HBO
Though we love them, the Roy children are not, as their father Logan famously said, serious people. Their parade of ineptitude and buffoonery, excused by their privilege and entitlement, is what makes them so sadistically entertaining to watch each week on Succession. Still, once in a while, the fact that these guys just really suck needs to be called out, probably for viewers’ sanity. And it’s so gratifying when it happens, as it did in Sunday night’s episode of the series, “Living+.”
The hilarity of Kendall and Roman (Jeremy Strong and Kieran Culkin) being co-CEOs of Waystar Royco stems from the fact that they’re huge idiots, and everyone knows it. Lukas Mattsson (Alexander Skarsgard), who is in the process of purchasing the company, knows it. Their sister, Shiv (Sarah Snook), knows it, to the extent that she can barely keep a straight face any time her brothers talk seriously about business. Someone as lowbrow as Cousin Greg (Nicholas Braun) is even aware of it, and he’s Cousin Greg. But no one is as cognizant of this as the senior leadership team at Waystar, and it is such a blast to watch when they finally get to vent about it.
There’s brilliant comms head Karolina (Dagmara Dominiczyk), who serves so expertly as an audience avatar that she stops just short of breaking the fourth wall and staring directly into the camera, blinking in disbelief. Her journey from certitude that Kendall’s speech on Investor Day would be a fiasco to bafflement, when it actually went well, channeled our viewing experience perfectly. And the “you listen to me, you juvenile prick”-style dressing down that Kendall received from CFO Karl (David Rasche) was such a long time coming that it was tempting to give it a standing ovation, as it finally happened on Sunday night.