SUCCESSION sticks the season three landing hard enough to leave a bruise
Plus more quick reviews including that BUCKAROO BANZAI sequel
It’s Monday, December 13, and here’s where we are…
If you have not seen the season finale of Succession and you plan to watch Succession, bail out now and skip to the next section of the newsletter.
I’m almost done reading Tinderbox: HBO’s Ruthless Pursuit of New Frontiers, the amazing new oral history of HBO by James Andrew Miller, and it’s amazing how much HBO I have inhaled over the years. Even before I had HBO in my house, it was a huge deal, something I desperately wanted. I think we first subscribed to the service sometime in the mid-‘80s, but before that, I had neighbors who had it and friends and one grandmother who knew she could tempt me to stay at her house with the promise that I could glue myself to the TV 24 hours a day to inhale any damn movie they felt like showing.
The original programming really wasn’t HBO’s bread and butter until much later, and watching the network’s identity develop was pretty amazing. I was a huge fan of shows like The Larry Sanders Show and Oz and The Wire and The Sopranos and the onslaught of stand-up comedy programming and watching the rest of television have to play HBO’s game just to stay afloat has been remarkable. It is truly HBO’s world these days, and when they are at the top of their game, it’s pretty much as good as television gets, even now.
This season of Succession is HBO in absolute prime fighting shape, and this final episode of this season may be the best thing the show’s ever done. It feels like they deliberately let the audience feel like they were starting to get ahead of the show, starting to get too hip to the show’s rhythms, and just when it felt like nothing was going to happen… again… everything happened all at once and the entire power structure of the series was upended in a sustained crescendo of absolutely brilliant writing and directing and performing. In a series that is filled with deliciously horrible dialogue every single week, this may stand as one of the densest single episodes, full of bark-out-loud funny lines. Roman’s crack about the gin-and-tonics was incredible, and Tom’s breathless comment about Greg being one car crash away from being Europe’s weirdest king is still making me laugh as I type this. But for all of the world-class-funny things being said, it is the savagery and the emotional brutality that really landed this week.
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