‘Succession’ soars higher and hits harder in Season 2: Review

Succession is hardly the first show to notice that the rich are not like you and me. We’ve all heard the power corrupts, that money is the root of all evil, and also that greed is good; we’ve all ogled the reality-show mansions and indulged in the princess fantasies. 

What makes Succession stand out, however, is that it’s the rare show about wealth that doesn’t make it look particularly fun. The first season of Jesse Armstrong’s HBO drama introduced us to the Roys, the tight-knit clan behind a lucrative media empire, and then picked them apart bit by bit, revealing them to be even more dysfunctional than we’d previously imagined. They’re warped by privilege, starved for love, and ensnared by their father’s looming legacy. 

It was meticulous in its world-building and unsparing in its character-building. It struck a tone so precise and peculiar — part primetime soap, part pitch-black satire, part Shakespearean tragedy — that it took me a few episodes to find my footing, to learn with the show how to laugh at them, cry for them, and rail against them all at once. 

Season 2 catches the Roys off-balance, still dealing with — or in some cases, pointedly refusing to deal with — the fallout from the events of Shiv’s wedding just a few days prior. The premiere sees the family regrouping for another round of their favorite game, Who’s Going To Be Dad’s Successor?, and the storylines that spin out from there find new ways to press down on each Roy’s foundational bruises.

In the five episodes I’ve seen, the result is a whole lot of squirming, both from the characters and from me. The first season faced the challenge of laying out the whos, the whats, the and-how-do-we-feel-about-its of this universe. The second gets to build on that groundwork, pushing the tension to new highs by casting the Roys and their associates down to new lows. 

There are scenes that veer excruciatingly close to our own reality, and ones that tiptoe past cringe humor and right up to the edge of full-blown horror. (Turns out the only thing grimmer than a Roy family business meeting is a Roy family dinner party.) The belly laughs are fewer and farther in between this time, not because Succession has lost its bite but because it’s doubled down on it. The giggles catch in the throat, and come out as gasps instead. 

Succession‘s secret weapon is its refusal to be impressed by wealth and power and the folks who wield them.

In Season 2, as in Season 1, Succession‘s secret weapon is its refusal to be impressed by wealth and power and the folks who wield them. In contrast to more traditional antihero dramas like Billions, Succession finds no glee in watching evil geniuses outwit their enemies. These characters aren’t particularly intelligent, and they’re almost never ahead of the curve. 

The shrewder characters, like Logan and Shiv, barely seem able to keep their heads above the rising water in Season 2; the dumbest ones, like Connor, are too oblivious to even notice they’re drowning. Money may have protected the Roys from life’s harsher realities — these are folks who can confidently laugh off the threat of a jail sentence — but it’s also stunted them and trapped them, hardened and softened them in all the wrong places.

In a bleak irony, they can’t even really enjoy the money they have, because they’re so used to having it. Succession avoids the visual hallmarks typical of a wealth-porn show, like the montages of extravagant shopping sprees, the close-ups of intricate meals, the shots of fancy cars. There’s no question the Roys are surrounded by pricey things, but these material details simply make up the background against which their deeper dramas play out. After all, your first private plane ride is a once-in-a-lifetime experience; by your fiftieth, it’s just another tedious commute.

But Succession is aware of how much its characters have, and that much of it has come at the expense of others, of people like us. Sometimes the acknowledgements are subtle: the camera taking in the studied non-reactions of caterers ordered to dump an untouched feast in the Season 2 premiere. Other times they’re more drastic; a storyline in the second episode felt so nauseatingly familiar that I had to pause the episode to collect myself. 

There’s a grim satisfaction to be found in the misery of it all, if you’re among the 99% of people less fortunate than the Roys. Succession, like Billions or Veep or Game of Thrones, confirms the unpleasant yet persistent suspicion that most of us are just pawns in a game played between kings, and that those kings are mostly terrible people. But Succession‘s clear-eyed view of the 1% means it also stops short of painting the Roys as monsters or villains or animals. 

It takes a breathtaking tightrope act to make us feel disgust with Roman’s ostentatious cruelty toward his family in one minute, and pity for his insecurities over the same people in the next, or to make a character as fucked-up as Kendall (who gets up to some ice-cold business this season) still seem worthy of our sympathy and even our affection. Go too far in either direction, and Succession becomes a caricature or a defense. Yet Succession strikes that balance with so confidently and consistently, you’d almost think it was easy. 

It’s in the way these characters are written, not with snappy dialogue or winking self-awareness, but with all the inelegance and uncertainty of real people. And the way they’re shot, as if we’re capturing private gestures of unhappiness or worry. It’s certainly thanks to the cast, who have a knack for revealing things by seeming to hide them — the way Matthew Macfadyen swallows Tom’s hurt, or Jeremy Strong mines new depths of despair from Kendall’s zombie-like stupor.

Season 2 isn’t all bad news for the Roys, at least not at first. There are promotions and job offers for some characters, and a renewed spark of ambition for others. Even the external threats have their upsides, insofar as they give the Roys something to unite against. As the season goes on, however, that Season 1 feeling of impending doom creeps back in and intensifies. 

In their reality, as in ours, there’s a growing sense that catastrophe looms around the corner, that we’re in the last days of something, even if we, and the Roys, can’t quite see the shape of the disaster yet. As their stock prices rise and fall, as their relationships fracture or heal or take on new shapes entirely, the Roys are forced to learn over and over what all of us should already know, but frequently forget: that not even money can save you from the affliction and the blessing of being human.