Your Weekly Dose of EEE #16: Meal Fit for a King

The only happy moment in all of Succession, and it was a fake

Badass hawks. Photo by author.

Hello,

I’ve just spent a good half-hour hanging out in a hammock in my backyard, watching an army of tiny birds raise hell with a pair of red-tail hawks working together to eat either the young or the eggs of the much-smaller blue jays, robins, and even crows. I was planning to dictate the newsletter out there, but it’s so hot my phone warned me it would melt if I kept using it. So I’m in the air conditioning for the time being.

How’s your week been? The long weekend (Monday was Memorial Day here in the US) was very nice, featuring gorgeous weather and impromptu trips to get LEGO kits and ice cream. Then, on Tuesday night (more accurately about 3:30 Wednesday morning), a stomach bug started making its way through our house.

So. That’s why no essay landed in your inbox on Wednesday. That one—a sweet reflection whose topic my daughter thought of while we were out at dinner last weekend—will have to wait ’til next week. Thankfully, though, I’m recovered enough to give you a quick dose of EEE before falling asleep in the sun.

What’s Exciting Me?

I got a hammock. It’s a silly thing to be excited about, but I’ve been meaning to get one for a long time. Maybe a 90-degree day isn’t the best day to take it out for a test drive, but the seat is wide enough to give some shade so I’m not complaining at all. In fact, when we’re finished chatting I’m going to drag it right underneath the hawk/blue jay/robin tree to see if I can witness any more drama, but while in the actual shade.

Also, I’m going home to Missouri next weekend. I don’t get back there too often, but there’s a family reunion and I’m hauling all five of us on a 3-hour plane ride followed by a 3-hour car ride so we can spend some time in the sun, water, and air of the Ozarks with family.

And, finally, after meaning to do it for many, many, years, I got a compost bin. I actually thought it was one of those that gets picked up at the curb each week or two, but it turns out it’s one of those that you actually get the soil out of and use in your garden, lawn, etc. Not what I was expecting, but also not a bad thing. (If you ask me. My husband’s version of this story is different.)

What’s Entertaining Me?

📺 Consider this your spoiler alert. Succession has ended, and I have thoughts.

Most everyone in this show got what they deserved. And then there were some characters who got what they didn’t at all deserve but had to subject themselves to something awful to attain it. This show started and ended a tragedy. Not a single main character in this show had a heroic arc.

The big losers

Kendall: From the very beginning of the series, you got the sense he was the center. Aside from the old man, Kendall is the first main character we ever we see. Of the family members, he was always the logical choice to run the company, no matter how pissed Logan was at him at any given time. The business—and how to get ahead in it—are the most important things to Kendall, and this shows in his detachment from basically everyone he loves. He likes to frame his power grabs as what’s best for the business…and usually, they are. But he takes a lot of joy in screwing everyone else in the name of the company. In the end, he gets screwed out of the only thing he ever wanted—the thing that was probably more rightfully his than anyone else’s. But he did it to himself—both with his actions and with the damage he did to his relationships. Of everyone, he’s going to be most lost. He wasn’t kidding when he said he didn’t know who he was without this business. It’s been his entire identity since he was seven years old.

Roman: He never wanted the company until everyone else wanted it. His brokenness attracted me to him (I’m a fixer), but it also made him unpredictable. He knew he could never be it, and so his life’s mission was to prove that he could. But he couldn’t. Toward the end he became so fixated on doing whatever was going to make them (meaning him and Kendall, because they’d already cut Shiv out) as much money as possible that he made some really bad and self-serving calls that caused actual social unrest and cared zero about who or what (like the country/democracy) would be hurt. And, of course, he “redeemed” himself from his reticence in an earlier board vote by expressing certainty and solidarity with Kendall but still lost in the end.

Shiv: She lost because, in all her maneuvering, she never fully proved her necessity to Matsson. She was always expendable because she never had the experience in the business to take over. And this contributed to why she was never taken seriously by most people as a successor to Logan. Yes, there was sexism. One-hundred percent. You don’t get into and out of corporate America, especially in a fake-but-also-very-realistic business like Waystar Royco, without it. But she also stabbed her brothers in the back (after, yes, they cut her out of the deal) only to be stabbed with the same knife. She gave the good ideas away like free candy at a parade and then was cut out at every turn.

The somewhat-winners

Greg: I’m gonna say Greg really came out on top here. Despite what Tom says, Greg is going to do just fine for himself once all is settled with the deal. You can’t trust a thing Tom says anyway, and Greg has proven himself a powerful chameleon (whom Matsson likes). He’s going to go far, and while I’m sad he’s such a slimeball, he’s proven that he’s willing to stand up for himself when needed and use information against people to get what he wants. I think he’ll make it out of this situation mostly intact, and that Tom should be worried about him (which is maybe why Tom is so abusive to him, but Greg loves money and image so much he is willing to take it).

Tom: Ugh, this guy. Also a slimeball. I do wonder if he’d have developed the sliminess as much if Shiv hadn’t turned their relationship on its head on their wedding night. (You were planning on both of us sleeping around, right? What kind of person enters a marriage without having this conversation?!) But whatever it was that made him this way, he was able to emulate Logan better than anyone else could—and apparently that’s what the world wants in a media executive? So, yay! He wins. I hated him just as much as the rest of the characters, but it is pretty poetic that the one person who’s not in the family is the one who takes the baton. He’s going to be the face of the company, but he’ll also be Matsson’s personal whipping boy and, like Greg, he’ll happily take it if it means the money and prestige he’s craved all his life. He has gone from nobody to somebody, and he couldn’t be more pleased. And he has…

Shiv: Wait, what? Yeah. Shiv lost. But she didn’t. But she did. She lost the CEOship she was angling for. She lost her independence (which she maybe didn’t really ever want) when she got in that car with Tom at the end. You can tell her heart isn’t in it by the way she holds his hand (or doesn’t), but you can also see that she’s made a (business) decision to stay with him. To stay in the company. Is she the CEO? No. But she gets to reap the benefits without being subjected to the torture. She gets to be married to her child’s father. And, you know, the schedule.

I liked this show less and less as the seasons wore on. Call it the sunk cost fallacy, but it took a bit for me to come to terms with the fact that while the series was a masterclass in characterization and storytelling via direction, there was nothing redeeming about the main characters or the storyline. But something in the last episode made me smile, and I will close my last-ever Succession rant with this, the only happy scene in all of the series. Of course, things fell apart just hours later, but for the moment, the siblings were just siblings, reliving a fun childhood memory, and it was beautiful. Shiv’s smile on the thumbnail says it all. (Note: It’s gross. But it is happy.)

That was long. I’ll make books and music short.

📖 The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. I actually haven’t read this, but my 9th graders did several years ago and I have a copy of it that I mean to read soon. Henrietta Lacks was a poor Black woman whose cells were stolen and used for some really groundbreaking science innovations after she died. From the blurb: “As Rebecca Skloot so brilliantly shows, the story of the Lacks family—past and present—is inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of.” I can’t wait to read it!

🎶 My daughter has decided this week that she is a parody writer. She has written a parody to “I Want it That Way” by the Backstreet Boys, except about bathroom issues after eating too much “chi-lay”. I won’t share her lyrics without her permission, but all through my fugue state when I was lying in bed unable to move, they were playing on loop in my head. Thanks, kid.

What’s Enlightening Me?

Hawks are badass. But other birds, who will go toe-to-toe with a pair of badass hawks to save their babies? Those are the real winners.

Take care, friends. See you Wednesday.