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Succession
2018 · TV series · 4 seasons
Created by Jesse Armstrong
Follow the lives of the Roy family as they contemplate their future once their aging father begins to step back from the media and entertainment conglomerate they control.
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64 comments on Hacker News
This feels like the Living+ Succession episode.
My backlog is crazy long. As much as I love TV I don't get nearly as much time to watch it as I'd like.
* Andor * Black Rabbit * Dune * Last of Us * Percy Mason * The Paper * Pluribus * Severance * The Studio * Succession * White Lotus
Of all those, Andor was the biggest surprise. I'm a mild Star Wars fan (I've seen the movies and that's about it) but I really enjoyed this, probably more than the movies. It looked amazing, was well written and acted. It's a prequel to one of the movies and we watched the movie right after we finished the series and I ended up liking the movie a lot more than I did the first time I saw it.
The Paper and The Studio are comedies and watching them made me miss the great sitcoms of the past. Why aren't there more comedies?
I liked the Last of Us game and I think that's a big part of why I enjoyed the tv show. If you haven't played the game or aren't a zombie person, you could probably skip that one.
I liked The Peripheral but it was canceled so I have a hard time recommending it. What they made was very good but there just isn't enough of it. The William Gibson book it's based on is worth reading IMHO.
"Oops, sorry, your postal votes were kept in this warehouse over there. Yeah, the one that went on fire.". There's even a documentary about it called "Succession".
> Conservatives Take Aim at ‘One Battle After Another’: “Year’s Most Irresponsible Movie”
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/one-battle-after-another-conservative-reactions-1236394128/
> Netflix's 93% RT Hit Show That Has the U.S. Government Furious Is a Streaming Sensation
https://collider.com/netflix-boots-streaming-success-after-government-backlash-october-2025/
And that’s before we’ve even touched HBO. John Oliver is probably the most obvious example. But I’d say shows like Watchmen count too. Fahrenheit 451. Succession was pretty clearly mocking FOX News and its media ecosystem.
Art that’s critical of the government doesn’t literally have to be shouting “Trump bad”, it can be done through critique or mocking of the values it holds.
True that and you left Succession off the list :).
Thats why I think its a good addition. Its a step up from their usual quality. They are anyways paying 72B for the company. Netflix has distribution and Warner Bros delivers quality. I think its a perfect fit. I mean imagine Warner getting acquired by Amazon and folded into prime video - that thing where search returns episode names rather than the series. That would be like Rolexes being sold at the local Walmart. There's only two homes for quality content and thats Apple TV and Netflix. Thats why I think its a good deal.
Sounds like they were inspired by the "Boar on the Floor" episode of Succession, playing a kind of dominance ritual over the prospective employee in the guise of "a bit of fun".
skipping succession episodes is insane, i'm sorry. it had a niche following but the entire series is a work of art in every aspect. i don't think i can point to a single episode that was "wasted".
Try this: look up the most highly rated episodes on IMDB and watch only those. Missing the crummy episodes usually does not interfere with understanding the story arc. Often, I set a minimum IMDB score that I will watch, like 8.5 or 9.0 to capture only the best. This works well with series that:
- take a year or two to find their footing or
- have a large cast (some mediocre) that get their own story lines of no consequence occasionally or
- introduce cast members that don't make it or
- implode towards the final season.
I have done this for many series that are somewhat uneven:
- The Americans
- How I Met Your Mother
- Fringe
- Orphan Black
- Halt and Catch Fire
- House of Cards (watching the ratings allows you to miss all of season 6)
- Arrested Development
- Bojack Horseman
- Veep
- 30 Rock
- Jane the Virgin
- Black Mirror
- The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel
- Suits
- Six Feet Under
- La Femme Nikita
- The Blacklist
- Peaky Blinders
- The Romanoffs
- Ozark
- Westworld (sometimes dropping episodes does not matter)
- Succession
- Borgen
And all of these series have lots of strong episodes.
Series I would not do this with:
- The Bear
- Breaking Bad
- Money Heist
- The Serpent
- Fleabag
- Chernobyl
- The White Lotus
You might think it's flippant remarks or a sarcastic tone, which I can understand, but I was honestly imagining in my head what a film about all of this would look like. I would honestly, even desperately like to know what is going on in a head of Sam Altman, or if this isn't possible, then any interpretation of what someone else might think that is going on in his head. So while I understand how I am perceived like that, I'm at the same time really curious about the topic, and actually really curious about the output of the OP. When I mentioned the 150 - 250 page novel, I was actually really desiring to read that, because OP had such unique perspective, I just needed to know more.
