which creates a consensus which, within the chamber of social media, comes to seem nearly invincible (so that, e.g., The Last Jedi can be a critical and financial success, while also being regarded as a failure, because social media pronounced it so, and that’s where we go to talk about films). One the consensus has been reached, it’s impossible to re-evaluate because all the tweets are still there and because everyone has already moved on.
Succession has enough big names and enough good stuff about it that it would probably have been a success without social media, but the hype around it is a perfect social media confection, like one of Logan’s babymaking supersmoothies: mostly froth. But delicious froth. And it sure seems like it’s doing something.
Frank Podmore 