The Wire left storylines unexplored. Simon admitted that they created frameworks they never explored. It contributes to the sense of a believable world.
Did we lay other groundwork? We did. We could have cannibalized Rawls’ moment in the gay bar and advanced that moment, but I’m not sure we would have created any more theme, and on some level it was very satisfying just to grant the notion of a closeted gay man’s sexuality a moment on screen and then move on. There was something very compelling and real about just acknowledging that but not making it into grist for a storyline that didn’t add anything to our portrayal of Rawls. We were always laying pipe that could be picked up later. It doesn’t mean that you should pick it up.
Even the top-tier Sopranos had plenty of loose end stories:
The Russian in the woods
Melfi’s attack
The bugged lamp in Tony’s basement
Meadow’s college roommate
None of those bothered me, it just made for interesting TV, and good debate and discussion. Sometimes you just don’t need to know every outcome in the story being told.
Obviously at some point we just disagree. That said, I’m not saying that no loose ends can be left, or that every storyline must be tied up in a neat bow.
But I feel like the episode-to-episode business-level storylines in Succession almost NEVER had any lasting impact or effect, particularly in the first 3 seasons. Have I gone through all of The Wire and Succession and Breaking Bad and categorized everything that ever happened and made a big graph of all storylines sorted by size and later-relevance and cross referenced and yada yada yada? Of course not. So I can’t mathematically prove that my assertion is correct, and of course even if it is correct, it’s perfectly reasonable for you not to be bothered by it.
But starting right at the beginning of S1, the first big looming arc seems to be that Marcia is trying to become A Player and get extra votes in the family trust (or something). And then… she is basically almost entirely written out of the show, and the family trust (or whatever it is) is basically never mentioned again. That kind of thing happens over and over… or at least, it felt to me like it did.
If that were the case, why did they have to get signoff from “the grownups” (Gerri, Frank, Karl, etc.) when Ken/Roman became co-CEOs? It’s pretty clear in season 4 that the kids do not have enough shares/seats to control the company themselves.
I know basically nothing about corporate governance… but I’m incredibly skeptical that any real-life person along the Gerri/Frank/Karl mode would ever vote for Roman to be CEO, given that he was basically a playboy until two years ago, and since then he blew up a rocket, sent Geri dick pics, and was basically a profane and feckless little shit.
The Board members would be voting for an unqualified candidate without even the pressure of the candidate’s father to bear. They would no more do such a thing than they would install me.
Taking a step back for a second… I think part of the issue is that (as the AV club argues) the show really isn’t a business drama with comedic elements. It’s a dark comedy about terrible people against a business-drama background. But the business drama is always secondary or tertiary to the comedic personal elements. So maybe, in a sense, the fact that I want more concrete and satisfying plot resolutions just means that I don’t, in some sense, “get it”. But even comedies can have satisfying and consistent plots.
They controlled a very large block, but not a majority. The grownups backed them as CEOs for continuity so the share price wouldn’t crash and they could close the deal. This was explicitly stated in the show.
I forgot to mention that the day before this finale aired, we watched Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday again. He’s in a small seaside resort hotel which has a restaurant with a swinging door. There was a whole bit with that door opening and closing while making a distinctive almost chiming sound. In one of the Succession scenes at the HQ before the vote, someone went out of one of those glass office doors, and it made the exact same sound as in the Tati movie.
StarGo was Waystar’s streaming app. It appeared most prominently in the episode with Kendall’s birthday, where it was portrayed as buggy, slow, and difficult to use. Matsson hated it, and saw it as an example of everything wrong with old media. He and Roman symbolically trashed it by dropping one of their phones in the urinal, then dousing it together.
I generally disagree with the ‘too many unresolved thread’ complaints. You intersect with little bits of many other big dramas all the time - that you even matter in these short encounters is a reflection of how much power the Roy empire wielded just by existing. Its showing power at work in a real-scale world, not a hermetically sealed one.
And in complete contradiction to that, what I would desperately like to know is the entire, intimate backstory that was only hinted at in Connor Roy’s concession speech:
“I’d like to say to my first running mate, who I will not dignify with a name-check, but had that woman not dropped out, and then had I not had to replace her with another figure, who turned out not to be able to bear the weight of public scrutiny, had I not been betrayed by those two jackrabbits, who knows?
If someone wants to crowdsource a series called ‘Jackrabbits’, scripted by Jesse Armstrong, please PM me.
I don’t understand this point at all. Sure, the things that are high-stakes for me in my life are very different than the things that are high-stakes for the Roys. But is there intended to be some super-subtle point that nothing is high stakes for them?
I mean, either how-many-board-seats-Stewie-and-Sandy-have matters, or it doesn’t matter. If it matters, it should matter. And if it doesn’t matter, it shouldn’t matter. But it mattering until it’s forgotten and never mentioned again is just weird and abrupt.
Succession is actually an interesting comparison with a weirdly similar show, albeit not a first glance… Bojack Horseman. Both are about extraordinarily damaged rich people with parent issues (although the Roys are WAY richer), and are dark comedies with very memorable characters. But Bojack, despite being WAY more over on the comedy side of the spectrum than Succession, has ongoing season- and series-long storylines with stakes and that leave marks and that continue to matter. When Bojack really wants something, he tries to get it, and he either succeeds or fails, and that success or failure continues to exist and ripple through further storylines.