‘Succession’ Episode 1 Recap: The Family That Preys Together

Succession is a very funny television program. That’s a relief, since it was created by Peep Show and The Thick of It‘s Jesse Armstrong and directed by Anchorman‘s Adam McKay (working in his Big Short vein); it weren’t funny, that would be kind of troubling. But I’d like to start this Succession Episode 1 review of its premiere by discussing a scene that isn’t funny at all.

This scene stars — deliberately, I believe — the surface-level funniest character: Roman Roy, the most Loki-like of the children of powerful paterfamilias Logan Roy. Where Logan is played by Brian Cox, still deploying the same slightly slackjawed look of utter contempt he used so effectively as the original Hannibal Lecter in Manhunter 33 years ago, Roman is Kieran Culkin, who at 35 has the lopsided haircut and simultaneously sleepy and lively eyes of an asshole half his age.

Until this point, Roman’s presence has manifested itself mostly as a mocking thorn in the side of his would-be power-player brother Kendall (a strong Jeremy Strong), who’s frantically spent the day trying to secure a deal designed to be the front-and-center jewel when he’s crowned heir to his father’s media empire. By now we’ve learned that Roman has already flamed out of the family business — though when his dad asks his kids to sign over extra power to his latest wife, Marcy (Hiam Abbass), we discover Roman still has aspirations to movie-moguldom, to the point where he wants to push out Logan’s old friend and legal adviser Frank (Peter Friedmann, one of TV’s most likable character actors) to pave the way. “As you know,” he tells his father in confidence when complaining about his lack of autonomy during his previous stint trying to run the family firm’s film studio, “I’m quite an innovative thinker, and I was met with a lot of resistance.” As best we can tell, his big idea was something called Robot Olympics.

Be that as it may. Roman is still the funny guy, the wiseacre, the one who deflates his siblings and siblings-in-law’s pretensions with f-bombs, the one who takes part in a family meeting about control of the company while lying upside-down on a divan or something. To the extent that he’s cruel at all, it’s to his own flesh and blood and their hangers-on, all of whom seem like they can take it, most of whom seem like they deserve it.

Then, during a grotesque and depressing faux-spontaneous family outing for a game of softball on a gray autumn afternoon — it involves multiple limos, helicopters, and a support staff; you can feel both money and carbon emissions burning before your very eyes — Kendall gets called away from the game to close his disastrous deal, and Roman gets an idea. Since a new player is needed to keep the teams even, he approaches the young son of a couple watching from the sidelines and offers him a million dollars, via a check he cuts right then and there, should the kid hit a home run.

Everything that happens after that point is perfectly appalling. While some members of the family seem at least somewhat disgusted by Roman’s display, no one does anything to stop it either. Frank, the guy who doesn’t yet realize Roman’s pushed him out the door, “jokingly” offers to go to bat instead, briefly grabbing the bat and then letting it go in one of those hideous interactions between an adult and a child where the adult reveals something base that the child can’t quite yet understand. When the kid hits the ball, the family members in the field play like it’s a regular at-bat; no one even considers letting the kid make it to home plate, and he gets tagged out at third.

You’d think the coup de grace for the scene would be Roman grinning his way through a bunch of “boo hoo too bad so sad” taunts, and tearing the check up right in front of the kid’s face before handing him a scrap as a souvenir, displaying a level of cruelty that’s shocking in its capriciousness. And yeah, it’s pretty bad.

But I’ll tell you what really got to me. Logan, a blustery I-don’t-give-a-damn egomaniac reaching his twilight years but still determined to hang on to power, has been watching all this time, slumped into a lawn chair beneath a black winter coat and sunglasses and hat. After his son finishes mocking this kid, Logan gets up and approaches the boy. He doesn’t apologize for Roman’s behavior, though, and he certainly doesn’t cut him a replacement check (though he does later award the boy’s parents the Pathek Philippe watch his tryhard son-in-law-to-be Tom (Matthew Macfayden) gave him as a birthday gift, along with a non-disclosure agreement). “Magnificent effort,” he tells the kid, extending his hand; the boy thanks him, sincerely, and shakes it, before returning to his parents for comfort.

That fucking crushed me, I’m not going to lie. It crushed me that this billionaire maniac could sit and watch his offspring ritualistically humiliate a child and think to himself “I know how to make this right: I will congratulate this young man on a job well done, and he will be grateful for my noblesse oblige.” It crushed me to see that he was right: The kid did respond, almost instinctively, to the praise of an Important Person.

It crushed me that this all took place as part of some kind of performance of family — a group of people with money in their veins instead of blood, continuing some kind of yearly tradition none of them have probably actually enjoyed in decades, spending most of the time scheming about (titular concept alert) succession in the outfield or the ersatz dugout while employees get paid to cart around a custom-made scoreboard that I’m not sure even gets used.

There’s more to the premiere than this one part of this one sequence, obviously. The on-a-dime switch from politics to business made by Logan’s daughter Shiv (Sarah Snook). The equally abrupt shift between shy and retiring tech brainiac to cutthroat corporate marauder made by Lawrence Yee (Rob Yang), who’s driving a hard bargain against Kendall for his “portfolio of online brands and digital video content” (ugh). The aw-shucks but totally shameless appeal to nepotism made by Greg (Nicholas Braun), a relatively distant relative who comes directly to Logan for help when he abandons all hope of working his way up from the bottom after he gets stoned on his first day as a mascot at one of the company’s amusement parks and barfs through his costume’s eyeholes.

The sociopathic pseudo-sexual harassment Tom subjects Greg to when he gets wind that the kid is trying to land a high-ranking job in the parks division. The unglamorous portrayal of turning 80, a birthday that begins with Logan pissing in his closet in the middle of the night because he can’t remember the layout of this particular house and ends with his brain hemorrhaging in a helicopter. Kendall trashing his dad’s bathroom after he gets the news that the old man isn’t handing him the reins, then cleaning up after himself.

But as I continue to follow the adventures of Logan Roy and his failfamily, it’s the baseball scene I’ll keep in mind: Roman cutting the check then ripping it up, and none of his impossibly rich relatives doing a goddamn thing to compensate except Logan offering a regular kid the brief attention of his betters. Rejoice and be glad, peasant. Don’t you know you’re in the presence of royalty?

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.

Watch Succession Episode 1 ("Celebration") on HBO Go