Is there anywhere in the great landscape of aesthetic confusion a sure guide that would allow us to shun the arid plains of austere and empty formalism, the banal shallows of mediocre uplift and compromise, not to mention the great sunken morasses of foul and pestilent postmodernism, and instead to tread always the balmy highlands of certain good taste, and walk amid the lofty verdant oaks of past genius, blessed alike by the cooling breezes of enlightened reason and the warm, beneficent sun of charity? Can one, in sum, know right from wrong and embrace without error the good, the true, and the beautiful, and abide with them forever?
I believe one can. Simply think the opposite of whatever Ross Douthat has to say and you’re home free. For example, take a gander at the Rossman’s rap concerning the current MAX must see, Succession, in a column grandly titled Put ‘Succession’ in the TV Pantheon:
Two weeks ago, I critiqued “Succession,” mildly, for the overestimation of elite power in its portrait of American democracy. Today I come to praise it — for a perfect series finale and a successful final season that together raised the show to the top rank of TV serials, the most successful examples of the central popular art form of our time.
This is perhaps a controversial judgment, annoying to the many people annoyed by aspects of the “Succession” phenomenon (for instance, by the media types Twittering and hot-taking obsessively about a niche-audience show), and simply mistaken if you regard the show as both too sitcom-ish and too unstintingly dark to rank with “The Wire,” “The Sopranos,” “Mad Men” or “Breaking Bad.”
Since that was roughly my view going into the final season, let me explain why I changed my mind — first by emphasizing the distinctive strengths of “Succession” relative to other successful serials, and second by answering the strongest critique of its limitations. (And let me offer, as well, a pre-emptive qualifier: My current view is that there isn’t exactly a top rank of serial television; rather, there’s “The Sopranos” on its own Olympus and the rest, “Succession” now included, a little further down.)
Okay, that’s an awful lot of Ross, but, well, the guy is not exactly concise, and it takes a while for him to formulate, you know, a “thought”, so let me summarize: “Succession is Great! Not Sopranos great—that would be impossible—but definitely The Wire great, Mad Men great, and Breaking Bad great! So, pretty damn great!”
Goaded by Ross’s praise—and, I suspect, an unattractive desire to prove him wrong—I signed up for MAX, expecting the show to provide at least some entertainment, as well as fodder for the sort of semi-amused pummeling I handed out back in the day to a number of the shows highlighted by Ross, in such posts for the Bright Lights Film Journal as Heavy TV: Breaking Bad, Girls, and Mad Men and Heavy TV, Part Deux: Breaking Bad ends badly, Girls gets girly, and Mad Men explores sex, death, and ketchup, as well as Hey, Netflix! “The Crown” sucks! and The Crown, Season 2: Yeah, Queen! for this blog. The thing is, these shows usually managed some measure of insight, or even, you know, emotion, along with the inevitable self-congratulatory posturing and manipulation endemic to “prestige TV”. And I would have watched all four seasons of Succession too, if the show had even a morsel of wit, imagination, or energy to offer. But it doesn’t. It offers nothing at all except a single, one note dirge: Rich people are shits! Rich people are shits! Rich people are shits! As a result, I never made it through episode six of season one.
In their zeal to display their liberal contempt for “evil” big business, every member of media magnate Logan Roy’s sprawling clan, modeled with painstaking unoriginality on the Murdoch family, is portrayed by show’s “creators” as such a pathetic excuse for a human being that it’s impossible to imagine any of them running anything, much less a media “empire”. I mean, in “real” life, how many business meetings end with the parties shouting “fuck you!” at one another? In Succession, they all do.
Emblematic to the entire show is its treatment of the semi-demi heir, Kendall Roy (Jeremy Strong), a character conceived, one might say, as the “not Don Draper”. In Mad Men, Don Draper, in Jon Hamm’s legendary performance, is a sort of pagan god, a magnificent animal endowed with limitless power and grace, and entirely without compassion or remorse. Kendall Roy is a pathetic wimp.
The writers delight in making Kendall look incompetent and foolish, a little boy pretending to be man. Given any mundane task—making an espresso, for example—Kendall will flub it. All that’s missing is the wah-wah-wah “laughing trumpets” on the soundtrack. And this, in Succession, at least, is “character development”!
