‘Succession’ Season 2 Episode 2 Recap: What Happened to That Roy

Never let it be said that Succession doesn’t know its audience. Effusively chattered about by New York’s downwardly mobile professional media chatterers, the series this week served up an inside look at its fictional BuzzFeed/Gawker equivalent, “Vaulter.” (The company name doubled as the episode title.)

The fake headlines generated in the storyline about the gutting of a once-promising new media company display the kind of laser-focused contempt that the phrase “it takes one to know one” is meant to cover; whoever came up with “Meet the World’s Richest People Trafficker (He’s a Surprisingly Nice Guy),” “5 Reasons Why Drinking Milk on the Toilet Is Kind of a Game-Changer,” and “Is Every Taylor Swift Song Secretly Marxist?” has a devotée’s, or perhaps even a veteran’s, familiarity with the milieu.

So does the company’s fate. Upon discovering first that the site’s numbers had been artificially inflated prior to its sale to Waystar Royco and then that the employees are planning to unionize, Logan Roy orders the whole thing destroyed. Four hundred thirty-odd people lose their jobs and health care benefits immediately, with paltry severance package that itself will evaporate the moment they break their non-disclosure agreements. One editor, five interns, and user-generated content will keep the few remaining pieces lurching along, zombie-like, without all those pesky side effects to running a business like “paying people a living wage for their labor.”

Logan’s hatchetman for this execution isn’t his sleazy son Roman, who wheedled the union info out of drunk employees and therefore proposed gutting the place himself. It’s Kendall, who argued it had potential and wanted to keep it afloat. Even his ill-fated pep rally for the employees, with whom he pleaded not to unionize, winds up doubling as a way for him to milk a few more ideas out of people who had about 24 hours of employment left. And as a “reward” for being a good soldier and destroying one of his pet projects, Kendall gets to share office space with his awful old man. When Kendall is angrily confronted by Vaulter founder Lawrence about why he’s doing this, he coughs up a dead-eyed “Because my dad told me to.”

The way he looks during all this is pretty much the way I feel watching it.

The thing about the Vaulter storyline is that all the jokes are the obvious ones if you follow the media business at all. Clickbait, SEO, Facebook algorithm changes, unionization, almond milk in the cafeteria, a lot of good-looking twentysomethings with glasses, pivot to video, middle-class marxism, union busting … yes yes, we all get it.

What I don’t get is why jokes so accurate they barely qualify as jokes require such a slovenly wind-up. The looseness of Succession—the improvisatory stop-start feel of the dialogue with all its repetitions and “um”s and “yeah”s, the amount of time spent watching people just walk into rooms, the handheld shakicam and its innate inability to stay steady for long—better befits more nuanced material, where giving the audience the time and freedom to interpret and focus as they will is a necessary component to the filmmaking. Here it just feels…lazy. Like, all this just to say that rich people fuck over the poor(er) people who work for them, especially in digital news media? Billions would do this in a two-sentence exchange between Wags and Dollar Bill and have plenty of room left over for Paul Giamatti in a bondage harness. (Billions is also way too tightly written a show to generate joke headlines like the above, which as funny as they are undercut the vital-to-the-story notion that this might be a business worth saving.)

The episode’s other storylines suffer from a similar surfeit of breathing room. Shiv’s lack of principles is disguised somewhat by her not being a nightmare the way her husband and brothers and father all are—that, plus never bothering to give her anything funny to say—but it’s still pretty obvious after watching a season-plus of the show. Drawing out her decision to ditch an offer to be presidential hopeful Gil “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Bernie!” Eavis’s White House Chief of Staff in order to accept her father’s proposal that she take over when he retires doesn’t add anything other than screentime.

During said screentime, unfortunately, we’re given ample opportunity to wonder why the hell she’s married to her thoroughly awful husband Tom in the first place. She’s aroused by power and deceit, not by him, and thus wants to have sex with him only insofar as power and/or deceit are involved. He clearly resents her to-the-manner-born condescension to him, as well he should. But he himself is a loathsome sociopath, relentlessly cruel to those beneath him (like Cousin Greg) and able to overcome what little objection he musters to the racism of his new right-wing fiefdom, the ATN news network, because principles are for losers. I feel like we’re supposed to think genuine human feelings are involved in the question of whether or not Tom and Shiv’s marriage will succeed. The feelings of the servants they’ll sack should the relationship fall apart, maybe, but theirs? They’d have to be human first.

Other than that, I dunno. Connor, perhaps the worst of the whole bunch, intends to go forward with his presidential run, a joke that, hoo boy, is just not that funny anymore. Roman and Kendall are in a race for last place in the eyes of their father that Roman incorrectly believes is a race for first. Greg keeps bumbling, and when he’s centered in the episode’s sole interesting shot it’s so out of place it feels like it was left in by accident. Kendall keeps feeling guilty for leaving the scene of a fatal accident. All this took an hour to explore, an hour during which you’ll feel like you’ve wandered through fifteen to twenty large Manhattan properties while losing track of what anyone was doing in any of them. I guess that’s the joke. Ha ha.

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.

Stream Succession Season 2 Episode 2 ("The Vaulter") on HBO Go

Stream Succession Season 2 Episode 2 ("The Vaulter") on HBO Now