The Last TV Show

everything I've binge-watched part something: on watching the finale of television

here’s an incredibly old photo from the last time I watched Vanya on 42nd St, a movie set in a grand old theater that’s about to be torn down

Hi everyone. this is an essay about Succession, kind of, but it’s also about the state of a popular art form more generally, which is why it’s both not exactly on time for a Succession-finale reaction piece, and still, I think, an interesting read for those of you who didn’t watch or aren’t interested in Succession.

Also! Griefbacon yearly subscriptions are on sale for the rest of the month, so if you want to read stuff like this truly absurd thing on Succession and Taskmaster, join us in the conversation pit, or just support this whole project, now’s a great time!

one more quick note: This essay gets into stuff about the Writers Guild strike and potential Screen Actors Guild strike (both of which I support wholeheartedly). Related to that, my good friend Eva runs a mutual aid operation in Los Angeles that provides services including hot meals, health and hygiene items, clothing, tents, and other needs to unhoused neighbors. It’s been going strong for over three years, with a robust network of volunteers donating their time. The operation runs entirely on donations which are, understandably, down by quite a bit due to the strike. If you have the means to donate to a group that will immediately put that money to use providing material help to vulnerable folks, you can donate by buying items from their wishlist, or directly via venmo to Catherine-Schetina.

Ok, let’s talk about TV.

Just after nine pm the Sunday after last, our refrigerator started making a noise. The noise was loud and awful, the kind of whining hum that lodges a knife between the folds of your brain. Thomas and I had just hit play on the final episode of Succession. We weren’t even all the way through the “previously on.” The refrigerator does this occasionally — our apartment is old and so is everything in it, and nothing really works properly— and usually stops on its own after a little while. There’s maybe a way to fix it, but not at nine pm on a Sunday, especially since it’s likely that the way to fix it is “buy a new fridge.” We tried to just look at our phones until it stopped, but we quickly realized that we couldn’t go online at all without getting spoiled for the episode. Thomas unplugged the refrigerator and plugged it back in, which didn’t make a difference. We fed the cats. We folded some laundry. I took a cold shower. Eventually, the noise stopped, and then we watched Succession.

Today, any TV show that airs at a specific time is a throwback. The refrigerator noise, the urgency of it, and the “really, NOW?” aggravation we both felt waiting for it to stop so we could watch a TV show at the same time everyone else was watching— all of this felt like time travel, but so, increasingly, does television as a medium. It was all too appropriate that a sitcom-style annoyance delayed our participation in what might have been the finale not of a single TV show, but of television itself.

Succession was exactly like every other TV show that’s ever occupied the Sunday-night place it occupied, and it was nothing like them at all. Before I’d watched it, people recommended it constantly, but they recommended it like a kid who’s found something disgusting and wants to show you: “This smells HORRIBLE, smell it!” Eventually, I found the dissonance between what people said (“I love this show!”) and the reasons they gave (“I hate everything about it and everyone in it!”) intriguing enough that I decided to try it for myself. It turned out I loved it, too, enough that I started doing this same thing to other people: “The characters are HORRIBLE, and you HATE them, and they hate each OTHER, and NOTHING happens and everyone is MEAN and ANNOYING and the show ITSELF also HATES them, and it’s so good, you’ll love it.”

This style of recommendation might have had something to do with why so few people, on any market-significant scale, actually watched this incredibly popular—and yet not all that popular—show. People who liked Succession comprised a relatively small demographic, but one that tends to think of itself as the entire world. Brian Eno supposedly said of The Velvet Underground’s debut album “only ten thousand people bought the record, but all of them started a band.” Fewer than a third of the people who watched the season finale of House of the Dragon watched the *series* finale of Succession, but all of them worked in media, or at least were connected to it. There was a bizarrely outsize quality to the coverage of the show, and to its fandom, which were basically one and the same. Interviews with cast members went so viral that other actors did interviews about those interviews. Actors who had toiled in laudable obscurity in New York theater for four decades were suddenly celebrities. It spawned fashion trends, bars, and endless memes. A mathematically invisible fraction of the population was watching Succession, and yet it seemed like Succession was everywhere.