I was specifically calculating the 150 - 250 pages to possibly contain enough detail to have many of the explanations that I would have energy to read.
Unfortunately, I'm not going to get this book, so I will have to deal with my everyday life instead.
I was kind of hoping that mentioning "Succession" due to its nature would give it away, that I'm respecting the intelligence of the criticism, because I feel like "Succession" is a really intelligent and insightful show.
Obviously the way I commented it, it didn't come off like that and I was trying to be unnecessarily funny when I shouldn't have been, but I don't 100% regret it, I did it, there were reasons for it, maybe not the best ones, but I hope we all learn from it.
I'll try to learn from it. Maybe I should ask better questions, maybe be more sincere, maybe live a better life. Hopefully something works.
In the end I am not happy at all about how my responses are giving off the impression I don't respect OP's thoughts, which I do, but I just miscommunicated here.
This sounds interesting enough. Could I have it as a more detail text based novel (150-250 pages) or if it's possible a full fledged movie, maybe in similar style as "Big Short"?
Or do you think it has to be a TV show, maybe like "Succession" - do you think you'd be able to write something like "Succession"?
'Succession' was a documentary about the American oligarch class.
You're missing a 4th group: people who would enjoy watching content X, but simply won't bother if it's too annoying. The alternative isn't piracy, it's just doing something else with your time. There's not that many shows or movies that I care enough about to keep one subscription open for it. I had an HBO subscription for Game of Thrones, but I also enjoyed Succession, Last Week Tonight, and some other random stuff. After Game of Thrones shit the bed, I canceled HBO and simply don't watch those other shows. I never finished Succession; I'd like to one day, but it's not worth either the subscription or pirating.
This just shows that the availability of piracy is NOT the problem. It shouldn't matter to HBO whether I've pirated it or not: I could be a paying customer if their prices matched their catalog's value, but it doesn't, so they get nothing, piracy or no.
Who, exactly, do you think is going to "think twice" next time?
It's a bummer, but this is how this has been done for decades (generations?) and everybody knows it's how it's done, and that has in no way made companies "think twice" about business leaders assigning fairly low level employees or consultants to do these meetings just like this.
There was a whole gag about exactly this in one of the last few episodes of Succession just recently. There have been popular movies about this ("Up in the Air", with George Clooney, is about this, if memory serves). It's not, like, a secret that this is how it works.
It sucks, but no, this video going "viral" is not going to change anything.
> I want escapism
I mean going by the highest grossing movies of the year you got plenty to choose from. Other than barbie (which I would argue is not super deep in terms of politics anyway) the rest are all escapism: Super Mario Bros, Fast and furios 10, guardians of the galaxy 3, spiderverse 2, mission impossible, quantumania, little mermaid and elemental are all extremely light in terms of politics.
The three movies with "heaviest" political message are oppenheimer, barbie and even then in case of oppie the message is "mcarthyanism was paranoid and political engagement was stiffled as well as weaponised for personal and selfish goals" certainly not a super crazy political opinion that america's red scare went too far. And in terms of Barbie its mostly surface level "its not easy to be a woman" and capitalism takes advantage of people. But saying "self actualisation is hard with economic forces pushing against you, and some parts of the patriarchy have a compounding effect on women in terms of how difficult it is" is incredibly milktoast feminism even if its pushing the boundries in a movie that is essentially a toy ad that lasts 2 hours.
I don't know what kind of media you think does not allow Escapism and its so absolutely drenched in political content that is impossible to enjoy.
Most emmy noms went to Succession, a shakespearean tale of rich brats picking on each other for father approval and Last of Us, a zombie show about a father daughter found family that shows humans are the worst threat and not the zombies. Neither seems incredibly political.
Videogames this year, top of the crop were Baldur's gate 3, Zelda and Spiderman 2. One is a DnD campaign about power, world domination and brain washing aliens. Another is Ganon is back, you are the hero go make a car and kill him and the last one is Spiderman saves new york from the same guys he has fought since the 1960s.
What is this escapism that existed in the 90s that no longer exist and where is the political undercurrent in all mainstream media that makes it so hard to escape into?
The stats for watched shows are pretty interesting - https://fortune.com/2023/06/29/netflix-amazon-disney-others-spent-a-record-23-billion-on-original-new-content-last-yearso-why-is-everyone-watching-movies-and-tv-from-the-past-aden-ikram/
Nothing prestige, almost entirely NFLX. A lot of it is back catalog licensed stuff. NCIS, Criminal minds, lol. Disney+ on the scoreboard with basically a couple kids shows plus the Simpsons.
