Watching “Succession” Amid the Fox News Scandals

 

 

By Inkoo Kang

HBO could not have programmed the current season of “Succession” better if it had tried. The weeks-long humiliation of Fox News and the Murdochs during the show’s final ten episodes has supercharged its already potent satire, making even the most minor plot points and throwaway lines feel delightfully loaded. For example, a fleeting callback in the most recent episode to Mark Ravenhead, an anchor on the Roys’ conservative news network ATN, might have ordinarily garnered scant notice, except that the white-nationalist, occasionally bow-tied broadcaster clearly riffs on Tucker Carlson, who was abruptly fired from Fox News two weeks ago. ATN’s uncertain future—as a midsize media property in a business landscape dominated by tech giants, one of which may buy up the network—recalls, too, Fox’s ongoing occupancy in hot water: its struggles as an old-media establishment desperate to stave off competition from upstarts. The narrative onscreen and the headlines stemming from Dominion Voting Systems’ lawsuit against Fox have been remarkably complementary: Season 4 killed off Logan Roy, and, although the character’s inspiration, Rupert Murdoch, is still alive, the real-life mogul is on his heels, his declining influence exposed and the future of his company in question. The looming litigation by Smartmatic, another voting-technology company suing Fox, and the sagging Presidential prospects of Ron DeSantis, reportedly Murdoch’s favored candidate for the 2024 election, have only added to the perception of the nonagenarian under siege.

Foremost among “Succession” ’s many irresistible hooks are its informed conjectures about the inner workings of one of the most powerful media dynasties in the world. Despite past statements by Jesse Armstrong, the series creator, that his characters are an amalgamation of various wealthy clans, the parallels between the Murdochs and the Roys have been harder to ignore with each passing season. One could argue that, for the ink-stained paterfamilias, the comparison to Logan has been fairly flattering. Though the show’s story lines have drawn focus to Murdoch’s health troubles and turbulent love life—not to mention the toxic competition he has engendered among his children to replace him—his onscreen counterpart is a master tactician and political puppet master. Viewers might not attribute to Murdoch the gruffly leonine charisma of Brian Cox, the actor who plays Logan, nor the character’s enigmatic, eviscerating wit. But, if Logan made Murdoch look like a villain, it was one whose ruthlessness you had to admire.

The image of Logan as a Republican kingmaker was solidified in the third season. Previously, the character took credit for planting a California politician—referred to only as “the Raisin”—in the Oval Office, then bristled when an agency in his Administration threatened the expansion of Waystar Royco. But, by the midseason episode “What It Takes,” the Raisin is wilting under bad press from ATN, and we see Logan making a family activity out of choosing the next President, or at least the next Republican Presidential candidate, at a secretive G.O.P. summit, where aspirants to the White House court his endorsement. The “ATN primary,” as the characters call the event, renders one of the news network’s election-coverage-segment titles—“America Decides”—even more deliciously cynical. Channelling Roger Ailes, Logan decides to support the dark-horse candidate Jeryd Mencken, a youngish provocateur who uses pseudoscience to justify his nativism (“People trust people who look like them”), in part because Mencken would “pop” on television. If the wannabe troll-in-chief is light on policy, all the better; Logan and the rest of the G.O.P. élite have plenty of agenda items they expect him to push through, and Mencken demonstrates by the end of the episode that he’s willing to kneel before the throne. Logan’s might—his ability to remake reality in his own image—is affirmed by Tom, who tells Kendall, then in the midst of yet another doomed crusade against his father, “I’ve seen you get fucked a lot, and I’ve never seen Logan get fucked once.”

The episode is a convincing portrait of Murdochian influence, or it was at the time. In an analysis I wrote after its première, I cited one of Kerry’s lines (in the show, it’s about a rumor concerning a Roy foe) as a meta-description of the anti-democratic confab: “It’s one of those things where, even if it isn’t real, there’s a reason it feels like it is.” But the airing of the Murdochs’ dirty laundry has only pointed toward the family’s diminished sway. Fox News is still a behemoth in the conservative movement, but, in arguably the biggest shocker of the Dominion revelations, it turns out that the network isn’t so much telling its viewers what to think (as Fox has often been accused) as chasing its audience’s desires to hear what they already believe. This might mean broadcasting conspiracy theories about the 2020 election which the anchors themselves believe to be ludicrous, or hosting guests who spout untruths on live television despite behind-the-scenes chatter among staff that those guests are “lying.” Fox’s need to cater to its audience has associated the network with ideological stances that even Murdoch himself doesn’t share: anti-immigrant sentiments, COVID minimization, pro-Russia takes on the war in Ukraine, and, most significantly, Trump boosterism for the 2024 election. Fox News can still be described as a propaganda machine, but it’s not just one man’s megaphone—and, if it is, then it’s not necessarily Murdoch’s. American conservatism has become a lot more diffuse (and at odds with itself) in the Internet age, and this means that messaging doesn’t just run top-down. The portrayal of Logan’s iron grip on his party in the world of “Succession” is arguably more believable in the context of the U.K. (Armstrong’s home country), where Murdoch and his peers control the major tabloids, than it is in America.