Television is a visual narrative told in serialized increments, but it’s also the noise it generates around itself. When it’s really successful, it’s a secular holiday, a form of small talk, a version of the weather. Succession always sat in this space oddly. It was too unfriendly, and too funny, and too mean. Its jokes were bleak and its characters unlikable. Nobody ever had sex except in weird, creepy ways, all of which happened off-screen. It featured neither a love story nor a murder mystery, which is basically unheard-of for popular narrative art. The closest it ever got to romance was like if Bergman made a movie about the two most annoying people at an Ivy League college frat party. There was a murder, but it wasn’t a mystery, and everyone involved was too rich to experience consequences. It was full of crunchy, juicy profanity, strung together in that gleeful, full-throated, first-language way that British people insult one another, even though most of the characters were supposed to be American. All its finales were named for lines from mid-century confessional poet John Berryman’s “Dream Song 29” and nobody ever explained why. It was shot exclusively on film, and there were lots of episodes with implausibly long single-take shots, as though summoned out of the fever dream of a film studies major. There was a subplot about a playwright whose dayjob is sex work, or maybe the other way around, spending too much money on a play that required several tons of actual sand onstage, which seemed like it was maybe some kind of inside joke between the several actual playwrights in the writers room. There was a different subplot about a website called Vaulter that was actually, explicitly an inside joke for the two dozen New York media people who were most of the show’s viewership. It had Eric Bogosian playing Sexy Bernie Sanders and Justin Kirk playing Sexy January 6th. The dialogue was over-written, and stage-y; when it was beautiful it was pointing at itself and when it was funny it was almost unbearable [complimentary]. Sometimes the characters sounded so much like real people that it was embarrassing for every other TV show, and sometimes the characters sounded so much like characters in a stage play that it might as well have been 1945. 

And yet, somehow, all of it worked. It was a TV show that felt deeply and legitimately serious, and whose episodes aired on Sunday nights, a thing on which an entire media ecosystem had spent two decades focusing its energy, and around which people in their thirties and forties spent those same decades learning to scaffold their social lives. The tornado of press and memes and feelings around the finale was, I think, about Succession itself, but it was at least as much about doing something for what felt like it might be the last time.

The same week when I got genuinely upset that my refrigerator making a noise meant I had to start Succession at 9:30 instead of 9:05, a dozen other shows had either just ended or were about to end. The Writers Guild had been on strike for over a month, and the Screen Actors Guild was about to vote to authorize potentially joining them. Every day there was another article about how the streaming model was broken, how the boomtown era of new television had crashed and burned, and how companies that had once seemed invincible were losing money and subscribers hand over fist. Every TV show I’d loved a year or two years ago was bad now, or cancelled, or had simply disappeared without any explanation. As I waited out the fridge noise, I felt a little like I was waiting to watch the closing ceremony for television itself.

Early in the episode, Shiv, the only daughter of the Roy family, competing for control of her deceased dad’s company, attempts, and fails, to have a real, vulnerable conversation with the husband from whom she’s semi-estranged. Like everything on Succession, the scene is comedy wobbling on the knife-edge of tragedy. Shiv is painfully awkward, cutting herself off at the pressure point of each thought to start another one, every verbal lurch forward more gratingly faux-jocular than the last. “I think, in relationships, I’ve never been very good at the underneaths,” she stammers.  Maybe she means to use the plural, or maybe she’s just so incapable of saying this stuff that she accidentally adds a stray “s” where she doesn’t mean to put one. It’s a brilliant piece of writing because it only sounds like poetry after the fact; in the moment it sounds like a person too self-conscious to say a single sentence all at once. 

“The underneaths” echoed a line from season one, the first time the show made me sit up straight and put down my phone. “You know this is just for fun, right?” This same character asks the ex with whom she’s cheating on her fiancé. “There’s no god, there’s no anything. There’s just people in rooms, trying to be happy.” The two declarations are a photo-negative reflection. One sounds smooth and elegant and is a lie, a very uncool character trying to act cool and disaffected. The other is raw and truthful, and, because it’s truthful, it comes out hideously awkward, its poetry coated in ten layers of false starts. 

Television had been trying to say something about anti-heroes for nearly twenty years when this episode aired, but I’m not sure it ever said it better than this. Human experience wasn’t grand or complicated, and moreover it wasn’t special; there was no heavy line that separated good people from bad, and no sweeping significance to why people were awful to one another. We were all just in our little rooms, doing whatever desperate little things we thought might make us happy.

