Trivialising ourselves to death.

Succession is not King Lear.

Don’t forget to vote for the best British novelist. Current leaders are Austen, Dickens, Eliot, Joyce, Woolf. I will send out a second round of voting to paid subscribers at the weekend. Some names will be added by fiat. Make the case for your author in the comments but only names in the voting form go through—you should be able to adjust your voting if needed. Sarah Harkness wrote about her favourite authors. Jonathan Porteous gives a running commentary on my shortlist. Paul Imgrund make a list of his own. Eliot Wilson argues for Graham Greene (as have one or two others). I agree with David Roberts: Powell is a major novelist. (I can’t remember why I left Powell off the list: who to bump?) Overall, the comments and discussion are making the GOAT VOTE a very worthwhile exercise!

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With his customary elegant terseness, in the FT, Janan Ganesh writes,

Most 35-year-old YA readers don’t presume to be stretching themselves to their limits (and might therefore be getting their aesthetic challenges from other sources). Whereas I fear much of the Succession audience really has bought the journalistic conceit that it is what Shakespeare would be writing now instead of King Lear.

I watched the first four episodes of Succession recently, to see if I was letting my belief that the golden age of television is made of tin foil was leading me to miss out. But no. The show that inspired the LA Times to print a fake obituary and that had a plot twist on the front page of the Daily Mail is exactly what you would expect—a soap opera, not the great drama of our time.

The fact that audiences didn’t want the show to end, despite the title, is part of the problem: drama resolves; Netflix keeps streaming. Audiences don’t want art, they want something they can keep watching. This is why, despite the fact that so many successful playwrights worked on Succession, the episodes I watched felt generic, predictable, and familiar.

The first ten minutes of the second episode—a full fifth of its running time—are nothing more than a montage of generic hospital scenes: blue overalls, the trolley wheeling urgently under strip lights, a harassed nurse having the obnoxious relatives removed from the room, the stoic wife, waiting room disputes. It was the same as everything ever televised about hospitals from House to ER to New Amsterdam to countless forgotten movies and episodes of sitcoms. These scenes adding nothing to the plot. We knew Roy had had a stroke. At the end of this familiar sequence, nothing had changed.

At that point, a team from Head Office sweeps in, takes Kendall into a waiting room, and tells him they need to make an announcement about who’s going to be interim CEO. The markets will need to know in the morning. The episode would have been far, far better if they had simply started here.

These things are the televisual equivalent of stock imagery. Put the stills next to innumerable other shows and it all looks the same. When Roman masturbates in his office at the crucial moment they cut to an espresso machine steaming and spluttering. Swap out the coffee for fireworks or a fountain and that is such an old trick it was a cliche before I was born. The same is true of Roy pouring coffee all over his desk or the dynamic between Kendall and his ex-wife. This isn’t original writing, it’s the usual television patchwork. I intended to watch the whole season but I was so bored I couldn’t make it. In the time I spent watching four episodes of Succession I could have watched two classic Hollywood movies and had time left to spare, or gone to see a production of Shakespeare, including travel time.

This isn’t the golden age of anything. It’s familiar dross.

And yet, the Atlantic published this sentence, with no shame or irony: “Succession is King Lear, retold for the age of the media empire.” When you treat Shakespeare as a tool of political analogy you end up writing this:

Lear has been used as a lens for understanding, among many others, Dianne Feinstein, Elon Musk, Boris Johnson, Rupert Murdoch, Donald Trump, and Trump’s children. (In response to the former president’s indictment in March, the older sons, like Gonerils with Truth Social accounts, offered up theatrical rage; Ivanka’s wan response, meanwhile, had a whiff of both crisis comms and Cordelia.)

It may well be true that the writers of Succession took Lear as some sort of model or inspiration, but that is no reason for us to take the results seriously. What you won’t read about when you read that article is poetry, drama, or anything to do with art. The reason why Succession is successful is because it is not made out of the stuff that Shakespeare worked with—a long tradition of drama, poetry, myth, legend, history, and worked on in a time of febrile politics that make our own problems seem minor. Succession is popular because it is gossip, not art.

Succession can be hard to watch. Its satires—insights powered less by ironic distance from the world than by proximity to it—stab and sting and chafe. Logan is most obviously a stand-in for Rupert Murdoch, a man who, like Logan, made billions promising people that the world can be made simpler than it is. But he is also a proxy for Trump.

Well, if you think Succession can be hard to watch, I don’t advise you to try King Lear, which might well be the most harrowing work in the Western Canon.

Unlike Logan, Lear was not an obvious stand-in for anyone. Succession is everything journalists want to say and audiences want to hear but which would be deemed scurrilous, libellous, or of a low-grade New York Post-type-genre that the amiable middle-classes can’t been seen to have dealings with. Take all of that gossip and give it expensive clothes and expansive sets, a wobbly “realistic” camera, and the sort of family feuding that makes earners in the top fifth of the distribution feel better about the fact that the top 1%, or the top 0.1%, still have their problems like us, and all of a sudden it’s not tabloid, it’s HBO’s answer to King Lear.

I am reminded of Marilyn Robinson, who said, “it is my belief that a civilization can trivialize itself to death.” Reporting the plot twists of a soap opera in a tabloid newspaper is quite normal; treating Succession as something worthy of an extended comparison to Shakespeare in the Atlantic is just silly.

“we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools.”