Don't trust the bastards' reviews of full Technicolor bastard-o-vision

Succession covered in a Murdoch paper is like asking a scorpion to write objectively about stings in the tail.

Previously: Portrait of the newsletter writer as a sick man

Typos are political.

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Melanie Phillips enjoyed Succession — which just concluded with its series finale on Sunday/Monday (depending on what side of the Atlantic you live on) — but she did not understand it. Her ongoing employment at The Times relies on her only understanding a specific set of things and in a very specific way; Anders Breivik’s favourite columnist is employed for her particularly sour take on the world and it must remain consistently sour, carefully calibrated opinions dropping from her maw like tart and chemically sweet sherbert lemons in a factory that is poisoning the local river.

Under the headline, Succession showed us how monsters are made, she writes:

The American TV series Succession, whose final episode has just been broadcast, was for me and many other viewers one of the finest productions we had ever seen on the small screen. A satire on American politics and media culture, with their grotesque hangers-on and boot-lickers and their default ethic of ambition, lies and betrayal, its appeal was on several different levels. The reason it packed such a punch, though, was its unsparing psychological and moral truths about the nexus between love and power.

And she goes on to raise the sea water-bloated spectre of Robert Maxwell and his sex trafficking ghoul daughter Ghislaine. The word ‘Murdoch’ was never going to appear in Phillips’ column, even as credible claims that Rupert demanded his divorce agreement with Jerry Hall included a clause preventing her from giving details of their life together to the writers of Succession.

In her conclusion, Phillips begs for us to feel sympathy for the Succesion’s central family, the revolting Roys:

All kinds of people put on a psychological suit of armour to conceal a painfully damaged identity. Succession prised off some of that armour and, like the best literature, has helped expand the store of human sympathy as a result.

Columnists have a suit of armour made of byline pictures that haven’t aged for decades and memories that erase every few months (or even weeks) so that they can pretend to have always been right about everything. Melanie Phillips writing about “human sympathy” is like Jeffrey Dahmer recommending his favourite vegan recipes.

Phillips’ take on Succession isn’t remotely the worst that The Times has published — and there will be many more to come: For the title of worst take, James Marriott’s essay on the show this weekend, a review of a book of the scripts, will be hard to beat.

The premise of Marriott’s piece is that Succession is good but cannot compete with War & Peace or other slabs of ‘great literature’ in the canon. It’s like saying, “This wolf and this predator drone aren’t the same,”; it’s a pointless comparison; a “who would win a fight between fifty duck-sized horses and one horse-sized duck?” scenario and no more edifying.

Marriott writes:

“In the world of Succession,” a writer at The New Yorker once opined, “pee is a symbol of power, and one can track the waning or surging of a character’s authority by keeping a close eye on the state of his urethra.” You will have noticed that journalists don’t write this way about Emmerdale. Even The White Lotus failed to inspire such high-flown analysis. Succession is a rare instance of a prestige television show so prestigious that it is capable of provoking its fans to that most reckless and high-minded form of enthusiasm — literary criticism. To solemn devotees, Succession is art, its creator, Jesse Armstrong, is the heir to Shakespeare and the only appropriate response to these facts is to discuss the show in the laboured tone of an undergraduate dissertation.

The reverential approach is endorsed by the publication of Succession’s scripts in three enormous War and Peace-size volumes by Faber. Twenty quid each! One bristles at the presumption. Faber, after all, is the publisher of TS Eliot, Samuel Beckett, William Golding . . . Look, I love Succession. Succession and Clarkson’s Farm are the only TV shows I watch. But still, there’s something about 2,194 pages of majestically bound script that puts a man in a combative mood. Is Succession really the profound and Tolstoyan work the folks at Faber seem to think it is? Well, let us take them on their own terms. Succession is great TV. But is it great literature?

The phrase “the laboured tone of an undergraduate dissertation” is interesting; I wrote my undergraduate dissertation on the place of Ian Rankin’s Rebus in the history of Scottish state-of-the-nation writing; it’s not laboured, it’s a hoot.

Another tell to the ego roiling beneath Marriott’s laboured — there’s that word again! — “Aww shucks” act is the line, “One bristles at the presumption.” One does, does one? Marriott is 30 years old.

He goes on:

… On the page, the relentless penis jokes can become exhausting. And comedy thrives on social restriction. It’s why Armstrong’s Peep Show is funnier (just) than Succession — its embattled, downwardly mobile characters are endlessly furtive, always haplessly trying to avoid telling the truth or saying what they really mean.

Marriott’s career so far has been a “relentless penis joke” but the penis simply does not realise who’s the butt of the joke. Peep Show is not relentlessly funny; in the bleak claustrophobia of Jeremy and Mark’s Croydon flat and the narrow cast of characters that circle it, you can see the seeds of the Roys. That family have the same trapped animal instincts as the Peep Show pair, they are merely given access to a universe of wealth and privilege which Succession shows us do nothing but gild the cage.

The wider premise of Marriott’s essay — that there is a dick joke limit beyond which a piece of art cannot be classed “great literature” — is just silly. There are numerous dick and cunt jokes in Shakespeare, and Russian literature, which Marriott uses as his yardstick (here’s another opportunity for innuendo), is practically priapic with penis allusions and outright crudity.

Does a review of the scripts for Succession matter? Not really. But as part of an ongoing project in arrogance and News Corp’s pretence that the show has not one thing to do with Rupert Murdoch, it’s very instructive.

In David Markson’s Reader’s Block, he quotes Tolstoy telling Chekov:

You know I can’t stand Shakespeare’s plays, but yours are worse.

I could say the same for Marriott but replace “Shakespeare’s plays” with Melanie Phillips’ columns.

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