Succession

If you’re a big Bruce Springsteen fan, then this weekend’s new release, Deliver Me from Nowhere, will be one of the year’s most eagerly awaited releases. But more-casual fans of the Boss – and I include myself in this category, despite a great admiration for a vast amount of the Springsteen recorded canon – may find the film, which focuses on the recording of his notoriously sparse Nebraska album in the early Eighties, a strange mixture of hard-going and unedifying.

There are few American shows more acclaimed and successful in the past decade than Succession, Jesse Armstrong’s peerless study of the corrupting influence of money and power, as illustrated through a Murdoch-esque media dynasty led by Brian Cox’s bull-like Logan Roy. The series was magnificent because it blended hysterical, unexpected black humor (step forward the excellent Matthew Macfadyen as Tom Wambsgans, who is hilarious virtually every moment he’s onscreen) with the serious thespian pyrotechnics of a starry cast including Cox, Kieran Culkin and the great Jeremy Strong, who, rumor has it, did not believe that he was making a comedy but a serious study of moral decay.

If you’re a Paramount+ or Showtime subscriber, there’s a decent chance that you spent at least some of the Thanksgiving break watching the first two episodes of The Agency, the Michael Fassbender-fronted espionage drama that the company has invested a huge amount of money in. Based on the cult French series The Bureau, starring Matthieu Kassovitz, it’s a grim and self-consciously serious piece of drama, low on explosive shootouts and one-liners and high on tortured scenes of introspection, as Fassbender’s deep-cover operative, codename Martian, is brought in from the cold by his CIA superiors to their London outpost, only to realize that he has not been entirely honest as to a tortured romantic liaison that he went through in Africa.

When Kevin Costner announced that he would not be returning to Yellowstone, the contemporary Western series that revitalized his career, the news was greeted with consternation. Costner had been the pivotal figure in the show’s previous four and a half seasons — and it was expected that he would return as the patriarch John Dutton III for the final installment, even though he was busy filming his own epic pictures, Horizon. However, amid well-documented spats between him and the show’s creator Taylor Sheridan, Costner announced that he would not, in fact, return for Yellowstone’s final episodes.   Rather than leaving the door open for a final, face-saving cameo, Sheridan dealt with Costner in brutal fashion.

It was to be the year of Shōgun. In one of the cleanest sweeps since Succession ended, the show won virtually everything at this year’s Emmys, including Best Drama Series, Lead Actress in a Drama for Anna Sawai and, unsurprisingly, Lead Actor in a Drama for the phenomenal Hiroyuki Sanada, who triumphed in a category that had some equally strong choices (Gary Oldman for Slow Horses), as well as some more perplexing ones (Idris Elba for Hijack and, bizarrely, Dominic West for The Crown). Shōgun took a record-breaking eighteen Emmys in total, with showrunner Justin Marks remarking of its makers Hulu and FX, “You guys greenlit a very expensive subtitled Japanese period piece whose central climax revolves around a poetry competition.” It proved to be a good bet.

On Friday morning, readers of the New York Times were presented with a foreboding headline: “The Chilling Reason You May Never See the New Trump Movie.” For the unfamiliar, the film in question, The Apprentice, is a drama/thriller about the relationship between Roy Cohn and a younger Donald Trump as he pursues glamour and riches in 1970s New York, becoming progressively amoral and self-obsessed in the process. Succession’s Jeremy Strong plays Cohn, Sebastian Stan plays Donald and the film’s most controversial scene involves the now former president raping his first wife, Ivana. (She accused him of “violating” her in her 1989 divorce deposition, only to recant this in 2015.

If there is one thing that the rescheduled Emmy awards from this year will be remembered for, it is comforting predictability. Succession swept the board in the dramatic stakes, as The Bear did a similarly imperial job in the comedy categories. There is, of course, something of an arbitrary nature about the way that both shows have been designated; Succession contained more laugh-out-loud scenes, characters and storylines than most comedies — and The Bear alternates between humor and serious dramatic heft with aplomb. Yet the powers that be decided to designate them thus, and I doubt that Jesse Armstrong or Christopher Storer, the creators of the two shows, will be complaining too vociferously today.

