Maeve Higgins: Succession is about some truly awful people - I love it

There is plenty to think about when it comes to what Succession’s existence says about the US today, about corporate culture, corruption, and greed. But I'm too busy enjoying the horror and comedy

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It's been so long since I’ve watched a television show the night it’s on television; I forget that was once the only way to do it. Now, it feels like an event again, a cute recreation of the olden days when shows were on once, and if you missed them, you missed out.

For the past six weeks, come hell or high water, I situate myself in a recliner at my friend Julie’s house at 9pm on Sunday evenings for a Succession watch party. We drink tea and screech when the characters do something outrageous or say something obscenely mean to one another. That happens a lot, because Succession is about some truly awful people.

It’s a fictional series on HBO about the Logan Family. Logan Roy is the CEO of Waystar Royco, one of the world’s largest media and entertainment conglomerates, and the first season sees him considering retirement. This sets each of his four grown children off on their own agendas. As you’d expect, their plans are absolutely and dramatically opposed to those of each other and their father, unless it suits them to align, which it does from time to time.

The characters are all fundamentally craven and crass and cruel, and I’ve heard that some people don’t enjoy it for that very reason. But that is one of the reasons I love it; their terrible natures make it such a fun show! Over three series, Succession explores all the biggest themes in drama and real life, including power, politics, sex, family ties, and money. It makes me laugh and cringe; in fact, I sometimes even sneak in another watch outside of the allotted Sunday nights.

On Monday, Succession earned eight nominations for the 27th annual Critics Choice Awards, more than any other show this year. Their nominations include the big one, Best Drama Series, and acting nods for Brian Cox and Jeremy Strong, who are both in the Best Actor in a Drama Series category. Hear me screech — isn’t this scenario echoing their onscreen rivalry? What a thrill! There are also Supporting Actor and Actress nominations for most of the main cast, including Kieran Culkin, Matthew Macfadyen, J Smith-Cameron, and Sarah Snook.

The nominations are well deserved; the casting and the acting in this series are phenomenal. This week, The New Yorker profiled Jeremy Strong, who plays Kendall Roy, the middle son and most likely to succeed his father at Waystar, at least at the beginning of the series. The internet went wild for the profile, chattering madly and a little meanly about how seriously Strong takes his work as an actor. “To me, the stakes are life and death,” he told the reporter when asked about playing Kendall. “I take him as seriously as I take my own life.”

This intrigued me; Strong’s acting style is to go all-in, to elide any differences between himself as a person and the character he is tasked with becoming. Having been mentored by actors like Daniel Day-Lewis, he is not fooling around. In a great detail included in the profile, I learned that for a role in 2014’s The Judge, Strong played Downey Jr’s mentally disabled brother and “when Downey Jr shot a funeral scene, Strong paced around the set weeping loudly, even though he wasn’t called that day. He asked for personalised props that weren’t in the script, including a family photo album.”

I’m an actor too, well, kind of an actor. Someone who does it for fun and is nowhere near as dedicated as Jeremy Strong, so that detail knocked me out. I mean, even the fact that he came to set on a day he wasn’t working seems like an extremely impressive commitment to me. I would show up for the catering truck, maybe, if they were doing pie that day.

AND as for the loud weeping on set, I don’t think I would be physically capable. Now, it’s pertinent to emphasise again that I’m nowhere as good or as accomplished as him, and that his portrayal of Kendall — this struggling, morally bankrupt man trapped in a dysfunctional family — is simply impeccable.

So while you won’t catch me laughing at Strong’s process, I certainly am laughing at the show. There is plenty of drama and excellent plot lines and twists, but above all, the writing is hilarious. British comedy writer Jesse Armstrong created the show; he also created Channel 4’s Peep Show and Fresh Meat. When Succession got ordered to series, he put together a writers’ room — staffed by both British and American writers — including the playwright Lucy Prebble, as well as Georgia Pritchett, Tony Roche, and Jon Brown, all of whom had written for plenty of other brilliant comedies between them, including working with Armstrong on Veep and The Thick of It. Veep is my favourite comedy show ever, the one I watch again and again and laugh every time. Adam McKay, who co-wrote Anchorman and the Dick Cheney movie Vice, directed the pilot and continues to produce Succession along with other American comedy royalty like Will Ferrell and Frank Rich.

With those brains, it makes sense that the humour in Succession, as with Veep, is dark, relentless, and never misses. I have a real weakness for the insults, perhaps because I can never think of ones as deadly as they do in my humdrum little life. Even if I could, I’m not sure I could deliver them with the vicious panache of Logan Roy chewing out his underling when a media leak ruins his plan to shock the world by buying out another conglomerate.

“This was supposed to be choreographed,” he roars. “That’s about as choreographed as a dog getting fucked on roller skates!” It barely makes sense, but it works perfectly. As does Shiv Roy delivering this zinger to her brother Roman when he agrees to do a televised interview in support of their father: “Look at you. The cutest cheerleader in high school. Is it true you let the track team fingerbang you for lunch money?” When I looked online to get those quotes right, I saw that VICE keeps a running ‘Insult Index’, which they update after each new episode of Succession. I love that they do this, and it shows that I belong to a sick little community of people who treasure every mean comment made on the show.

There is plenty to think about when it comes to what Succession’s existence says about the US today, about corporate culture, corruption, and greed as this country wrenches itself through this late stage of capitalism. But I’m not thinking about that; I’m too busy enjoying the horror and comedy of this brilliantly crafted show where one messy family spread their chaos far and wide, making me laugh and wince in the process. Perhaps that makes me — as Waystar Royco’s top lawyer Gerri Kellman once, and very memorably, called Roman Roy — “a slime puppy”.

Just like Roman, I can’t help it!