Succession Review

The structure is a joke the show is in on. Every season poses the same question, a Roy child gets close to the throne, and every season the answer is no, which would be intolerable if the failing were not the point. Armstrong's room writes insult comedy at a level nobody else attempts inside a drama, and the specificity is what makes it land, because these people wound each other in the private dialect of a family. Kieran Culkin does the hardest thing in the cast, playing a man whose every sentence is a defense mechanism, and Jeremy Strong plays Kendall as someone who long ago confused ambition with a personality.

Brian Cox holds the architecture up simply by being the only person in the room who is not performing. The handheld long lens style, all sudden reframes and eavesdropping zooms, gives corporate boardrooms the texture of surveillance footage. The fourth season's central event is handled with a restraint the show had never shown before. Cruel, extremely funny, and structurally repetitive by design.