Previous year stats pretty similar - https://www.nielsen.com/insights/2022/streaming-grew-its-audience-in-2021-drama-reality-and-kids-programming-lead-the-content-wars/
Prestige stuff like Game of Thrones, Succession, even each of the Disney+ Star Wars shows is $100M/season. None of these make the scoreboard for views.
Meanwhile most people are watching boomer reruns and midbrow stuff. Even Seinfeld licensing only cost $100M/year for NFLX to end up one of the top 10 viewed shows.
No not everything is bad. Severance, The Bear, Succession off the top of my head are totally worth watching.
Nah, it was like a good episode of Succession!
Even if everything mentioned is 100% true the board handled the situational so poorly they lost and Sam won. It was like an average episode of Succession being played out.
Others have pointed out several reasons this isn't actually a problem (and that the premise itself is incorrect since "OpenAI" is not a charity), but one thing not mentioned: even if the MS-appointed board member is a MS employee, yes they will have a fiduciary duty to the organizations under the purview of the board, but unless they are also a board member of Microsoft (extraordinarily unlikely) they have no such fiduciary duty to Microsoft itself. So in the also unlikely scenario that there is a vote that conflicts with their Microsoft duties, and in the even more unlikely scenario that they don't abstain due to that conflict, they have a legal responsibility to err on the side of OpenAI and no legal responsibility to Microsoft. Seems like a pretty easy decision to make - and abstaining is the easiest unless it's a contentious 4-4 vote and there's pressure for them to choose a side.
But all that seems a lot more like an episode of Succession and less like real life to be honest.
Even an episode of Succession and they would have known better than to have attempted this
Even in the HBO show Succession, these things take a season, not an episode
I started this last night and quickly lashed through 2 episodes - really enjoying it. Very it's got a good Succession horror vibe to it.
> Thinking about it, all of the media I’ve enjoyed in the last decade — my middle age — were made with a single “dictator” in charge instead of a committee in charge. E.g.: I like Christopher Nolan or Ridley Scott movies precisely because their personal vision and style is apparent and beautiful.
Agree with this totally. Two recent examples of that, that I really liked, were Succession (where Adam McKay ruled the production with an iron fist and scrutinized every detail), and Hamilton, where Lin-Manuel Miranda not only wrote the music and the lyrics and played the lead, but also had a hand in the choreography and probably in more stuff. And both of these things were considered some of the greatest, or the greatest, works in their respective genres in the last God-knows-how-many years!
TLDR: Discusses how popular TV shows of the '90s like "Friends," "Seinfeld," and "Cheers" portrayed characters spending most of their time hanging out at cafes, diners, and bars. These shows depicted work as an afterthought or a joke, with the characters prioritizing their social lives and relationships. In contrast, modern shows like "Succession," "Superstore," and "Industry" emphasize work as all-consuming, leaving little room for personal connections outside of work. The article suggests that the decline of places for people to socialize, such as bars and parks, has contributed to the loneliness epidemic. It argues that shows like "Friends" and "Seinfeld" provide a cure for loneliness by depicting characters who prioritize social interactions and spending time with friends.
Also covers a study conducted by the Canadian design firm Happy Cities in Seattle called "the lost-tourist experiment." The study involved an actor pretending to be lost on two different street corners, one with a blank wall and one with shops and cafés. The results showed that people were four times more likely to stop and offer help on the street with shops compared to the street with the wall. The article highlights the importance of having more things to do in a community to encourage interaction and engagement among people
> 'affluenza'
Nice term. Logan's kids on the TV series "Succession" definitely exhibited that affliction.
All of this makes complete sense, it just felt shocking because HBO has such greater cultural cachet and prestige than Discovery, which I didn’t even know owns an empire of reality shows aside the ones on its channel. Guess that really illustrates how what is seen as good TV is increasingly decoupled from what is actually watched on TV. There was a recent meme about how the “little-known” ABC drama The Good Doctor was obscure to the Twitterati but is, in reality, a long-running series with viewership that dwarfs the Succession set.
And on the subject of reality TV, this is a good retrospective of how many cable channels from MTV to Bravo have drifted from their once lofty, even high-brow identities into domination by reality television. It really is a ubiquitous trend.
https://youtu.be/Vd1gqLVHZWo
I wonder what genre will succeed reality television. Maybe they’ll find a way to adapt Twitch streaming or vlogging for television, and then they will have to pay even fewer people.
