For 4 seasons now, HBO’s Succession has given folks one thing to tweet about on Sunday nights. Everybody, it appears, is obsessive about the Roys. With the finale airing on Sunday, it might appear that the large tent get together is about to finish. That’s not totally the case. On-line, Succession screengrabs, quotes, and references dominate the discourse in a fashion that isn’t more likely to dissipate anytime quickly. By means of its memes, Succession is already tiptoeing into eternity.
Proof of the present’s meme-ification is in all places, from the picket lines of the Writers Guild of America strike to your Twitter timeline each time a wealthy individual does one thing dumb. It is a testomony to the standard of the writing and the precise model of the present that almost each episode supplies an all-time one-liner, the type good for a GIF or picture macro. Creator Jesse Armstrong beforehand made the sweatily deranged UK comedy Peep Present, and he clearly nonetheless hungers for the form of singularly broken quips which might be preferrred meme fodder.
The Simpsons’ on-line dominance may be ascribed to its quirky, coincidental predictive powers and to the truth that it’s all the time good to see Homer sink right into a shrub. When The Sopranos gained new relevance through the pandemic, The New York Times Magazine argued that it was the best way the present had captured America’s nationwide decline —“a humiliating, slow-motion slide down a hill right into a puddle of filth”—that had given it on-line resonance. Succession, too, appears destined to reside on in our on-line hearts. However what story will its memes inform?
Maris Kreizman is a author and podcaster who recaps the present on Twitter by encouraging folks to “tag yourself in tonight’s episode.” She traces her adoration again to a second season episode about Vaulter, a fictional Gawker/Vice-like entity that the Roys capriciously destroy. “Kendall fires your complete employees off, and afterward he walks right into a bodega, steals a pack of batteries, after which throws the batteries within the trash,” Kreizman sums up. “Having handled a number of media corporations that deal with their staff like trash, I had by no means recognized with an inanimate object as I did that pack of batteries.” She tagged herself because the batteries after which simply stored on tagging.
Curiously, Kreizman isn’t the one Succession meme-maker to say that the destruction of Vaulter was the second they fell in love. Maybe counterintuitively, Succession’s depiction of the workings of the digital media trade as ruthless and inane has really motivated actual digital media staff to actively work together with the present on-line.
Writing for Polygon, Gita Jackson described the show’s online fan community as “fiercely devoted” to the fates of those fictional lives and ascribed that dedication to at least one main via line: “On platforms like Twitter and Tumblr, followers of the present analyze trailers body by body and talk about their hopes and desires for the characters. Regardless of being a present about ruthless capitalists, a few of whom supported a fascist presidential candidate, the best way that every one the characters have been so wounded by their abusive father makes it simple for the viewers to empathize with them.”
