'Succession': a robotic series for robotic audiences

This is not an article, but a confession of whose sins I hope you will absolve me. I am a writer, I am very interested in TV and I devour series, even infected series, practicing television coprophagy. I have been commenting on them for years in this newspaper, on the radio and wherever they leave me, even on the TV itself, the few times that TV allows itself to analyze itself. Among my friends there are many writers like me, journalists with my same pathology, cinephiles of all conditions, screenwriters and even filmmakers, all unanimous in their passion. Everyone shares their delight: "Have you seen the last episode?" they ask, five minutes after HBO Max posted it. "My mother, Logan's death." "It's undoubtedly the best sequence in the history of the series." They comment and recomment, celebrating the genius of the scripts, the greatness of the performances and the avant-garde audacity that has broken the conventions of drama.

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'Succession': the more people I meet, the better I like the Roys

To their enthusiasm, I oppose a polite smile and a downcast silence. They are right, I cannot reproach them for their analyses. I have also seen her (I saw the first two seasons of the pull, the third in fits and starts, and some of the fourth, already as the well-behaved child who finishes the plate so as not to displease his hosts) and I can not deny that his statements are fair. But they have inflated the balloon so much that any dissent sounds taboo. To say that Succession leaves you cold, that you don't give a damn about the fate of the Roys, that you are not thrilled by the production design or the debates about the costumes of the rich and that you are even very burdened with the self-awareness with which it is written and interpreted, as if writers and actors celebrate themselves the genius and compete to see who has it greater, Saying all that, I mean, makes you an outcast. I know that I will be banished from the tribe, although I trust in the kindness of the friends: I do not take into account how much trouble they have put on the Roy family.

Just because I don't like Succession probably means I don't like the series. I discovered some time ago that I do not like literature, a phrase that I sometimes drop in literary meetings and is taken for a boutade, but it is true: I am almost never interested in books that excite the letters. I am bored with polemics about styles, genres and approaches, and discussions between literary critics sound as alien to me as those between theologians. I am as interested in literature as I am in series: their ability to extend life, their deep connection with it. I love Kafka, but I deplore almost everything that has been written about Kafka, for example.

Therefore, a series as Brechtian as Succession, which produces that distancing pursued by the great playwrights of the twentieth century, which draws the characters as characters and not as people, leaving the plot almost in sight, seems great for a class on narrative and dramatic techniques, but unbearable for a Friday night. It is not strange that those of the guild and surrounding people enjoy it, but those of us who came to this for life and aspire to stay for it despair at its pomposity. Something similar happened to Sorkin and his West Wing, but in Sorkin life always prevails. Behind the thick jungle of his prose there is a flash of humanism that excites. Succession, on the other hand, is a good prelude to artificial intelligence. When screenwriters are computers, they will write things like that. And the most robotic of the spectators will applaud delightedly.

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