SUCCESSION, Spoilers and The Lost Love of the Art

The state of the discourse is bad, real bad.

This is going to have spoilers for the latest episode of Succession, including a spoilery image, so please be warned.

I am not a spoilerphobe. Back in the days when I was a writer who did some scooping on the side I was privy to lots of information about upcoming movies. I would get details from people close to production, I would get my hands on scripts, I would see imagery that was not public. This rarely, if ever, ruined my experience (unless the idea was good but the finished product was bad. That happened sometimes - you would get a detail from an upcoming movie, it would sound amazing, and then it would be fumbled in action. Maybe if I hadn’t had the info about that bit I wouldn’t have felt so disappointed by it).

Plot details rarely matter - it’s the singer, not the song. You can know everything that’s going to happen in a movie, say one adapted from a novel, and still be caught up in the experience. I still remember my first viewings of the Lord of the Rings movies and how, even though I had read the novels a dozen times by that point, being in that world felt new and fresh and each plot point felt exciting.

There’s a thing Stephen King talks about in his book Danse Macabre, and it’s about how a surprise is the lowest form of shock. He talks about the idea that Alfred Hitchcock might have a scene of two people talking at a table, and he would show you the bomb under the table. You know it’s going to blow up! That adds so much more tension and excitement to the scene than not revealing the bomb and just suddenly blowing the thing up. In fact, I have been spoiled on movies and had the whole film transformed in this way - how is this film going to get to this plot element from where it is now? It becomes a pleasurably suspenseful experience.

That said, sometimes a surprise is just what is called for. To make a blanket statement about spoilers is silly, because each work is its own thing, and each author or filmmaker has their own intentions. King recognizes that sometimes the shock is delightful in and of itself. That can be the point. The intended effect is to have you as shocked and unmoored as the characters experiencing the thing.

Which brings us to this week’s episode of Succession, which many are calling the best episode of the series (side note here - I don’t disagree, per se, but I think that this kind of a statement is impacted by the fact that it was an incredibly serious episode what is usually a very funny show, and I think that people default to serious = best quite often. It’s why you see so few comedies at the Oscars). And a few minutes into the episode something incredibly surprising happened.

Now we’re getting to the spoilers, so if you don’t want to know what happened please avert your eyes and go read the thing I wrote about how Jesus Christ’s corpse was eaten by dogs.

As the Roy kids were on a boat for dipshit brother Connor’s wedding they got a phone call from a plane carrying their father to Sweden for a business deal - something had happened to the old man. He had collapsed. He was not breathing.

The show handled this brilliantly. It did not show its hand at all, there was no foreshadowing or any sense that something momentous might happen. In fact all the pieces were in place for what could have been a standard Succession storyline, with Logan Roy in Sweden throwing down against Lukas Matsson, who is looking to buy Roy’s company. And it was the third episode of the season, not a point in which we expect a truly paradigmatic narrative shift to happen.

How the death played out was also brilliant, and relied largely on surprise. When Tom calls and says that Logan is not breathing the audience is left to wonder if he’s fucking with the kids - this is not at all beyond something Tom might do, and the scene before this had Tom with a mischievous twinkle in his eye fucking with Greg. These people trade in casual cruelty.

But it soon became clear that Logan was in fact on the floor of the airplane, not breathing. And for almost 30 minutes of real time people did CPR on him in the background of shots, endlessly compressing his chest, and it slowly became clearer and clearer he wasn’t going to wake up coughing. He was simply dead.

We realized this along with the kids - our understanding of the situation evolves alongside the understandings of Kendall, Roman and Shiv. And we have an extra layer of processing to do here, as this is a TV show, and we are attuned to fake outs and twists from TV shows. But there was no twist - Logan Roy was simply dead, suddenly and unexpectedly, dying at a moment that causes maximum chaos.

To know that Logan Roy is going to die in advance would be to rob yourself of this journey, a journey that Succession creator and episode writer Jesse Armstrong wanted to take you on. This was the way the show was structured, and the surprise was not just part of the storytelling, it informed the emotional weight of the episode. This episode is about the experience of someone close to you dying suddenly and far away, the surreality of the whole thing, the slow coming to terms with what has happened. A sudden death is so different from someone slowly dying, or even an elderly person going (Logan Roy is old, but everyone treats him like an immortal). There’s a sense of not knowing what’s real, because the world-changing event is outside of your line of sight.

A lot of this episode is the kids trying to understand what is happening on the plane because they’re so distant from the events. They don’t have a mooring image to bring them into this new reality. And neither do we! Armstrong and director Mark Mylod don’t show us Logan gasping for air in the bathroom, or him being discovered unresponsive. We don’t really see him - he’s usually in the foreground, we only see bits and pieces of him as he’s worked on. The last time we see Logan Roy he’s getting on that plane, which reflects something of the kids’ experience. And him getting on that plane is not a doom-laden moment.

All of this is to say that not knowing what was coming was central to how the show creators wanted you to experience the episode. It’s not just a big shock-a-rooni, it’s part of the way the story is told and the way that your emotions are supposed to be processed.

Enter the LA Times, a major newspaper in, as the name might indicate, Los Angeles. At 6:43PM Pacific - roughly the exact same time Logan Roy was declared dead on the show if you were watching the East Coast feed - they posted this:

Cute, a little in-universe nod to Logan Roy. Fun! They likely knew it was going to happen because HBO had worked with select outlets to get post-show interviews ready to run. They had a minute to think about this before posting it. Which is what makes it all the more egregious.