Sunday’s episode, “Tailgate Party,” takes place at another private gathering where the Roys swan about, flaunting their muscle. On the eve of a Presidential election, Logan’s heirs host “forty of the most important people in America,” ideological allies of their deceased father they hope to impress. Logan is dead, but the memory of his lupine talents is ever present, and it’s impossible not to imagine how he would have avoided the predicaments in which his children find themselves. Unlike Shiv, he wouldn’t have partnered with a man like Matsson, the tech billionaire trying to acquire Waystar Royco, who treats Logan’s lifework like a shiny thing to wave around in order to distract from some dodgy accounting. Unlike Kendall, he wouldn’t have concocted the most faux-epic, Icarus-like plan to counter Matsson. Unlike Roman, he would’ve successfully persuaded Connor to drop out of the race to help bolster the prospects of Mencken, his candidate of choice. (And Logan surely would have landed Connor a better sweetener than an ambassadorship to Oman, even if it is, as Connor says, in an attempt to console Willa, “the Pearl of Arabia.”)

Weeks before the siblings’ disintegrating bond began to reveal itself, the Fox News scandals also reminded me that, whatever pain and grief Logan’s children may grapple with this season, “Succession” has primed us to want all the Roy progeny to fail. The show let us forget that for a few weeks by bumping off their father and immersing us in their grief in real time. Shiv has had to contend with keeping her pregnancy a secret from her estranged husband, Tom, while Roman has been adrift since firing Gerri—until recently the closest thing he’s had to a mentor and a genuine love interest. And, whatever their faults, the junior Roys are practically normal compared to Matsson, a showstopper even in the series’ menagerie of freaks, who listens to podcasts on his headphones during sex and sends one of his employees a half litre of his own blood as a courtship tactic. “Succession,” which could just as readily be categorized as an abuse comedy, is a study of how Logan produced children who are constitutionally incapable of preserving the only thing he truly nurtured. But, even before Kendall’s grandiosity and Roman’s power trips came roaring back last week, the real-life headlines nodded toward the fact that there’s no reason for us to root for the kids. We’ve only ever wanted to see them accidentally set their inheritance on fire. The slow conflagration they’ve already sparked is tragic, but also profoundly satisfying.

In the most recent episode, Shiv alludes to ATN’s “Great Toxification” of America, which we see in fits and starts—“Gender-fluid illegals may be entering the country ‘twice,’ ” one infamous chyron warns. But the network’s most foregrounded effects are on Kendall’s daughter, who attends a school where her classmates have started an anti-ATN club, and is seemingly perturbed by her father’s role in elevating Mencken. Meanwhile, in real life, the consequences of Fox News’ complicity with the Big Lie are in plain view. A January, 2022, Axios/Momentive poll found that only fifty-five per cent of Americans believe Joe Biden was the legitimate winner of the 2020 Presidential election. The vast majority of the Republican base is convinced that Donald Trump’s many legal woes are the result of a Democratic “witch hunt.” These ramifications of right-wing disinformation bring to mind one of the most frustrating aspects of “Succession” ’s world-building: the show’s reluctance to grapple with the full weight of Logan’s noxious impact on the country. (It’s certainly considerable: in Season 2, Shiv wondered where she would be able to find out what’s actually happening in the world if her father’s empire continued to swell and there were no longer any reliable news sources.) The series’ myopia may be in keeping with the blinkers that the Roys put on: the pain of the masses is only theoretical, like the confused anger on the faces of the employees whom Greg lays off via Zoom, seen only for a few seconds. (A hundred pink slips in three days, he later brags.) It’s only the suffering of the help that the characters really see, if they choose to linger on it—the occasional contractor who gets stiffed by a vindictive Logan, or the boutique newsroom that gets sacrificed in a father-son loyalty test. But the show’s decision to treat the reach of Logan’s true powers with a fuzziness—and to deploy it mainly as a way to contrast his capabilities with those of his children—blunts its class consciousness. “Succession” is, ultimately, most interested in how the point-one-per-centers save their most exquisite tortures for those directly beneath them, like Tom, Cousin Greg, or the cowering C-suite of Gerri, Karl, and Frank. Neither the Roys nor the show sees the proles.

“Succession” has never hid its focus on the family. That’s what has made the show a cultural phenomenon: the miseries that we love to imagine the rich and mighty inflict on themselves, the characters who’ve dedicated themselves to an idea of kinship and legacy but don’t know how to love. The series is, of course, a coherent and self-contained universe that requires no context beyond it. But much of the outsized affection toward the family drama comes from its ability to see our world so well, especially in its media satire—what other show could catch the late-night anarchist Ziwe (who plays a taunting host based on her TV persona) or the actress and dirtbag-left podcaster Dasha Nekrasova (who played a crisis-P.R. rep) during their fifteen minutes of extremely online notoriety? Fox News has unexpectedly proved a more slippery target, but, if “Succession” doesn’t quite nail the network, at least the series is winning at the thing that’s furiously chipping away at the right-wing institution’s standing: the memes. ♦

NEW YORKER