Succession – Greatest triumph on television
In the TAAD content range, we can distinguish a new category – prestigious television, because after the covid period television takes on a completely different level. We shoot champagne because the 4-season television series phenomenon – Succession has reached its grand finale on HBO. Series creator Jesse Armstrong gave us a Broadway-level theatrical experience that has been called the television renaissance.
Succession is about a family, whose Machiavellian patriarch Logan Roy was faced with the problem of choosing one of his children as a successor for a global media and entertainment conglomerate. This choice is not easy, because the offsprings characters: Kendall, Roman, Shiv, and Connor are miserable, lacking empathy and desperately trying to get their father’s recognition. Such a dysfunctional family is unimaginable without manipulation, conflict, and constant betrayal. The audience can spectate this mega-rich family gladiator fight as an anthropological documentary with a sense of painful realism.
Speaking of painful realism, it‘s necessary to pay attention to the visual language and cinematography of Succession. The camera plays a separate role that has a superpower, it enhances the absurd moments and the agony of the characters. It looks real because we are constantly following the camera which moves dynamically and resembles a documentary film style. This style is inspired by the avant-garde movement called Dogme 95 Manifesto, pioneered by Danish directors Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg in 1995. The goal of this manifesto was to purify filmmaking by refusing expensive and spectacular special effects and concentrating on the story and the performance of the actors. The masters behind the Succession cameras: Patrick Capone, Christopher Norr, and Andrij Parekh gave us the privilege of feeling like we are listening over the shoulder to the real conversation of billionaires with all the obscenities, profanity, and idiocracies.
How did the creator manage to create such an authentic story? According to creator Jesse Armstrong, he did a lot of research and spent a lot of time examining media elite families like the Hearsts, to modern-day Redstone, John Malone, Robert Fitz of Comcast, Murdoch, and Robert and Rebekah Mercer, who founded Breitbart. Lots of real-life moguls about which managed to collect a lot of information. While watching the series, you practically cannot get out of the bubble of the Roy family characters, it seems that everything that happens outside the family is insignificant, so the spectator becomes a part of a different reality, in which an ordinary person has no influence.
EMMY award-winning drama Succession deserves to be at the top of your list. Critics promise the most amazing satisfaction watching this masterfully directed HBO project. And we praise perfectly cast actors like Brian Cox, Jeremy Strong, Sarah Snook, Kieran Culkin, and many others. We cannot fail to mention flawlessly crafted production designs and costume designs that fulfill the lifestyle of the rich. On the Internet, it became the most famous trend called – quiet luxury, which is characterized by aesthetic comfort and intellectual minimalistic style. We’re living in an interesting time where technological advancements and artificial intelligence seem to be able to do anything, but we’re just looking to the simple television screen, which provides human-made media with more artistic value than ever before.
Text author: Linas Jurevičius
