Succession Review: A Tragedy of Boardrooms Told in the Grammar of Cinema

The house style as thesis

To describe Succession as a show about a media dynasty is a little like describing Lear as a play about estate planning. Jesse Armstrong’s series is a tragedy in the oldest sense — the study of a great house consuming itself — and its genius lies in how completely its formal grammar embodies that theme. The restless, searching handheld camera, forever drifting a half-second late to the action, refuses the polished stability we associate with wealth. It creates a documentary intimacy that makes us feel like an unwelcome fifth presence in rooms we have no business entering, always straining to catch the flicker of calculation behind a Roy’s eyes.

The reaction shot as weapon

If there is a single directorial choice that defines the series, it is its devotion to the reaction shot — and, more devastatingly, the withheld one. Armstrong and his directors (Mark Mylod chief among them) understand that in a family where love is only ever expressed as leverage, the most important drama happens on the faces of those pretending not to care. The camera lingers on Kendall a beat too long as a joke lands at his expense; it snaps to Shiv registering a betrayal she is too proud to name. Nicholas Britell’s extraordinary score — those broken, discordant piano figures and hip-hop cadences dressed in orchestral finery — supplies the tragic weather these people are too armoured to express themselves. Sound and image together do what the characters never can: they grieve.

An ensemble without a weak link

The performances constitute perhaps the deepest bench in modern television. Brian Cox’s Logan is a tyrant of terrifying stillness, capable of dismantling a child with a single muttered obscenity. Jeremy Strong pours himself into Kendall with a raw, Method-inflected desperation that turns each doomed bid for the throne into genuine tragedy. Kieran Culkin’s Roman weaponises comedy as a defence against feeling anything at all, and Sarah Snook’s Shiv is a masterpiece of thwarted ambition — a woman perpetually underestimated by the very people she is smarter than. Matthew Macfadyen’s Tom, oscillating between servility and sudden cruelty, may be the series’ sharpest study of how power actually flows: downward, always, onto whoever is closest.

The comedy of the damned

Succession is, crucially, one of the funniest dramas ever made, and its wit is not decoration but argument. The Roys speak in a baroque, profane, allusive dialect — insults sculpted like small poems — because language is the only weapon left to people who have long since traded away sincerity. Armstrong, a veteran of British satire, deploys this comedy the way Chekhov deployed the pause: to expose the desperation underneath. When the laughter curdles, as it always does, we recognise that we have been complicit in mistaking cruelty for cleverness — the same trick the Roys play on themselves.

Verdict

There is no fat on Succession, no false note across its four seasons. It takes the most conventional of subjects — who will run the company — and, through sheer control of camera, cut, and cadence, elevates it into a genuine tragedy about the impossibility of love inside a machine built for power. It refuses catharsis and denies its characters redemption, and it is all the greater for that refusal. This is the drama every prestige series of the past decade has been trying, and failing, to become: proof that television, in the right hands, can achieve the moral seriousness of the greatest cinema.