HBO's Succession and The Complex Simplicity of Fragile Human Relations
“I can’t forgive you. But it’s okay. And I love you.” Succession sums up all the feelings of love there is for someone and love that is lost.
It has been almost a year since we bid goodbyes to one of the best shows ever seen on TV, and as I have had more time to sit through the show and let it all sink in, I can safely say now that Succession is one of the finest portrayals of human beings at their worst and at their most vulnerable I have ever seen. Subversion of expectations, a wave of devastation, one of the most heartwrenching portrayals of loss and grief, all with a sense of sinking but organised chaos in storytelling. There’s no way a TV Show is topping it off for a good couple of years. Succession is truly a modern classic.
Throughout its run, Succession became a show where love, grief, and strategic and emotional manipulation all co-existed in the same plane and same breath.
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The show took the world’s most awful family, people who would not even be in the same room together if they have nothing to gain from it, siblings who love each other but would absolutely tear each other apart for their own gain and made them into some of TV’s most tragic and broken human beings, and it did that to the point that you just can’t help but shed a tear at just the freaking glorious beauty and tragedy of the script Jesse Armstrong has written and the world this stellar cast takes you into.
Episode 3 of Season 4 embodies everything this show is and these characters are. In a life full of abandonment and not being heard from their father, in a life where they have chased the acknowledgement of that one guy that they hate and love the most in their world, the guy who has truly messed them up in every way imaginable, the siblings are pushed mid-episode into the truest form of abandonment.
This is Succession in all its glory as Logan Roy goes out like the monster he was, where the love from the kids outpours their hatred for their awful father, where even minor characters like Frank and Carolina can be both human beings who seem to care, and be a monotonous inhuman corporate bot in the moments to follow. Wow, that was truly something remarkable.
Essays and love letters could be written for every single scene of this episode, with the cast collectively producing some of the finest and most raw performances you will ever see on television.
But perhaps the rawest and most gut-wrenching moment of the episode was just delivered in this one line, “I can’t forgive you. But it’s okay. And I love you.” Family and relationships are ever so complicated, but Jeremy Strong summed up all the feelings of love there is for someone and love that is lost, the feelings of trust and lack thereof, and of betrayal and broken faith in just a single sentence. And maybe that is what the show should be praised for the most, the way it understands people, whether it be with walls or bare naked, and the way it understands how everyone is just somebody trying to do what they think is bearable best for them, grasping and clinging to whatever one can comprehend.