The final season of HBO’s Succession may be known to others by its various epithets—a “bloodbath,” a “breathtaking blindside,” “a perfect, terrible goodbye”—but recently, I know it as my ambient media of choice. Having to endure the world’s longest flight from JFK to my home in Singapore at least twice a year, I’ve found Succession’s final season to be the perfect frame for my travel itinerary. The adrenaline rush of its opening, which sees the Roy children abandon their pet project in favor of a clearly ill-advised investment for no reason than to spite their father, keeps me just conscious enough for my first in-flight meal. Likewise, when I awaken for the second meal thirteen hours later, Kendall joins me with his own “meal fit for a king.” (For there is something about the milkshake concoction of “sprouting potatoes, zero-percent milk, and wartime pickles” with which Roman and Shiv anoint/torment their elder brother that renders the microwaved mush of airline catering suddenly palatable.) Yet, despite the serendipitous concordance between the show and my circadian rhythms, there remains something eerie about the prospect of drifting off to sleep as “Connor’s Wedding” plays in the background of my barely-noise-cancelling headphones, as the low hum of jet engines and my wine-addled and sleep medicated-haze cradle me into my slumber.
Marking a long-anticipated, but never entirely foreseen, development in the show’s overarching narrative—the death of Logan Roy, head of Waystar Royco—the episode is, as it was lauded when it first aired, a heart-rending portrait of loss and grief. Belied by critics’ frequent emphasis on plot and emotion, however, is the episode’s evocative soundscape of static and noise. Set to the symphonies of a white noise machine, much of the episode’s drama is catalyzed by the Roy siblings’ inability to fathom, let alone impede, their father’s death as it unravels off-screen and on board his company jet. Suspended in mid-air, and transmittable to the trio only by a call from company executives, the final moments of Logan’s life are mired in commotion, phone static, and miscommunication. As his children take turns navigating their complicated attachments to him, Logan’s corpse grows cold beside a futile device propped pathetically by his ear. Meanwhile, the ashen faces of the employees—or, as Roman Roy puts it, “corporate bozos and some airplane sluts”—next to his body are evidence enough that Kendall’s orders for them to consult the “best heart doctor in the world” and “best airplane medicine expert in the world” are belated.
Withholding Logan from those who mourn him most, a sea of sound, radio, and electromagnetic waves thereby amplifies the scene’s tension. The gravity of Logan’s death becomes suffused throughout noisy interferences, which, like the raucous din of jet engines and the tin-tinged voices that relay the in-flight ongoings to Kendall, Shiv, and Roman, transmit to them nothing but this inconvenient fact: that their dearly feared/beloved is beyond resuscitation.
Although the Roy family may command the news, entertainment, and stories of a fictive America, it is in this crucial moment of life and death that they are faced with the failures—and farce—of their influence.
Noise thus distracts, even as it informs the scene’s unmistakable pathos. Arriving amid a cycle of calls, shit-talking, and inane chatter, the decisive blow—delivered by a staticky voice from an unlocatable elsewhere, no less—blends almost seamlessly into Succession’s equally disorienting premise of a collapsing family business’s failures to paper over its deficits. Turmoil, disorders, and volatility are simply de rigueur for seasoned viewers of the show (one need only be reminded of the disinformation regime that is Waystar Royco itself). But this time, this call, this message is unlike any other: this is not, or not only, the same sort of volatility that can be so easily shored up into financial profits; neither is it the traffic of guile on which the company thrives. This is, instead, the moment that the series’ eponymous line of succession comes to realize its import—or, worse still, its lack thereof.
As Roman tells his siblings at the end of the episode, pointing to the seismic collapse of Waystar’s stock prices on his phone: “There he is; this is dad.” For all the prior contentions regarding where and when to land the plane that entombs the Roy patriarch—immediately, as his family wishes, or after the markets close, so that the company’s executives can draft a public statement to bolster stakeholder confidence—it is with such an anticlimactic stock index (itself the ramification of a scrambled trade signal) that Logan is finally brought to the ground. No PR spin nor heartfelt pronouncement of love is commensurable to the havoc that Logan wreaked in both life and death. He is exactly as investors have received him: Dionysian chaos and noise.
Whereas the discordant whir of his jets used to accompany him to yet another acquisition, another deal, another involvement in “wars and famines and revolutions,” it now signals the immeasurable weight of his life. In this way, Logan’s death seems almost like a cruel joke that, unlike his jet, never quite lands, for his reign of terror never ceases; it can only be sublimated into—as much as it has always been interchangeable with—the circuits of money, clout, and information that he had always stirred.
The irony of the episode’s portrait of miscommunication is therefore clear to us: while “our story revolves around a media empire…around information and eyeballs,” it is the unavailability of information—or the unavailability of the message that one desires most—that motivates its drama instead. Although the Roy family may command the news, entertainment, and stories of a fictive America, it is in this crucial moment of life and death that they are faced with the failures—and farce—of their influence. No matter that these characters are armed with preposterous wealth, or that Succession’s viewers may be accustomed to the generic arcs of TV. Logan’s death blindsides us all equally, for it obliterates the known conventions—and our grasp—of narrative. Here, then, proximity to knowledge and power no longer shields us from instability; it merely lulls us into a false comfort with uncertainty and stuns when we expect it least. Insofar as we may wish to believe ourselves at home in noise and static, the caprices of our reality itself never let us forget that stasis is simply not knowing when the shoe will drop.
Indeed, not unlike poetry for Auden, TV makes nothing happen; it is for this guarantee of ease and banality that we turn increasingly to it. What “Good TV” does, however, is to operationalize its narcotic nothingness.
