We Are Not Serious People
And it shows…
Succession was, at its core, a show about awful rich people saying terrible things to each other. Members of the Roy family told each other to “Fuck off!” the way some families say hello or goodbye. Gerri called Roman her little “slime puppy,” Siobhan referred to her eldest sibling, Connor, as “the first fucking pancake,” and a fictional tweet called the David Schwimmer-esque Kendall “a bootleg Ross with a daddy complex.”
But as enjoyably baroque as many of these insults are, sometimes the most effective attacks are the simplest. For my money, the most cutting comment in Succession’s run came in the final season, when the family’s patriarch, Logan, finally told his children what he thought of them: “You’re such fucking dopes. You’re not serious figures. I love you, but you are not serious people.”
Now, Logan Roy was an awful character whose cruelty toward his “loved ones” and willingness to subvert American democracy for profit made him a deeply unreliable judge of character. But in this moment, as a business deal fell apart because of bitter familial resentments…