> We may all want to watch Ballers or some other a tv show starring The Rock
As an aside, apparently not, judging by what happened to Young Rock. :p
> Seinfeld is one of the few sitcoms where a female character is as flawed as the men. You couldn't even do that show today.
It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia? Succession? Yellow Jackets? The Righteous Gemstones? Beef? White Lotus? House of The Dragon?
You could argue about percentages but it is in fact extremely easy to do a show with flawed female characters today.
https://collider.com/max-4k-streaming-collection/
Headline and subhead:
Max Adds Over 200 Movies and TV Shows in 4K Ahead of Official Launch
'Dune,' 'Succession,' 'The Conjuring,' and regular and extended editions of 'The Lord of The Rings' franchise are among the added titles.
> Nowadays the energy, ingenuity and talent that would have gone into making smaller films is instead going into making premium TV.
I hate this. I think 80-110 minutes is a good amount of time to tell a story. It's enough time to develop characters and build a world, but it's short enough that to be effective a film has to be ruthlessly edited.
Stories for TV are so bloated. Series like Stranger Things, Servant, The Last of Us and Russian Doll would have been perfectly suited to the movie format, but instead they get padded out to 8-hour seasons.
I should note I don't think this is true of all series, by any means. Lots of stories are well suited to the series format, like Succession, Dahmer or The Boys. And I know my opinion won't be a popular one because the runaway success of long bloated stories shows us which way the winds are blowing.
My favorite episode, but I think this is maybe one step worse than taking cues from "Succession"
Succession (TV Series) on Wikipedia:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Succession_(TV_series)
> an American satirical black comedy-drama television series created by Jesse Armstrong
A family owning media/entertainment conglomerate fights for control amid the head-of-family's ill health.
Four seasons on HBO, started 2018 and finished March 2023.
---
I really think a ChatGPT prompted on the mechanics of Dramatica StoryMind could generate some really fast, structurally sound treatments. Just haven't heard much in the way of naysayers or supporters either way.
> Long pauses usually filled in with music to give the illusion something is happening, sex scenes, gratuitous violence, people taking offence with unrealistic ease, longshots, slow shots...
This. I pretty much stopped watching all new shows made after 2015 or so (with Succession being the exception), as it feels like, during the TV shows gold rush, a lot of not very talented writers and directors got to make their own shows due to huge demand from the studios. In reality, making something many hours long and yet packed with actual interesting content is a Herculean task, so it feels like these untalented people are trying to steal any piece of time they can get, by every mean of stalling possible (sex, violence, "poignant" long shots etc.). It's almost like watching workers paid by the hour, and not by result.
Combine that with the fact that most movies and shows nowadays are targetting people who are at most 30 years old [1], and I'm really no longer interested.
[1] That's my theory anyway. Young people are the perfect audience - they have more free time and are significantly easier to impress with what is often in reality a poorly done rehash of things that worked in the great movies, shows or books of the past. They're still young enough to experience a given concept for the first time in their life, so they'll be moved by it. They're also significantly more susceptible to fads (don't belive their own taste as strongly, because it's not yet well developed), so it's much easier to manipulate them with marketing, paid reviews etc.
About the AI art aspect, having just experienced this week what's probably the greatest hour of TV ever filmed until now, certainly on a personal level, in Succession's episode 3, season 4, I am fairly certain AI tools without agency will never be able to achieve such levels because art is fundamentally about humans, the manner of depiction is secondary: art has been impressive from Lascaux to Giotto to Stable Diffusion, the point however is the transference of feelings, from the artist to the viewer, and for transference to be achieved the artist must have feelings to begin with.
This is not to say that great artists of the future won't use AI tools for shaping their vision. And if AI goes beyond being a mere transformer of input and starts having agency, well, we're not there yet at least.
Just watched this again few weeks ago since 90’s. So good still. It seems that Succession has taken quite a bit of influence from Celebration. I think calling the pilot episode Celebration might have been nod to that direction. The somewhat restless camerawork in that series is where Dogme style lives on.
These are all non-episodic TV shows which have yet to conclude. I reserve judgement until they have concluded as to whether the writing will hold up. For the vast majority of these shows, writing is great for a few seasons, then nosedives because they can't figure out how to conclude it or the plot becomes an ever expanding fractal of loose ends.
The reason for this is simple. Due to the nature of how studios are run now, you gotta keep making the popular stuff until it ceases to be. Even if it was better to just leave it at one or two seasons. Everything has to be renewed to make evn more money and to offset the endless treadmill of cancelled-after-one-season garbage that Netflix and HBO etc are pumping out.