The Golden Globes have historically been the strangest of all the major film awards ceremonies. Previously handed out by a mysterious body known as the HFPA (Hollywood Foreign Press Association), the ceremony has all the glamor and glitz of the Oscars, but with one big difference: there is free-flowing alcohol on all the tables, meaning that, more often than not, audiences can enjoy the spectacle of at least one A-list star collecting their award blind drunk, which leads to some of the more unorthodox and entertaining speeches in recent memory. And this unrestrained ethos extends itself to the hosts, too.

Ross Anderson, life editor Silo, Drops of God and Hijack As I wrote early this year in our pages, Apple TV+ is probably the most under-appreciated streaming service available, with a very high batting average for its output. Bad Sisters was far funnier than I expected, The Super Models was just fantastic, and Boom! Boom! The World vs. Boris Becker is almost as long as its title, but is also the best sports documentary I’ve seen in years. But the three best shows I watched though it were Silo, Drops of God and Hijack.

After a year in entertainment dominated by the Barbenheimer phenomenon, it wasn’t hugely surprising to find that Barbie and Oppenheimer were similarly garlanded when it came to today’s Golden Globe nominations. The adventures of Mattel’s finest and most lucrative product-turned-icon are up for nine awards — in large part because it has no fewer than three nominations for Best Song, including my own favorite “I’m Just Ken” — whereas Christopher Nolan’s atomic bomb epic is just trailing behind slightly with eight, including recognition for Best Picture, Best Director and, as expected, actors Cillian Murphy, Robert Downey Jr. and Emily Blunt.

It always used to be that, in Hollywood movies, big business was seen as a force for ill rather than good. Leaving aside that the films themselves were financed by giant studios hellbent on making a profit, such classics as Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life and Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times firmly took the side of the individual against the system and presented the corporate world as a faceless and uncaring one — if, that is, it wasn’t simply a criminal one altogether, as best expressed by Lionel Barrymore’s sneering robber baron Potter in Capra’s film. Today, things have changed immeasurably.

HBO's flagship drama Succession came to an end on Sunday night. The tale of the Roy saga was heavily based on the Murdoch family, to the point that Rupert Murdoch's divorce agreement from his fourth wife Jerry Hall stipulated that she would be barred from providing plot points to the show's writers. But how close is the fiction to reality? Spectator chairman Andrew Neil — who spent over a decade as editor of one of Murdoch's top newspapers — joins Freddy Gray on Spectator TV to discuss. "There was enough of an overlap to make it interesting, and enough of an overlap to say, 'yeah, that's happened in real life, that's the kind of thing that goes on,' but not enough to give the lawyers at HBO palpitations," Andrew says. He describes how Logan Roy "ran his company like a king.

The finale of Jesse Armstrong’s show Succession — and it very much is a show where the creator and lead writer is the auteur — has been one of the most anticipated for any series in years. But us aficionados of intelligent long-form television are always primed for disappointment. For every Breaking Bad, which concludes satisfyingly and inspiringly, there is a Game of Thrones, which lazily drops in fan-service tropes and fails to bring any kind of rewarding closure to the show, alienating its audience in the process. So which way did Succession fall? In truth, there were moments in the fourth and final series where I was beginning to feel that the show had jumped the shark.

This post contains Succession season four spoilers. Succession is probably the most realistic of the prestige TV shows. Instead of shows like The Sopranos and Yellowstone that try to raise the emotional stakes by leaving us with a body count every episode, I like how Succession delves deep into one or two complex situations every season, letting them marinate over time, much like how a major business acquisition might play out in the real world. The Sopranos is possibly the best show ever made, but I don’t actually believe that a real-life mob boss has to deal with the number of unique life-or-death situations that Tony Soprano does every week.

Like everyone else in the Acela corridor, Cockburn has been avidly watching the final season of Succession. Without giving too much away, there have been some moments this season that are up there with the best of prestige television: the real-time playing out of a medical emergency in the third episode, for example. Cockburn feels entitled, then, to speak up when the show is less than great — and Sunday night's election special was an absolute stinker. One of the best things about Succession is that it feels like it takes place in a realistic parallel universe, very similar to this one, except that Trump and Covid never happened. And the drama is at its weakest when it tries to play solemn about the Roys' political whims.