Before I get into Succession, monsters, humans and more… (and to ensure no one accidentally scrolls down too fast and finds the episode spoiled):
I recently finished up at The Journal after 12 great years. I did a lot of growing up there, and that helped me to realise that as much as I loved the people I worked with (it truly was my second family), and that it would be strange not to be part of the team and watch it continue to grow, it was time to go pursue new things.
I wrote a bit about it here on Instagram:
I’m now moving my journalistic focus more into writing/talking about arts and culture topics, as well as features, and have some cool stuff lined up. I also want to prioritise my own writing and try some new projects at this stage in my career.
This month, I’m prepping for the launch of my first book Social Capital (see below).
But I’m also just giving my brain a bit of a rest after what’s been a hugely intense 18 months or so - or honestly, a hugely intense 3 years since Covid. We live in an era where hustle culture nestles up against late-stage four-hour-week culture, crossed with productivity obsession culture and capitalism-masquerading-as-wellness culture, so it feels weird to prioritise myself for a few weeks in a genuine way. But thanks to a bit of planning and the realisation that if I didn’t do it now, I would seriously regret it, I’ve been taking the past week and a half ‘handy’. I haven’t been getting up at 5am and journalling, or doing ‘hot girl’ walks or manifesting an entirely new life. I’ve tried to catch up on sleep, let some ideas percolate, ticked difficult long-ignored tasks off my to-do list, bought paint samples, had meetings, started an oil painting of a heron (overseen by my mum), saw friends and family, and worried about money (the freelancer’s curse).
I did some radio work - I was on Screentime on Newstalk talking about my favourite comedies with Chris Wasser and presenter John Fardy (great fun); did my regular slot on Today with Claire Byrne talking about TV and films out in April alongside Brian Reddin; and did the music slot on The Last Word with John Caddell on Today FM. Thanks so much to everyone who has been supportive about my career progression - it’s meant a lot. My send-off from The Journal had me in tears at one point, it was so lovely. I felt the weight of this decision heavily, so to have it go well so far… I don’t take any of it for granted.
Hopefully you’ll be glad to hear that I’m looking forward to writing more for this newsletter, so thanks to all who’ve signed up so far. Please do share with any friends who might enjoy my writing.
Second spoiler warning: If you haven’t yet watched episode 3 of Season 4 of Succession, then back the fuck out of here right now.
Late last year, I started experiencing the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. After losing my dad and stepdad in quick succession, I started to see death and grief everywhere. I went to a play not long after the deaths with a friend who’d also lost a parent at the same time, and midway through the play we realised to our horror it was about… grief. A film I’d been anticipating all year - Aftersun - was about a dad who died. I put on My Life, an amazing album by Iris de Ment, and all of a sudden copped that lyrics to songs I’d listened to many times before were about death. My Life = death. No Time To Cry = a dead dad. (That one had me in floods.) Death was everywhere, inescapable, and art I loved was irritatingly reminding me of what I’d lost and the fact I was grieving.
Soon, though, I realised something else, something more basic, but profound in its basicness. Death was indeed everywhere. It was not really the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon I was experiencing, just a new phase of adult life where I was slightly more alert to an experience that affected everyone. I was in no way special. It was like a bloody Paolo Coelho book: the answer was inside me all along! No need to climb a mountain and talk to some sheep (this is all I remember from the one book of his I read, donkey’s years ago) to figure out the answer.
Death and grief were everywhere I looked because they are an essential part of living. The yin and yang of being born onto this planet; the flipside to the gift of living - call it what you will, it’s the basic reality of mortality. It’s the price we all pay for being alive. I had just been free to pretend that it didn’t really happen, because even though I had experienced death, this new experience landed with me a different way. Now I had to suck it up and get on with living while knowing I would never forget about dying.
I thought about all this during the most recent episode of Succession, when the Roy kids grappled to come to terms with the family patriarch’s death. Logan Roy died (as he threatened to do early in Season 1) up in the air, in a liminal space on a private aircraft, floating in the borderless sky. This location functioned as a metaphor for how difficult it was for his children to grasp what was happening, for the actual fact of his death to land. The fact seemed at times not to be true, but, crucially, they also did not want it to be true.