I love Succession, but I hope this 4th season is the last one.
EDIT: named the wrong season.
Some good quotes:
> The true villains of our time are ensconced in cocoons of comfort, immune to accountability. They enjoy their lives; they are not burdened by guilt or shame; the other shoe is never going to drop. To see them suffer, we have the cinema.
And
> As critics have noted, there is an element of feeble wish fulfillment in these works, an unctuous eagerness to flatter the audience’s moral sensibilities while satiating a furtive lust for class warfare. (Somehow, hostility to the ultrarich has become a marker of modish cultural literacy.) At other times, a frisson of class consciousness serves only as an alibi for an audience eager to live vicariously in luxury. (HBO’s White Lotus and Succession, which Mylod frequently directs, manage this dance particularly well.) As viewers, we get to have it both ways: Indulge in a fantasy of extravagance, and then, remembering we’ll never have it for ourselves, relish watching it turn to (literal) shit.
I don't even like Succession so much, just didn't want to pick a fight with its many fans :) Actually it's an objetive fact that you can't say too loud that you don't like it, or else... anyway, I'd rather not talk too much about shows that I liked, disliked or started liking, later got disenchanted. It'd be distracting for the discussion.
Since you asked: what I would like is just to buy Succession. Do you know what happens when you want to watch something that's not on any platform? There is this cambrian thing called Blu-ray or you go straight to precambrian with DVD.
But if I'm not mistaken, there's no way to "buy" a digital copy of a movie or a series. Or even "rent" it. I don't really think I'd watch Succession a second time.
Mostly everybody prefers torrents, if they're available, that not always happens, specially in other languages. If not, you need a Blu-ray reader and paying not so nice prices from Amazon. Add some reaping software if you don't quite believe that optical disks last a hundred years.
If you come to think it, platforms really aren't. They're subscriptions to catalogs. Also moving catalogs. I've paused a season for some days, then found out that it had become pay-per-view at Amazon.
I suspect that the real power of "platforms" is copy protection... again. Studios wouldn't allow non-DRM shops, so they insist in DRM in the browser and thus they've given all the power to the gatekeepers.
> the quality of films/TV produced in the west has been in steady decline for quite some time
I could agree the average quality has dropped. But surely you agree that the sheer volume of high-quality content has ballooned. How many high-quality TV shows can you name from the 90s?
Compare that to the last 10 years of shows like: Succession, Ted Lasso, The Queen's Gambit, The Handmaids Tale, Better Call Saul, Ozark, House of Cards, Stranger Things, Silicon Valley, The Crown, Fargo, Mr. Robot, True Detective, Veep, and even (controversially) Game of Thrones.
Clerks - $27,575 [0]
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night - $56,000 [1]
Butt Boy - $100,000 [2]
The Blue - <$100k [3]
Call Me Brother - <$100k [3]
Frances Ferguson - <$100k [3]
Greenlight - <$100k [3]
Love in Dangerous Times - <$100k [3]
Man in Camo - <$100k [3]
I'm going to stop now but I hope I've made my point. I've watched many of the above. I've heard about most of the above.
Your tone is pretty snarky so I'm not sure if it's worth responding but here is a list of TV shows, all within the last decade, that I believe are exceptional and not limited to "just the Sopranos":
* Chernobyl
* Rick and Morty
* True Detective
* Fargo
* Severance
* 1883
* Mindhunter
* Westworld
* The Knick
* The Peripheral
* Succession
* Years and Years
* Orange is the New Black
* Halt and Catch Fire
* Insecure
* Watchmen
* Atlanta
This is only from 10 minutes of searching. You'll note that many of them are produced, directed, written and star high profile artists. The subject matter that they deal with can be done at a pace and care that's impossible to do with a 2-3 hour movie. The quality of the above series or mini-series was virtually non existent, maybe with some very few exceptions, before 2000 and only began to pick up pace in 2000 to 2010.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clerks_(film)
[1] https://byrdtheatre.org/news/2019/10/a-girl-walks-home-alone-at-night-brings-beauty-to-vampires/
[2] https://www.cautionspoilers.com/film-reviews/butt-boy/
[3] https://musiccitydrivein.com/2021/02/19/film-threat-award-this-announces-2021-indie-film-nominees-for-drive-in-event-virtual-ceremony/
There's an episode of "Succession" that captures this vibe pretty well.