Of course, captivated by Logan’s larger-than-life persona, we may be tempted to brush aside reminders that the absurdity of death—his death, in particular—is what scaffolds Succession itself, just as the unintelligibility of our lives, as Joan Didion would say, is precisely what also occasions our stories. Communication, in other words, must always be inseparable from the incommunicable grounds from which it is borne. Or, as the thermodynamics of information puts it: entropy is the necessary evil from which all order is derived. Nonetheless, what these various affirmations of chaos do not teach us is just how uncomfortable change and contingency can be. Against the contagion of energy that attends all static—a movement towards the inevitable heat death of the universe—for instance, physics would wield the sterile language of relativity to urge us to re-engineer the universe’s rhythms to our own. Likewise, treating language as a means of mastering unsound noise, the human sciences would shroud a spurious curation of our milieux under the guise of ethical openness—it tells us, specifically, to acquaint ourselves with doubt, given that it expands the bounds of our perspectives, but only insofar as it affords us a way to ward against what cannot be known. In so doing, both science and culture impel us towards a relentless pursuit of a comfort that can only result when we so willingly turn ourselves from the known unknowns of reality, thereby reining the limits of our understanding into tentative contours.
The fact, however, is that such momentary relief by and large succeeds for most of us—that is, until the other shoe drops. Perhaps this, then, is the allure of a cruel patriarch, whose mercurial disposition and promises of protection—or, in the Roys’ case, a prodigious inheritance—suffice to blind us to the eventual devastation of losing his favor. It is easy to seek and desire a comfort that lets us withstand the unbearable; it is less so to be exposed to the potency of reality. Compared to the horrors of being awake to the world, one cannot deny the relative pleasures of a makeshift somnambulism. So for me, between the dull consistency of airplane white noise and the Ambien brain fuzz, the static-tinged voices of “Connor’s Wedding” have often proven adequate to drown out the unnerving and, frankly, unnatural prospect that I am being propelled across the world in a fuel-guzzling metal tube. Or, at least, it has served me well enough to tide me through my regular nineteen-hour journeys home. In the same way, Succession’s recursive rehearsals of its characters’ repulsiveness may be said to inoculate its audiences against its “alienation effects,” “its jittery moral center and its gleeful apocalypticism.”
Still, turbulence intercedes. We remain poised, at times literally, on precarious mechanics. For this reason, neither the Roy siblings’ Oedipal longings nor patricidal plots are ever quite satisfied, for their disgust at their parent results merely from their wounded attachments and acquiescence to him. Ultimately, no one but the primal father can ever be “comfortable with a world” in which his unbridled will prevails—where “money,” as the show implies in Kendall’s quixotic eulogy of Logan, is entirely coextensive with the “lifeblood, the oxygen of [life],” and wherein even one’s family may be played like screen fodder for “fun” and “amusement.” In short, the brutal theater of entertainment for which Logan stands only reprises a more familiar script—one of capitalist expropriation, whose own semblance of “vitality” hinges on that of its progeny, actors, and even audiences. Yet, should the laws of thermodynamics hold, any interim fix for system collapse can only last insofar as friction does not become the constant state. White noise can only distract for so long before its overwhelming drone sets in and tedium turns into frustration.
The triumph of Succession lies, then, in its mocking complicity with Logan’s world. In an age when we flood our sensoria to simply avoid hearing ourselves, the series unabashedly announces its own part in such an anaesthetic machine. Inundating us with its repetitive schemes, its exhausting pace, and a litany of numbers and jargon that can wash so easily over us, the talky drama lends itself all too well to its audiences’ trance. As a result, it shocks us whenever the series avows its status as noise, turning its subject from the slow decay of the entertainment business to the utter insensibility of the circus in which we all partake. For, asleep before a screen, as we tend to imbibe our deluges of content today, any unsuspecting viewer may awake, as I had the misfortune of doing, in the most untimely of circumstances. Were one not careful—but can anyone ever regulate one’s bodily habits so exactly—one may even stumble upon the season’s eighth episode, “America Decides,” to be greeted with scenes more nightmarish than anything one can dream: a nauseating satire of our present; the instrumental debilitation of our sensibilities; the paralysis of politics by media glut and our ongoing march towards such a reality today.
Unravelling the machinations of Waystar’s subsidiary network, ATN’s election night coverage, the episode exposes the destruction that the Roy siblings’ contests for power have wrought on American politics. In its depiction of the backrooms of the country’s exercise of democracy, it boils our ballot box decisions down to a family’s petty tug-of-war—one that nevertheless masquerades itself as a feel-good narrative of choice that at once galvanizes and governs the populace. Taking our oft-uncritical absorption of media to its logical conclusion, Succession here becomes a stunning indictment of even its own audiences, as we trade any initial aversion to its characters’ chafing behaviors for cheap thrills and titillation, never knowing the depths of depravity into which we have sleepwalked until it is too late.
In the end, it is Roman, whose unflinching embrace of the perverse, leads him to make the most accurate diagnosis of our present media circuits at the close of “America Decides”: “We’ve just made a night of good TV,” he says after ATN swings the election in favor of a Trump-esque caricature, “Nothing happens.” Indeed, not unlike poetry for Auden, TV makes nothing happen; it is for this guarantee of ease and banality that we turn increasingly to it. What “Good TV” does, however, is to operationalize its narcotic nothingness. Inflating the empty vessel that is entertainment itself, Succession elucidates the intrinsic alienness of noise: the abyss that forever lurks beneath the soporific murmur of TV static.
Rachel Tay is a PhD candidate in Duke University’s Graduate Program in Literature, where she’s researching the generic analogies by which we mediate attention technologically. When she’s not after (the problem of) attention — and only for research purposes — she prefers to be tucked away in the dark corners of a bar, theatre, or library.