Television happens in rooms, and rooms are what define television. TV— of any kind, old or new, prestige or trash, cheap or expensive—is the genre of rooms. For several decades, most TV shows took place in one or two rooms, so much so that a single-room setting became part of what defined its early genres. Advertisements for TV sets, and then, soon after, complaints about the deleterious effects of television on its consumers, talked about how “it comes right into your home!” Movies technically play in rooms, but a room in your own home is a room in a way a movie theater isn’t. The “Netflix relationship” became shorthand, in the earliest days of streaming, for two people who’d let their relationship rot while they sat on the couch next to each other, watching TV. The first time I ever really felt like I’d participated in prestige TV was when my college boyfriend and I binged Six Feet Under as a way to have emotions near each other because we no longer felt emotions about each other. In the early pandemic, when many of us weren’t leaving our homes at all, TV became more important than at any other time in recent memory, because our lives had collapsed into rooms. Inside the rooms we watched television, and mostly what that television showed us was other people in other rooms, trying to be happy.

Succession often featured these sorts of playwright’s flourishes, a line just slightly too beautiful for a real person to have said it. In the funeral episode, Kendall, the striving failson played by Jeremy Strong, gives a eulogy that we’re supposed to be believe is wholly off-the-cuff. It’s a world-class piece of oration, gorgeous and stirring and nervy and musical and completely implausible—nobody but a person who’s spent their life studying the written word could come up with a phrase like “that magnificent awful force of him” on the fly, no matter how pumped up on grief and adrenaline—but so are most big speeches in movies and plays. Somebody’s always turning to the audience and saying the thesis out loud. Near the end of the last episode he survives, our monstrous patriarch Logan Roy tells his children “I love you, but you are not serious people.” Here, the show’s writers turned to the audience and said the thesis, telling us exactly what they thought of these characters. But this idea of “serious people,” along with those other two lines—the underneaths; people in rooms—might be the turning-to-the-audience thesis of prestige TV itself, whatever it was, for however long it existed. 

It’s difficult to find a single working definition of the term “prestige TV,” and more difficult to locate the origin of the phrase (although a lot of sources point to this 2013 Vulture piece), which seems to have appeared sometime around the early 2010s. But, in the simplest sense, a preoccupation with “serious people” and “the underneaths,” might act as a decent definition (both are also very believable as the names of mid-aughts prestige TV series). Neither the excavation of what makes a person serious nor the desire to scratch a surface and find out what squirms and hisses below is new, but then, prestige TV was never about being new. When critics praised shows like The Sopranos, it was almost always by comparison to older art forms. “This TV is good because it isn’t TV” wasn’t just HBO’s tagline, it was a critical consensus. Those other forms — nineteenth century novels, New Hollywood movies—differed from television in their interest in serious people, and in the underneaths of those people’s lives.

Television in the twentieth century was about the aboves. Shows like Cheers and Friends offered the perpetual-hang-out fantasy of a friend group without any of the ugliness or complexity that often accompanies such relationships. Fans of Law & Order spent years with cops without ever learning anything personal about those cops. Multi-cam sitcoms showed the inside of homes but never the inside of lives. Even when television explored serious themes, it was more about plot than feeling, driving forward rather than turning inward.

When The Sopranos aired its final episode, Netflix was a service that sent you DVDs in the mail. Soon, somebody you knew was comparing Deadwood to Shakespeare, and somebody else was calling Six Feet Under a Dickens novel. One friend wanted you to watch The Wire, and then everyone wanted you to watch The Wire, and then so many people wanted you to watch The Wire that people wanting you to watch The Wire became a meme. Somebody you knew showed up to Halloween in a vintage nightie with a cigarette and a toy gun as Betty Draper. Every Sunday night starting around 9pm Eastern, broke twenty-somethings made little pilgrimages to whomever’s house had an HBO account, and then for ninety minutes or so — because nobody’s TV or computer quite synced up with anybody else’s— the internet became a wall of text all on a single subject: Game of Thrones. Mad Men did this same thing as it oozed toward an ending, and Breaking Bad, and a few other shows, waiting at the bottom of the week like a church service or a play-off game.

Sunday Night Important Television was Sunday Night Football for people who failed the Presidential Physical Fitness Test. Prestige TV borrowed its shape from sports, which for decades had made fans gather around televisions, hold their breath, and get furious at their fridge if it started making a noise during a big game. This was sports, but the sport was the underneaths. The sport was figuring out what it meant to be serious people. The big game was just people in rooms, trying to be happy.