> the fundamental rules of cinema - speak clearly and face the camera
You're literally describing the fundamental rules of cinema... in the 1940's. Back in the studio system, that was exactly with they did, so clearly they even used a fake "transatlantic accent" with heightened enunciation to do it.
And these rules (minus the accent) are still followed to a large degree in middlebrow TV fare like what you watch on ABC or the CW Network. It's also more present in comedies.
But if you're watching a prestige drama on HBO or Netflix? If you're watching The Wire or Succession? If a drug dealer or cop suddenly starts speaking clearly and facing the camera, all believability is instantly shattered.
Your rules for "bad acting" are outdated by about seven decades. In fact, "method acting" in the 1950's was precisely a reaction to the stilted "speak clearly and face the camera" acting of the 1940's. By your standard, Marlon Brando would be a bad actor, since "speak clearly and face the camera" is the polar opposite of what he did.
It's handy they have the tv show "Succession" to use for management training though.
It's such a superb show.
Something I realized watching Detectorists is that there aren't many realistic adult drama shows (or American movies) these days that aren't about crime or similarly extreme subjects, or that aren't historical dramas.
Detectorists is technically a "dramedy", of course, but it's basically a realistic, truthful depiction of everyday life, with some observational humour thrown in here and there.
For some reason Hollywood has indoctrinated the world into thinking that fiction can't be true to life, because life is somehow boring.
A similar American drama that comes to mind is Lodge 49, which is absolutely fantastic. On Becoming a God in Central Florida has a similar vibe, and is also excellent.
Off the top of my head, I'm struggling to think of many other shows. Better Things, Transparent, Togetherness, Succession, Mozart in the Jungle… any other good ones?
Airing 1 or 2 episodes a week gives maximum opportunity for a show to be successful, esp if it's a smaller show that doesn't have a built in audience (ie. if it's not a Marvel/Disney show or returning seasons of successful shows). Airing weekly means that there is an ongoing conversation around your show (if it's any good) and each media outlet is potentially writing about your show n times as opposed to writing about your show 1 time reviewing the entire thing, that results in more chances for the audience finding your show. The cancelling the service thing is at best a secondary concern. Moreover creators of many show prefer that their show be consumed on a week to week basis as opposed to binged in 1 sitting with little opportunity for the audience to reflect on it.
HBO has mastered that art of "1 episode a week to maximize the audience and buzz of what appears to be a niche show" even on their streaming service and as a result have found unconventional hits like Euphoria, The White Lotus, Succession, The Leftovers which would otherwise have been lost in the glut of peak tv abyss if they were just dropped in one night.
> All the old television networks, Netflix, Amazon, Disney, Apple, and others are pumping out more mediocre
This is a subjective statement. You might even dislike shows on a particular service, but to say all of them are “objectively bad” and you think people watch more of “90s sitcoms” tells me that you probably prefer 90s sitcoms. :)
I’m basically cycling between these providers each month. The Expanse, The Morning Show, Hawkeye, Succession, For All Mankind.
Last year was the most television I’ve watched since I was a kid.
TV Shows:
The Great
Succession
Snowfall
Best storytelling since Sopranos in those 3 I think.
Games:
Warzone
Hell Let Loose
Best social FPS (need friends for Warzone though)
Books:
Denis Johnson (all of his books)
Algorithms We Live By
Behave (best book of the decade imo)
Succession season 3 describes this accurately
I'm the same, except the YouTube.
I just love information, so I watch a lot of documentaries.
Outside of the top shelf of TV (Sopranos, Wire, Succession) it's all incredibly formulaic and boring.
Maybe the better analogy is your friend who somehow has to make everything about how either capitalism or communism is behind everything wrong about the world. It doesn't really matter if they're right or wrong, as some point you just want to talk about how much you like the new episode of Succession or whatever and not have them link everything back into their pet universal theory of the world.
It's often better and more effective to have an article about one single novel thing than to bang a drum about how every single thing in the world is just the same pattern again and again.
>snarky comments about corporate drama
Season 3 of "Succession" starts October 17
Thanks, so Succession is also one of the movies that touch on powerful people but change the names and declares itself purely fictional as a safeguard against real world repercussions.
To be clear I totally encourage creators to protect themselves and their art. I also wish they took the same care to protect their subjects when they’re in the opposite position of power.
Thanks, I read this expecting not to like it, but it resonated with me a lot. This past Oscars show, I'd seen only two of the Best Films nominees, and they were both streamed. I also tried Nomadland and I turned it off.
