CULTURE

There are many theories as to why HBO's Succession was such a riveting show: Perhaps it's the ripped-from-the-headlines premise (the Roy family closely mirrors the Murdochs, as well as other media dynasties), the quippy writing, or that it dutifully provided ample Twitter meme fodder every Sunday night. My personal theory: We've never been psychologically capable of separating Matthew Macfadyen from Mr. Darcy, and therefore we are simply forced to root for Shiv and Tom's toxic, fucked-up marriage.

My colleagues have much more intelligent theories, however. After Whizy Kim published her final recap of the show's (absolutely perfect) series finale, Constance Grady wrote the definitive piece analyzing Succession-as-Shakespeare ("'Put the world's whole strength / Into one giant arm, it shall not force / This lineal honor from me,' Hal says once he has the crown on his head, and when Shiv starts to move to take the chair from Kendall, he screams at her with the same furious commitment.")

Alissa Wilkinson argued that Succession was so good because it evoked the best kind of theater. A more boring version, written in the way too many TV shows are these days, "would spend enormous amounts of time showing us snippets of the various characters' childhoods, the traumas that formed them," she writes. "The pace would drag, and the tone would change, and now it would be a show about how we should feel bad for them." Thankfully, we got to finish the finale feeling bad for no one except ourselves that it was over.

—Rebecca Jennings, senior correspondent

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Succession's roots were in theater. That's why it was great.

Ohni Lisle for Vox

I know this isn't the point of TV, but I find there's no higher compliment I can give a show than to declare at the end of an episode that it "felt like theater." The shows that keep me engaged feel like a series of one-hour plays. Mad Men did it, and The Sopranos before that; each installment feels ready to mount on some off-Broadway stage, a self-contained world that was part of a bigger whole but stands on its own feet.

That's also what kept me coming back to Succession.

In fact, Succession comes by its theater DNA honestly. A number of its writers, including Lucy Prebble, Susan Soon He Stanton, Alice Birch, Miriam Battye, Will Arbery, Anna Jordan, Mary Laws, and Jamie Carragher, are working playwrights, with impressive produced work under their belts, and executive producer Frank Rich was the New York Times's chief theater critic from 1980 to 1993. (All of which makes Willa's terrible play — which someone actually put up in New York — and its crashing failure a little funnier.)

But that's not unusual: There's a long, long history of playwrights working in Hollywood, from Clifford Odets and Eugene O'Neill to Tony Kushner and Martin McDonagh, and many playwrights make a substantial portion of their living writing on TV shows today.

So it seems like creator Jesse Armstrong made a significant choice: Episode after episode, this show leaned into formal and stylistic choices that often felt to me like they owed more to playwriting than anything else. For instance, Succession was, gloriously, a show without flashbacks. A much more maudlin and unbearable version would spend enormous amounts of time showing us snippets of the various characters' childhoods, the traumas that formed them. We'd finally figure out what exactly made Roman be like that, or see Tom getting rejected by some girl in high school, or whatever. The pace would drag, and the tone would change, and now it would be a show about how we should feel bad for them. That sounds really boring.

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