What this episode did was demonstrate how, though the Roys are monsters, they are also human. We have watched them play out their roles in the world of the ultra rich, a place we know they occupy because of the symbols of wealth they hold: the private helicopters, the ugly-but-expensive clothes and suits, the personality-free apartments with floor-to-ceiling windows looking out onto Manhattan; the harried minders and PAs who hide snarls behind their blank smiles; the ping-ponging around of incomprehensible sums of money as if they were tossing a few dimes in their open palms. We know they occupy a space most of us do not, and we know they reap the countless benefits of that.
But part of living in that rarified space is insulation from real life. When the Roy kids - Kendall, Shiv, Roman, and latterly Connor, who is last to find out (on his wedding day) about Logan’s collapse - assemble and, via a phonecall from Tom Wambsgans, learn of their father’s situation, the first thing they try to do is control it. Kendall gets on the phone to Jess, an assistant, and orders her to get the best medical staff out to his dad. He wants the task carried out in minutes. He also demands to be allowed speak to the pilot of the plane. For a second, I thought his requests might be granted, given his societal rank. But no: it was a delusion that he could do anything about his father’s demise in the sky. This was one situation where he and his siblings could not get anyone else to do their bidding, no matter how many threats, insults or promises they made, or how much money they flung at it.
From the initial phone call from Tom (including the many missed calls to Shiv), to the final scenes where Logan’s body is removed from the plane, the Roys were brought down to the level of the everyperson when it came to their dad’s death. They might physically and socially be in a different world to most people, but they experienced many of the same things that the people they boss around or ignore experience when it comes to death. The unexpected phone call. The lack of clarity about what was actually happening. The ‘Is he? Isn’t he?’ confusion around wondering whether someone has passed on or not. The presuming that with a lack of indisputable evidence, the truth could not be the truth (Roman kept, up to the last minute, insisting his dad could really be alive). The offer of saying a few final words to a dying parent, knowing that whatever you say is futile in capturing what you really want to express.
Succession didn’t provide the kids with the chance of a Hollywood ending with their father, either explosive or emotional. They struggled to find the right words, like many would in that situation; Roman wondered if he really had told his dad he loved him, as he had forgotten minutes later what he’d said to him. The dialogue in these scenes was peppered with ‘uhs’ and ‘what’s, not fully-formed sentences. Just like ordinary people, the Roys were faced with death and found themselves lost for words. To make things more complicated, of course, was the fact their dad was monstrous, and yet they loved him in the way that many love monstrous or just plain complicated parents and family. A knotty, difficult, but real love. It would have been a little easier, maybe, if their father was not a domineering man who treated his relationships with them like a game, and them like puppets he could manipulate at will. If he hadn’t pulled and clawed at them through his words, if he hadn’t taught them how to think ego-first. But he did, and they knew it, but they still loved him. Only Connor was able to disconnect himself from his father to a degree, because he - tragically - had realised his father’s lack of love for him.
Succession is, on one level, about a major business decision: who will succeed Logan Roy when he dies? But scratch that away and underneath the layer of foil is the truth: Succession is about a flawed family who are more human than they wish they were. In losing their father, the Roy kids - who were literally at sea when the incident happened - could not find any sort of logic or power that would bring them out on top. Jesse Armstrong, creator of Succession, and his team of writers often bamboozle us with business terms, deals and boardroom banter that can be confusing and a little boring (to, er, me). But that’s all a cover for the fact they are writing about damaged, preposterous and fucked-up humans who can be totally monstrous, incapable of doing anything other than playing a gigantic game of human chess with the people in their orbit.
By taking Logan Roy’s character and killing him, everything is stripped away to reveal the humanity in Logan’s children. That doesn’t mean they are now pure, distilled human beings who will go on to become wonderful business leaders and thoughtful members of their community. They will continue to act like complete fuck-ups and we will undoubtedly see how they go on to manipulate each other in their quest to keep control over their father’s company. But for this one episode, they became truly human: they faced a horrifying situation, and could do absolutely nothing about it.
That’s where the gold in Succession lies. Through this episode we could begin to feel empathy for people who are the worst of the worst, knowing what they were going through. It’s quite a juicy thing for the Succession team to do, to pull the rug out from everyone like that. But empathy or not, it doesn’t mean we have to like the Roys. That would be a step too far altogether.