TV has indeed taken over. The creativity of Breaking Bad or Succession or Yellowstone is what we used to watch movies for. Real creativity is always there and it'll go where it's appreciated.
I don't want to make this tl;dr so just one more thing: I hosted A.O. Scott at Google [1] and I mentioned that I never look at Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic. I read him, and whoever's on the Roger Ebert site. An 80% "score" from a bunch of stupid people is still stupid.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Kh3-DGU3l4
I agree with your core sentiment on movies - but I couldn't disagree more on the topic of TV having reverted to the mean.
It may not all be "Sopranos", but I've seen so many TV shows in the past decade that have pushed boundaries and delivered experiences that frankly, have hit me much harder than almost any movie - and certainly much harder than pre-netflix era TV.
I know everyone has different taste, but I think we've seen a lot of maturation in the past decade specifically in the form of more interesting TV anthology series / single-season narratives (True Detective, Fargo, Watchmen) and dark-ish comedies (Rick and Morty, Barry, American Vandal, Succession). I think networks in general are giving show-runners more space and budget for trying weird stuff, because even if they end up with a show that's too niche for a general timeslot - there's at least the possibility of selling it to a streaming service later (like Arrested Development, The Expanse, and Community did).
Nice work. Just a heads up for troubleshooting, I searched for Succession and it shows when Season 1 and Season 2 were released, and said it's next season is Season 4. Looks like Season 3 was skipped? https://i.imgur.com/2IegGEK.png
The main reasons have already been mentioned.. compensation, feedback to the CEO, etc.. but an interesting one that I just saw, and I don’t know if it’s possible, appeared on the TV Show Succession (HBO) where the family's stock in the company (which they control but not by much) secures a loan that the lender can call if the stock drops below a certain price.
By "draw the line" I was referring to how much you would take from him if he wanted to convert some of his equity in Amazon into cash. Although I feel like I do appreciate the points you listed above, even with those measures in place there are no guarantees that "billionaires as a class of people" would cease to exist.
Certainly with someone like Bezos, unless you take it all there is going to be a number that will still net him a billion after all of the taxes. And if you do "take it all", then maybe the next Bezos, Zuckerberg, or Gates starts the next company in another jurisdiction with less of an appetite for taxation, drawing away with it the capital and all of the follow-on effects it provides (jobs, spending in the community, etc.). And given the lengths we know that rich people will go to protect their money, that line has to be drawn at far less than "all" to keep them.
On the other end of the extreme, even if he never sells a share those shares still allow him to wield a tremendous amount of power. So in the short run, all the taxes in the world would change nothing (Amazon does not pay dividends). It would just give him more time to figure out how to evade the taxes in the long run. :)
I am moved by the argument that Walton's kids shouldn't get it all, but I'm not sure that transferring some or all of his property to the government is a good idea. You would then just have a "trust fund class" of politicians and bureacrats! (BTW your Walton comment has got me pumped for season 3 of "Succession")
I like your overall thesis, I just think we should be less punitive with those exceptional people who do indeed add tremendous value to our economy and society.
I stopped midway at the wrestling match.
Watch Succession instead. Its way stronger and has what I liked about Billions Season 1 while also being better
The NRPI expression is something I first heard about on the HBO show Succession. Does that phrase have a history of use before that show? If I google it, I only come up with hits for the tv show.
it's ridiculous how blatant it all is, to the point that even in modern media (e.g tv show Succession) pokes at all the cancer this stuff produces and its one of those things most people are like "yep its happening" but there is nothing being done to stop any of it. ive stopped using facebook/twitter ages ago. that stuff is the downfall of modern society
Because "results" matter more than culture. Just watch a TV series "Succession" to see how the upper echelons of people treat/think about ordinary engineers and senior engineer.
Off the top of my head: Succession, VEEP, Barry, Big Little Lies, Sharp Objects, True Detective (seasons 1 & 3), Chernobyl.
Big Little Lies was probably the worst of that bunch, and is still lightyears ahead of any recent Netflix drama.
On Prime, The Man in the High Castle is a guilty pleasure despite its flaws. The bizarre spy drama Patriot is absolutely excellent.
I like that with Prime, I can subscribe to HBO within the app, and also buy seasons of some cable shows, like FX’s Legion, Fargo, What We Do in the Shadows.
I prefer that experience much more than Netflix. With Netflix, the original content has to be so good that it offsets the lack of being able to purchase non-Netflix content, and frankly Netflix originals have just not been good enough to cut it for a while.
