

Tom Wambsgans was probably the smartest, most successful guy in his Minnesota hometown. They are treated less as point-of-view characters and more as audience insertion characters: Here is who you would be if you suddenly married Shiv Roy.Īnd the resulting picture is not pretty: You would be constantly out of your depth, nobody would take you seriously, and your own wife would regard you with something akin to pity. But instead, they become peripheral characters, haunting the story’s edges, perpetually befuddled by what they find there. The two of them are the closest thing the show has to outsiders when it comes to the Roys and their extreme wealth, and on any other series, we would be seeing the family through their eyes. The way Succession uses Tom and Greg is endlessly fascinating. He performs horribly in front of the Senate subcommittee, pretending briefly not to know Greg (more on Greg below, of course), playing dumb about why the family’s nickname for Lester was “Mo,” and seeing just how quickly his confident façade is punctured. He might have been 100 percent genuine.Īnd, look, Tom is almost always a loser on this show, but “DC” takes almost unlimited pleasure in setting the character up for a long fall, then having the ground disappear beneath him so he just keeps falling. Logan turned to Tom to tell him that Tom’s mom and dad would be proud, and it wasn’t entirely clear just how sarcastic Logan was being.

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HBOĮmily: It became clear that “DC” was not going to go particularly well for our favorite business sociopaths when the episode opened with a 60 Minutes-style TV news piece on the Waystar cruise line scandal, which featured a brief explanation of how Tom was tangentially involved. Here are zero winners and 11 losers from “DC.” Loser: Tom Observe: Conclusive proof that Tom’s last name has a “B” in it for some reason.

of this clan but he deserves at least a puppy or a kitty or a friend.) (Seriously, can Succession just let Kendall, like, have a nice relationship or something? He’s the Donald Trump Jr. It ends with an ambiguous cliffhanger, but one where you totally know which direction the show is pointing and you’re already horrified by whatever is to come in the finale. It’s so good that I turned to Meredith Haggerty, editor of The Goods by Vox and my Succession co-critic, and said, “Roman has maybe been kidnapped, and it’s the B-plot.” Incredibly, “DC” is an episode where absolutely everybody loses, and on Succession that’s a truly delicious proposition. “DC” is also a terrific episode of the show, in a second season that has run from strength to strength. I’ve had multiple critics tell me (and by “me” I mean Vox critic at large Emily VanDerWerff) they had to watch from between their fingers.
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(Check out Peep Show, the very funny Britcom he co-created, for a series that offers many kinds of jokes but is dynamite when it does cringe humor.) And “DC” is maybe the cringiest episode of Succession yet. Well, Jesse Armstrong - Succession’s creator and the writer of “DC,” the second season’s penultimate episode - is a Brit, and he’s a cringe comedian par excellence. The most notable example for American audiences is The Office, but if you’ve ever seen the original (and superior) British version of that show, then you know how good the Brits are at plumbing the depths of our most embarrassing selves for fun and giggles. At its dark little heart, Succession has a lot in common with the cringe comedy, the show where humor comes from how much embarrassment the characters suffer and how little the universe seems to care that they are in pain.