This was posted two hours before the show aired on the West Coast. It’s logical to assume that the vast majority of the LA Times’ audience had not yet had a chance to watch the show. It does appear on HBOMax at 6pm Eastern, but plenty of folks like to watch these shows on their cable, and Succession airs at 9pm in the Pacific time zone.

I was gobsmacked by this; by now I”m used to shittier outlets just spoiling things willy nilly, but the LA Times? This is indicative of just how fucked up our culture has become, in terms of the entertainment industry and its coverage - there is no longer an respect for the idea of the experience.

Back when I was writing about new movies at CHUD and Birth.Movies.Death I had a policy - if we were writing about a spoiler, or about a post-credits scene, that piece would wait until Monday after opening. We needed to give people a reasonable amount of time to actually see the movie before we begin discussing twists or surprises. Today, those kinds of pieces run as soon as the very first screening of the movie begins. Sometimes earlier, sometimes the night before.

The world of entertainment journalism has become absolutely disconnected from the experience and meaning of the work and has become totally consumed by immediate clicks. The LA Times social media person almost certainly had one thought in mind when they pressed send on that tweet: we gotta be first. We have to make this joke first.

And on some level they were right - other outlets put the spoiler in headlines that ended up in people’s inboxes or as push notifications on their phones. Normally I recommend just staying offline until you can watch whatever the big show is, but it has now become impossible to avoid these spoilers because they are being aggressively put in your face by outlets desperate for engagement.

The other problem is that in a streaming era nobody is watching stuff at the same time. Disney+ puts up new episodes of The Mandalorian in the middle of the night in the US, and unless you wait up until the wee hours you’re in danger of waking up to an email from some outlet spoiling a cameo or a plot twist or anything else you might like to have experienced on your own. Again, this isn’t ruining anything but it’s annoying because it’s become almost impossible to steer clear of this stuff while also maintaining an internet connection of any kind.

There has to be some introspection here - I’m part of a generation that moved the dial towards clickbait, even if my sites never did SEO fuckery. But the nadir at which we find ourselves feels very distant from anything me or my peers were doing ten years ago. It feels almost mechanical, like the machine itself is just trying to get clicks and likes and retweets, and any human element has been removed from the equation. The truth, though, is that the humans are just thinking like the machines, seeing nothing but numbers and algorithms.

Something is lost. I just visited a website that was once run by a person I knew, who sold it. That website used to have solid stuff on it - good, contextualizing news articles, smart commentary - but now it’s just glurge. There are maybe 100 articles published in the last two days, a flood of “content” that no one can keep up with. That’s because it’s not being written for anyone - it’s being written for the algorithm. That’s what tells editors what to assign; gone are the days when you’d follow your human hunch about what might be interesting, today you’re told what the search terms are and that’s what you’re writing about.

What is lost is the love of the art. Someone who publishes a spoiler for a TV show while the show is airing does not care about the art, they just care about the jolt of clicks and views. So many people who write about movies today could just as easily be writing about cars, or loans, or trends in breakfast cereals. When i look at that aforementioned site I see analysis pieces and honestly, most of them are hastily thrown together junk. When a new episode of The Mandalorian airs the site will have ten, twelve “think pieces” up by the morning. They're uniformly bad, because nobody had time to “think” about them. And no one is supposed to read them and think about them - they’re engineered to be shared quickly, and maybe argued over. In fact if the take is bad all the better - the piece will get more widely shared.

If we’re going to get all “old man yells at cloud” about it, this lack of respect for the art is everywhere in spaces that are supposed to contain lovers of the art. You see it when people live tweet first time viewings of classic movies they’re almost certainly watching on a dirty laptop screen. You see it when every movie gets boiled down to a social justice talking point or a meme, with almost no discussion of craft or larger theme or anything of depth.

And again, there needs to be introspection here - I have to look at the ways I have contributed to this turn in the culture (although I always tried hard to give readers something different and more thoughtful, but when you’re publishing ten pieces a day they couldn’t all be winners). But to me it speaks to a shift that has been out of the hands of any one person.

The thing is that I think most of us agree that shit is bad. It’s dismal out there for movie and TV lovers who want to read something better than “12 Times Chris Pine Made Us Gasp For Air” or “16 Ways Luke Skywalker Might Be In The New Daisy Ridley Star Wars Movie.” That means there’s space for something better, and I think there’s a hunger for it as well. I look at that LA Times Succession tweet and I think to myself, maybe this is rock bottom. Maybe this is where we begin realizing we want something a little better than instantaneous memes and rampant spoilers. Maybe, as Twitter slowly sinks like a ship in the North Atlantic, these impulses to be quick and first and appeal to the algorithm could change. And by the way, I know there are bastions of good writing and thinking out there - they do exist! - but they are largely overshadowed by the lowest common denominator, which is lower than it has ever been in my lifetime. Still, I have to have hope - I believe there are people who do want good stuff, who want thoughtful pieces, who want something deeper. I’ve seen indications that longer reads are getting more popular as people start turning away from the blasts of infotainment. I truly believe there is a better, smarter future, we just have to find our way there.

In the spirit of trying to achieve that, please feel free to comment with your favorite sites or authors who are doing smart, good written work in the movie/TV space (there are a number of strong podcasts, but let's stick with writing). Let’s share the quality with everybody.