People loved to call Succession “Shakespearean,” because calling things Shakespearean was also part of what defined prestige TV. It wasn’t Shakespearean, though, not really. It was small and un-beautiful on purpose, focused on insincerity and failure, and critical of the whole system that elevated its subjects. Lots of Shakespeare’s characters are venal or cruel, but all of them are the size of a whole world, grand as opera, whereas every character on Succession was the Chihuahua at the dog park who thinks he’s a Great Dane (not Gerri). Shakespeare’s plays are by and large stories about why the king is the king, which are the stories you write when the living monarch is also your boss. A play might show a mad or evil king’s downfall, but it never shows the whole system as rotten. An individual, fictional king might be bad, but the idea of a king is always good. Succession, like every other Sunday night prestige television show, invited you to lie upon your couch and watch sad stories of the death of kings, but what those stories were, and why they were sad, and what they thought of that king, was something quite different. 

If Succession was actually similar to the work of any playwright you might have had to read in high school, it’s Chekhov, who considered his own extremely depressing plays to be comedies. Succession made me feel like I finally knew what he meant. Chekhov’s characters spend the plays doing, mostly, nothing, complaining about themselves and one another, considering taking a small action and then thinking better of it, pining after someone who barely knows they’re alive, or throwing minor tantrums because they’re bored. They sit around in their big houses; they have guests over and put out tea and talk about the weather and gossip about their neighbors and think they’re in King Lear. They spill a drink and act like Hamlet about it. They talk about God sometimes, but they’re just people in rooms, trying to be miserable. Most of what happens to us is petty and myopic. We mistake our own lives for tragedy, which is what makes them comedy.

There are a couple ways, though, in which comparing Succession to Shakespeare is illuminating. Most of Shakespeare’s tragedies center on a man who thinks he’s the hero but isn’t. A dirtbag student or a shitty bureaucrat convinces himself that he’s been promised a grand fate, and tragedy unfolds as he attempts to fit himself into the place in the story where the hero would go. These guys aren’t the main characters, but they’re convinced that they’re supposed to be, and they spend several hours ruining people’s lives about it. If Succession is any of Shakespeare’s plays, it’s Macbeth, a miserly, nihilistic drama about a man who shouldn’t be king, but who carves a path of devastation through his own life on the gossamer-weight strength of one conversation in which somebody told him what he wanted to hear.

Succession never quite succeeded at being a corporate thriller; the boardroom intrigue scenes were where it most often fell flat. Business, the thing this show sometimes seemed to be about and yet never seemed to be very interested in, was always happening just out of frame, between tertiary characters too busy with their jobs to give a gorgeous speech at a funeral or ruin a lavish destination wedding. But that was the point; its central characters were never interested in business either, they just thought they were supposed to be. Succession’s finale revealed something that it had never kept particularly secret: These people were never actually at the center of this story. The final confrontation between the siblings takes place in a glass-walled office, off to the side of the main conference room. It’s shot so that you feel like you’re seeing it out of the corner of your eye, from the viewpoint of someone in the meeting this argument interrupted, texting “can you believe this bullshit again,” while waiting for the circus to be over and the real business to start. The ending didn’t feel like an ending, but it wasn’t supposed to. Heroes get endings; these were just some guys.

Succession had showed its hand upfront when it had a central character say “There’s no god, there’s no anything.” With its British creator and primarily British creative team, Succession is a British work about Americans, starkly secular and skeptical of hero’s journeys. The Roy kids exist in a tradition that reaches back to mid-century British authors such as Larkin and Amis, who saw their world as profoundly un-miraculous. In an interview after the finale aired, creator Jesse Armstrong said about the show “the story doesn’t end here, but this is where it loses interest in these people,” or something like that. Even the worst anti-hero of the last two decades of prestige TV held the story’s interest because they were the story. These people simply wandered through the frame of someone else’s photo, and then wandered off again. 

