‘Succession’ Season 2 Episode 3 Recap: Excitable Roy

Jokes? Succession’s got jokes, are you kidding? Succession fuckin’ loves jokes! Succession’s like a big fuckin’ joke-shaped dick, squirting out hot loads of joke sperm, you dumb bastard. “No one is gonna wanna tackle a big angry pufferfish bristling with dick.” “I don’t wanna get into a dick-measuring competition, but I have a better, more powerful dick than you.” “This is about as choreographed as fucking a dog on roller skates.” Jokes, Greg!

“Hunting,” the wearying third episode of Succession’s second season, goes on much like that for the duration. Which is how the whole series has gone on, pretty much: overwrought obscenity delivered as the punchline to a slow and winded setup. No matter who’s talking—that’s Tom, Roman, and Logan above respectively, not that it matters—the jokes come out the same.

This is true even without the crutch of inventive cussing to lean on. Here’s Greg, for example, enthusing about his first flight on a private jet: “It’s like I’m in a band! A very white, very wealthy band. It’s like I’m in U2!” Here’s the windup…and the windup…and the windup…aaaaand the pitch. The idea, I suppose, is that by the time the jokes get where they’re going you’re caught up in the huff-and-puff rhythm and primed to receive whatever they throw at you. I’m mostly just bored.

Maybe I wouldn’t be if every hour-long episode—why this isn’t a half-hour sitcom is beyond me—didn’t make the same two or three points about Logan Roy and his brood over and over again. Logan is a tyrant surrounded by toadies and sycophants. His family consists solely of fail-sons, even the ones who aren’t technically his sons, except for Shiv, who dresses fantastically but doesn’t get to be funny. (“Funny.”) Yes, rich people are parasites who think they’re actually the host organism and treat the poor accordingly. But that’s a starting point for a show. “The rich are monstrous assholes” is a point anyone with a conscience can grasp in two seconds; Succession treats it like they’ve discovered cold fusion.

Anyway, in this week’s dick-filled episode, the Roys are trying to extinguish a few fires at once. Logan dispatches Shiv, his secret heir apparent, to dissuade his eldest son Connor from launching a presidential bid by refusing to pay his taxes. (She fails.) Shiv dispatches Tom, her odious husband to whom she feels superior and is not attracted, to dissuade Logan from buying Pierce, a more respected rival media firm, so as to become to big for his enemies Stewy and Sandy to take over. (He fails.)

And Logan takes the occasion of his braintrust’s retreat to a hunting villa in Hungary to attempt to smoke out the rats he sees everywhere, specifically the one who screwed up his sneak attack on Pierce (that would be Roman) and the one who spoke to his unauthorized biographer (that would be Greg, but it turns out some other guy who just died also spoke to her, so Greg’s off the hook). In the process he bullies and humiliates grown men into attempting to piss in a bucket and crawling around on all fours while oinking before being made to fight over sausages. (George Harrison got there fifty years ago, gang.)

Let me make clear that it’s not like Succession is unwatchable garbage. Matthew Macfadyen and Nicholas Braun remain very funny as Tom and Greg, when the predictability of the joke writing doesn’t get in their way. Kieran Culkin’s just doing schtick as Roman, but it’s decent schtick. I appreciate how bottomed-out and defeated Jeremy Strong makes Kendall look now that he’s been blackmailed back under his father’s thumb. Sarah Snook does with her under-serviced role what she does with her fabulous wardrobe. A show on which she’s just an open hound instead of having to fit in her canoodling around the open-marriage plan she and Tom worked out to accommodate her appetites would be better all around, not least because that’s a rare thing for a woman to be allowed to anchor. Brian Cox is ferocious, though I can’t imagine bellowing is much of a challenge to him as an actor.

And occasionally, very occasionally, there are human moments that make you wonder what Succession would be like if it were written to have actual characters rather than joke delivery mechanisms. The morning after Logan’s abusive party game (“Boar on the floor! Boar on floor!” “THERE ARE NO FUCKING RULES!”), his right-hand woman Gerri (J. Smith-Cameron) approaches the returning Frank Vernon (Peter Friedman), brought back into the fold after his own humiliating ouster in hopes he can help finesse his friends in the Pierce family with the intended merger.

“He said he offered you your job back,” she says, after they exchange grim pleasantries. Quietly, he tells her he’s considering it. Her response is the dictionary definition of dumbfounded, and the first time she’s expressed open rebellion against Logan’s cruelty to anyone: “Why?!”

“I need money to kill a guy in Palermo,” Frank deadpans, referring to Logan revealing the location of Frank’s ex-wife’s new paramour the night before. Then, more seriously: “Baby needs shoes…moth to a flame…” And finally, defeated, disgusted with himself: “I don’t know.”

That “I don’t know” is worth more to me than Logan Roy’s weight in dick jokes. It’s a recognizable human emotion in a show short on them, less because the one percent are uniformly ghoulish (though they are) and more because it’s not a show particularly interested in the human and only passingly intrigued by the recognizable, so long as they can make corny I get that reference jokes about Gawker or whatever. It helps that Smith-Cameron and Friedman are aces, but so is most of the cast. Yet here they all are, milking the dick cow for joke milk. Drink up, I guess.

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 3 ("Hunting") on HBO Go