The others are no better. Kendall’s brother Roman (Kieran Culkin) is essentially Kendall but more coky. There’s wimpy yet I guess cunning poor relation Greg Hirsch (Nicholas Braun), who will I suspect metamorphize into a “playa”, more or less along the lines of Michael Corleone in The Godfather—which is, of course, more or less the “Godfather” of all of this schtick—but I just couldn’t wait for little Greg to get his wings. As for the rest, well, let ‘em rest. The thought of watching the Roys be rude to servants and snarl “fuck you” to all and sundry for four full seasons was more than I could bear. I have better fish to fry.
Afterwords
My subscription to MAGA has not been a complete bust. I found The White House Plumbers, a “true-ish”, five-episode account of the misadventures of former CIA dude E. Howard Hunt (Woody Harrelson) and former FBI guy G. Gordon Liddy (Justin Theroux) during the Watergate years to be quite entertaining, despite its frequent departure from the “facts”. It’s likely that “E” and “G” were destined for one another, as the only two men in DC who went by their first initials, but what’s really entertaining is the culture clash that occurs when the Hunts and the Liddys have dinner together, with Lena Headley as Dorothy Hunt and Judy Greer as Fran Liddy. The Hunts affect an upper middle class life style—Howard belongs to four fashionable Washington clubs while Fran spends much of her time on horseback—while the Liddys live very much in a world of their own, constructed by Gordon’s paranoid dreams of power and glory and Fran’s cheerful enabling. Both actresses give charming performances as intelligent, compassionate women struggling to maintain a home for themselves and their children despite being trapped in marriages to men who are clearly in way over their heads and headed for disaster. Woody and Justin, meanwhile, portray bumbling would-be masters of “tradecraft” who are ultimately puppets/stooges/victims/fallguys for slick, higher-level bumbling would-be masters of tradecraft.
Beyond the Plumbers is And Just Like That, a surprisingly successful “update” on the lives of three of the four leads of my all-time TV fave rave, Sex and the City. I’m only about half way through the first season, but the episodes are surprisingly good, if you can overlook the fact, which I usually can, that it must take Carrie about three hours to dress in the morning, her outfits are so extravagant and so immaculate, but, hey, we all gotta mourn in our own style. (In case you hadn’t heard, Big is dead.) There is, naturally, “extreme” fluidity when it comes to gender this time around, so we’ll just have to see how that plays out. Every generation is entitled to its own mistakes, after all.
Afterwords, Part Deux: Why Ross’s “Pantheon” sucks
The mainspring of “prestige TV” is the attractiveness of evil. As I say, this goes back to The Godfather, which I did not like at all, precisely for its glorification of evil, for its account of how sissy “college boy” Michael Corleone transforms himself into a swaggering Mafia prince, gloating at the bloody demise of his enemies. The Sopranos is simply a continuation of this schtick. I particularly disliked the portrayal of Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) as “just a little boy”, which is precisely not what gangsters are. Orson Welles, bless his enlarged heart, had the last word on gangsters:
The Godfather was the glorification of a bunch of bums who never existed. The best of them were the kind of people you’d expect to drive a beer truck. They had no class. The classy gangster is a Hollywood invention.
Hollywood folks have a love/hate relationship with “evil” because they are, well, “evil”, or at least want to be. They “expose” power and privilege and obsess over it at the same time. They want power, and they admire people who get it, and they love the trinkets that exemplify it, which explains the endless references to thousand-dollar bottles of champagne, whiskey, and wine, the posh residences, the sick rides, the designer labels, the Louboutins and Blahniks, etc., etc, etc., trinkets to which screenwriters so pathetically aspire and which so pathetically fill their scripts and dreams. If you don’t have a taste for power, and don’t dream of the trinkets, then you need to go back to Kansas, where people are decent and stupid, and don’t know an ortolan from a hole in the ground. A show like Breaking Bad is really an allegory for the “development” of a bookish kid who loves reading and grows up to become, first, a struggling, put-upon Hollywood wannabe, hoping just to get a foot in the door so he can pitch his precious script, who then, if the gods choose to smile upon him, transforms ultimately into a ruthless “show runner”/media baron with a gorgeous pad on the beach, a $50 million pied-à-terre in the Big Apple, a 10,000 acre spread in Montana, and, oh, a couple of other places. And, as Walter “confesses” at the end of Breaking Bad, it wasn’t for his family. It was for himself. “I enjoyed every minute of it.” He enjoyed killing people, bending them to his will, ruling over others, and, most of all, savoring “revenge”. This is the true pleasure of life, and anyone who lacks the belly for it is nothing but a goddamned pussy who needs to get out of town.