There’s something else about Succession’s ending that makes the comparison to Shakespeare relevant. A lot of Shakespeare’s tragedies end in basically the same way as one another: The future arrives. A guy you’ve never seen before, or a guy who’s been in the background until now, steps over the bodies of the people you’ve watched live and breath for two hours, and declares that this isn’t the end but the beginning. Malcolm at the end of Macbeth, Fortinbras at the end of Hamlet, Edgar at the end of Lear, the two families burying their grudges at the end of Romeo and Juliet, Richmond at the end of Richard III. It turns out that what we were looking at wasn’t the whole canvas, but a little corner of it, and the dramas playing out there were far less important than they seemed. The story goes on past this; tragedies are just the middle of progress. When Mattson showed up at the end of Succession’s third season, I thought maybe I was wrong, maybe this was Hamlet after all. The final guy who steps over bodies to announce the future usually isn’t sympathetic, and the future he ushers in isn’t necessarily appealing. But that doesn’t matter; the play’s over. It may be compelling to watch highly flawed people churn up their underneaths to the surface, but in any larger sense it isn’t particularly significant. The camera pulls back to the exteriors, to the visible world, the one in which things actually happen, and matter, and cause something to change.

Television ended a week and a half ago. Now the future arrives, like a third-string actor in a soldier costume or a creepy Swede with a vaguely-defined tech empire. There’s still television, of course, and lots of it; I don’t mean to say that there isn’t. There is, in fact, almost certainly more television right now than ever before. HBO may not exist as HBO anymore, but there’s already a new Sunday night show on MAX, even if I don’t know anyone who’s watching it yet. Maybe everyone will be soon; maybe one more thing will change my mind. Maybe I’m just complaining that the world I live in now is not the same world in which I grew up, as though time were supposed to stand still as a personal favor to me. 

But the sense of an ending that started in the build-up to Succession’s finale and that’s persisted in the ten days since isn’t some vague vibe shift. It’s a distinct, material change, swift and chilling. It’s there in the reason writers (and, possibly soon, actors) in Hollywood are striking. The medium itself is imperiled. The state of the industry at present represents an existential threat to art as a viable career. Numerous artists have found themselves unable to work in this industry and survive at this same time. These people, working together, are the only reason a show like Succession gets to exist. I hate the word “genius,” because it implies that anything belongs to any one individual, that any creative work happens by way of a single body in a room, dependent on no-one and beholden to nobody. All the art any of us love, the guilty pleasures and the serious underneaths, is the work of dozens and dozens of hands piling on top of one another. When this becomes materially unsustainable, something may still exist under the name “television” or “movies,” but it will share little with the best of those things except the name. It’s easy to make fun of the whole concept of prestige TV, but it’s also easy to forget that its saturation in culture started from how deeply people loved these shows, and how much they meant to so many of us.

“Why do I care so much about these characters when I know they’re horrible and evil?” was a common fan’s refrain about Succession. The answer wasn’t a mystery: We cared about them because a bunch of extremely skilled artists had told us to care about them. We’d loved them, or at least we were compelled by them, because love is about proximity, and several of the most talented writers on the planet had asked us to stand next to these people again and again for several years. 

Television doesn’t matter, right up until it does. It’s just television, and silly to care about it, until it’s people whose work has lived in rooms with me for years, out in the sun with signs, living off savings and credit cards. It’s just a TV show, until it’s a future that narrows and narrows and narrows until all the light in the room is gone. I was so embarrassed that I cared enough about a TV show to get angry at my refrigerator making a noise, but I’d be heartbroken to think that I might never care that urgently about a TV show again.

Calling Succession “the finale of television” is a joke, but it also isn’t. This very well may have been the last TV show that was in fact television, and not the internet. The direction in which television seems to be headed is towards the same endless scroll as today’s internet, a feast of numbing, half-baked options, a surface that never collects dust, or dirt, or texture, uninterested in the underneaths. Perhaps that future is inevitable; I hope it isn’t; I hope every strike succeeds. I hope I’m wrong about everything. I hope I feel stupid for calling Succession the finale of television. I always hope I’m wrong about the future.

Sundays close up into Mondays. The future becomes the past so quickly. The king dies, and then some guy shows up. This is mostly how we lose things; it’s only a long while after the last time that we realize it was the last time. It wasn’t lost on me that the whole final season of Succession was essentially a funeral, performed in ten parts. The worst part of a funeral is when it’s over, when there are no more steps to follow, and all the long afters swarm into the empty space that’s left. In the end, all those Sunday nights were only a tiny corner of the canvas, a detail tucked into a larger painting, where the story at the center draws the eye away.

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