The day I got home from my Spring Break trip to Florida, I was met with an overwhelming wave of boredom.
So, naturally, I picked up my remote, opened HBO Max, and decided to start watching the show my parents told me repeatedly to watch while I was home with them for break. The show was Succession, the drama series that began in 2018 and is currently airing its fourth and final season.
If you aren’t aware of the plot of the series, here is a basic run down – the series follows the founder of fictional media conglomerate Waystar Royco, Logan Roy, late in his life while he is getting closer to retirement. His adult children, Connor (Alan Ruck), Kendall (Jeremy Strong), Siobhan (Sarah Snook), and Roman (Kieran Culkin) are fighting for both their father’s approval, as well as the title of CEO of Waystar Royco once it comes time for him to step down.
As we all know, our phones know and see everything, so naturally after watching one episode of the series, my TikTok decided I had no option but to become completely and utterly obsessed with the show and its characters.
The videos were not what I was expecting. Given the nature of the show, I would expect it to be plenty of business people doing deep-dive style analysis videos, but what came up on my For You page was just about the opposite. I started to get edits of two of the characters, Tom Wambsgams and Greg Hirsch, to Taylor Swift’s “Cruel Summer”, edits of the “troubled” child of the family, Kendall Roy, to different sad Mitski songs, and a never-ending supply of text posts with the background audio being a mashup of the shows theme song (which may just be the most catchy theme song to exist) with “Watch Me (Whip/Nae Nae)”.
Since Succession is a business-centered show, this was extremely surprising. These characters to their core are no different than other greedy business characters, such as Leonardo DiCaprio’s depiction of Jordan Belfort in the 2013 film The Wolf Of Wall Street, but for some reason, the internet has decided that Succession is for the girls and the gays.
Kendall Roy is central to the internet’s “baby girlification” of Succession. Though he is a 40-year-old man, the writers of the series have written Strong’s character in a way that has made him so incredibly relatable to younger, 20 somethings women. He is written in a way many shows will never ever write about a man, extremely emotional, real, and also extremely cringy. When I watched the season 2 episode where Kendall performs his original rap for his father “L to the OG”, I knew I was completely obsessed with how utterly cringe, but somehow utterly real the character was.
Another fan obsession is the connection between Greg Hirsch, cousin of the Roy family, to his boss and Siobhan Roy’s husband, Tom Wambsgams. If you search “tom greg succession” online, you will be met with COUNTLESS youtube videos of edits to them to “Cruel Summer”, people saying they need to be endgame at the end of the show, and emotional videos of their “relationship.”
**Some minor spoilers ahead**
The reality of these characters is that they are not good people. Tom and Greg most definitely are not even the slightest bit romantically interested in each other, and their relationship is started by covering up and burning the extreme evils and wrongdoings of Waystar Royco. Kendall Roy is unreliable, his loyalty to his father changes multiple times every season, and he is a distant father and not a great person. But we love to look past these things and find so much entertainment in these characters and project our own feelings and lives.
If you have an HBO Max subscription, do yourself a major favor and get caught up on Succession. You will want to be able to watch some of it live before the fourth and final season finishes airing. If you don’t have an HBO Max subscription, find a friend who does, it is that important.
Come for the family drama, stay for the Taylor Swift edits.