Of all the shows you mentioned the only ones I have watched is, OITB (left it at after watching S04 I think), Master of None (both the seasons), I realise that its a drama that leans toward being a rom-com but I do not watch rom-coms at all. Kudos to Mindhunter, indeed that was entertaining and right in my ballpark. Liked House of cards till the time Spacey was there, S06 disappointed me. Season 1 of Making a Murderer was outstanding, season 2 didn't catch my interest. Also the last comedy I watched end-to-end I think was Entourage (which was produced by HBO), The Office (US) and Parks And Recreation, not surprisingly Netflix doesn't stream any of these in my region, Prime Video does the last two and Hotstar streams Entourage.
These are good shows not great ones like The Wire, The Sopranos, Mad Men, BB, Six Feet Under you know about the stuff that critics rave about etc. I don't care if Birdbox was watched by all of Netflix's subscribers, thats precisely the sort of thing that I don't watch the majority of the time, you watch that thing once and you forget that you ever watched it again. I'm now on probably my sixth or seventh rewatch of The Wire, that should tell you something about my viewing habits and why Netflix's content just doesn't work for me. I don't expect a network to consistenly churn out shows like that but at least some of the shows should be somewhere close to that level which HBO continues to do with The Deuce, Succession, True Detective(I know they fucked the dog on S02) etc.
Also you have the time to watch ALL of that, I don't. I work in tech too, I have an hour on weekdays and maybe 2-3 on weekends for leisure, so its only natural that I would be picky about what I watch, the absolute best, currently that would mean shows like The Americans, Escape from Dannemora and shows from the past like Halt and Catch Fire(from AMC), Six feet under, Deadwood which not surpisingly were also made by HBO. Netflix doesn't stream any of that.
I also don't understand how you think AMC won't exist, are they going to be insolvent ? Doesn't look like it, they have a cash-cow in The Walking Dead(I only watched till S06 then got bored) They got two of the best TV shows I liked BB and BCS, BCS is gonna kill it in the next season. They also produced The Terror, a brilliant mini-series which Netflix didn't stream as well and again Prime Video did. As a viewer I don't care about Netflix's subscriber numbers or HBO's lack thereof, I want to watch content I like which sadly Netflix doesn't produce on a consistent basis, this is entirely subjective and I realise that I might be one of the edge-cases in all the millenials when I say Netflix don't tickly my fancy.
I'm not biased towards HBO, hell HBO doesn't even stream in my country, I'm incredibly picky about what I watch since I'm short on time, Netflix churns out a LOT of shows, its only natural that some of them turn out to be brilliant and some of them indeed are, but the rest, like 90% of the shows are just average, they don't work for me, I simply do not have the time to watch them.
In that sense, Netflix is like the Y-Combinator of producing original content. You produce(invest in) hundreds of TV shows(startups) and hope one of them makes it big (becomes a unicorn) and the rest of them, well they would be probably cease to exist after some time.
> comparable to HBO’s tentpole programming?
I think this misses the forest for the tentpoles. Right now HBO's original programming is one episode per week of: Sharp Objects, Succession, Last Week Tonight, Vice and a Bill Maher special. Yes I think Netflix's better new content competes with that. Netflix supplements that with a huge array of quality third party tv shows. Non-English content is another set of moats for netflix, I wouldn't be shocked to learn that Netflix Japan has more hours of original-ish (lots of it is co-produced) content per year than HBO. Korean and Spanish might be behind but not too far and Chinese and Hindi are just a couple years away.
> there are basic cable channels (AMC and FX) that have given HBO a run for its money.
Each has produced a couple series ever of the quality that HBO has a few of at any given time. They aren't playing at the same level.
> Does anyone really believe that HBO is going to outcompete Netflix on original programming over the long run?
Yes.
> They just randomly drop them in the middle of the week, as if they don't have time even to promote them. Have you ever started an episode of Jessica Jones and had to wait 2 minutes for them to promo the next season of Mindhunter?
Netflix promotes more heavily in the app than most other streaming g services do; I actually find this both more intrusive and less effective than pre-roll promotions like HBO does.
> Meanwhile, after Game of Thrones ends, what's HBO got for tentpole series?
Succession, The multiple (IIRC, 5) GoT spinoff series that are already confirmed in the works, potentially with the first airing as soon as 2020, the Watchmen series they are rumored to be picking up...
> But premium cable is over, everything is going to be disintermediated,
The trend seems to be more streaming services offering premium add-ons like HBO, and away from “streaming means the end of the premium cable model” that was more defensible a claim a couple years ago.