I think the idea is the standard Shiv thing where she thought she was a genius but was only actually adequate. She gave Gil some decent advice for tussling with her father, but he only REALLY hired her for that/leverage on Logan, and it’s noted that her only actual victory was getting a liberal elected in NYC, which… Read more
William Hughes
plumberduck
Writer on The A.V. Club's Newswire desk since 2014, covering stories ranging from TV, to film, to games, to that time the Harry Potter lady said wizards used to poop on the floor, like dogs.
It’s also a weirdly consistent touch - she doesn’t have any food when Shiv and Roman visit way back in season 1, either. It’s always very, “Oh, right, children need that to live, don’t they?” Read more
You caught me, I clearly loathe this TV show I have written 25,000 words about and given uniformly high scores to. Read more
Buying Pierce was always predicated on the kids pooling their money from their part of the Waystar sale (and some outside funding, I think?) so, no we can assume that deal is dead. Read more
Jess Watch is because a) I like doing at least one little bit like that to add structure to the Strays, especially since I have a bad tendency to over-stuff them and b) I just like her! She’s a small spark of humanity in a show filled with assholes, she’s in almost every episode, and Juliana Canfield does great work… Read more
Like, regardless of my politics, Succession in an aggressively leftist show that is in part about politics. Most of the Roys actively mock their own anchors, viewers, and specifically Mencken as Nazis. I'm just reporting on the text of the show. Read more
This is fair! Tom’s getting pushed from a couple of different angles and all the ones you listed are almost certainly more pressing for him. Seeing Shiv and her new “boyfriend” joke about destroying Tom’s life, with her old boyfriend, was the lethal blow. Read more
I will note that Roman for sure does not “shrug this off,” he immediately goes from Gerri dismissing him to trying to browbeat Connor into submission, talking shit about Willa and making a pretty huge public spectacle with his “I got this” when Kendall tries to de-escalate. He’s angry and spinning. Read more
Nah, that one is for sure a typo. Thanks for pointing out, fixed now. Read more
*shrugs* I’m changing it because I’ve written literally 10,000 headlines and my brain is mush now, it reads fine to me as a sort of flat language thing (shades of our colleagues at The Onion’s famed “It Only Tuesday”) but if it reads to multiple people as a typo I guess it counts as a mistake regardless of intent. Read more
It’s not a typo? I get that it’s a weird construction but I promise you it’s deliberate. Read more
I’ve thought about this a fair bit, because it’s an interesting question. On the one hand, we’ve never gotten any indication that he has stopped using, no text about it at all - the show could reasonably assume that we know that Kendall is always a little bit on coke at all times at this point.
On the other hand, Shiv… Read more
Ah, that was total guesswork on my part, my screeners don’t have captions. I should go check the spelling on HBO Max and fix it in these last few, hadn’t occurred to me. Read more
Kendall sends it to him, you can see the text on his phone. Read more
I get your point in general, but “Kendall trying to come up with an idea so crazy that it blows up the deal” isn’t really the premise here. He thinks he sees a way to goose the stock price so high that Mattson can’t buy Waystar anymore. The way he's doing it is plenty nutty, but he seems to genuinely believe he's got… Read more
They also included a big prominent Doderich poster at Investor's Day to remind us that he's Waystar's Mickey or somesuch Read more
I should have tagged that in the Strays, since it definitely caught my eye. I think for sure she's just fiddling with the coke so that Mattson assumes she's taking some, which would suggest she's also faking the drinking. Read more
That timeline would work out (I think, time on this show can be a little weird) to the baby being conceived on the night she had that talk about motherhood with her mom, right? (Spite! The best reason to have kids.) I do think Shiv entertained some hopes of a baby changing her relationship with Logan in some way, even… Read more
I’ve been nursing the “Greg wins” theory for a while now, because it’s what you’d do if you were plotting out a straight satire. (And Succession started, I think, as much straighter in its goal to be satire, and has layered the drama on as everyone has found the awful humanity of these characters.) An absolute nobody… Read more
This is just me speculating; the leak could have come from anywhere, but Greg’s Greg-ness combined with his proximity to the journalist led me to infer. Read more