Pandora's Box, page 32
Then, on November 20, 2022, Bob 1.0 suddenly became 2.0. The board astonished the jaded industry by ousting Chapek and reinstalling Iger as CEO for two years, five months after it gave Chapek his extension. Contributing factors were a $1.5 billion loss in the July–September quarter on its streaming business, and a 41 percent dive in Disney stock as of November 22, 2022.
The dropped shoe was the earnings report in November 2022, in which Chapek threaded Disney’s dismal financial picture with inappropriately happy talk about its success in selling “magical memories that last a lifetime,”34 as if the board were comprised of theme park groupies. Several high-up Disney executives talked about resigning.
To some extent, the Chapek fiasco was of Iger’s own making. Streaming-first was his baby, after all, and he groomed, then knifed two successors, Tom Staggs and Kevin Mayer, before selecting Chapek.
Some felt that Wall Street was punishing Chapek for his streaming strategy, which consisted of favoring general entertainment programming at Disney+ over traditional Disney content, thereby diluting the brand. First on Iger’s agenda was reversing Chapek’s reversal of Iger’s decentralization strategy administered by Alan Horn, restoring budgetary powers to division heads. Disney would not be based on the top-down tech-based data-driven model that Chapek favored.
Disney execs welcomed Iger redux with enthusiasm. One tweeted, “Daddy’s back!”35 Iger quickly reversed Chapek’s punishing price gouging at the Disney parks. In May 2023, Iger killed Chapek’s Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser hotel, a ten-figure failure. That same month, Iger struck back at DeSantis, yanking a billion-dollar office complex planned for Orlando that would have created more than 2,000 jobs. Iger also proceeded to fire seven thousand employees in a cost-cutting measure, including Ike Perlmutter, who had hung in at Marvel in some capacity, proving that behind smiling Ordinary Bob was another Iger with a long memory and a touch of Captain Hook. He then proceeded to sue DeSantis. The irony is that the Democratic left has always disparaged Disney’s power over the state, and DeSantis is doing what they have longed to do for decades.
Reed Hastings expressed dismay at Iger’s return. He wanted him to run for president, presumably so that he’d be preoccupied with climate change. But Iger’s immediate problem is Disney, not Netflix. His new two-year term can go by quickly, and his last succession plan was not exactly a success. The question remains: What happens next? Can anyone restore the “magic,” such as it was? Is there anyone who can replace Iger but Iger? Ted Lasso?
Back at WBD, Bloys developed originals of unequalled quality for HBO, including Mare of Easttown, Euphoria, The White Lotus, and We Own This City, all on Sundays, while expanding its footprint by occasionally stepping into Thursdays with Hacks, Fridays with A Black Lady Sketch Show, and Mondays with My Brilliant Friend, an impossibly artful adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet for the small screen.
On the whole, this may augur the revitalization of a legacy cabler, but worriers worry that the marriage of Discovery+ to HBO, with the twin goals of cutting costs and broadening its appeal, will further dilute the latter. HBO is no longer The Sopranos channel, or The Game of Thrones channel; it’s the Flight Attendant channel, and where you go to watch Batman spinoffs like The Penguin, Pennyworth, and Arkham Asylum (forthcoming), alongside a laundry bag of old Warner Bros. network shows that most HBO watchers have never heard of, like Doom Patrol, Gossip Girl, The Sex Lives of College Girls, and Ten Year Old Tom. It will enable the 130 million subscribers that Zaslav dreams of to watch Mike White’s The White Lotus and Battle Bots on the same streamer.
HBO started a revolution, but one of the nasty habits of revolutions is that they often consume their own. The combined HBODISCOMAX+ was renamed simply, Max, a generic title like “+.” Indeed, why not go all the way and call it Max+. Whatever it’s called, the name change symbolically marks the end of the prestige cable pioneer as a distinct, “stand-alone entity,” and was interpreted as an attempt to turn away from HBO’s perceived elitist, bicoastal audience, towards the pimple-starved heartland. HBO still lives on as a tile on the Max screen, which made its debut in May 2023. Meanwhile, shows like David E. Kelly’s Love & Death are presented as “MAX originals,” not “HBO originals.” Says Fuchs, “This is a fifty-year-old company. I consider that it died at fifty. There’s no longer an HBO. Max has made HBO become like Kleenex. It’s fucking crazy.”36 (By the way, while “Max” may recall the 2018/2019 twin crashes of Boeing 737 Max jets, on the other hand, in 2022, it enjoyed the distinction of being the most popular name for male dogs in America.)
Then, along came Succession. Writer-producer Jesse Armstrong had approached Bloys with an idea about a powerful media family. Bloys explains, “The thesis was, ‘All families are somewhat dysfunctional, siblings fight or your brother’s getting more of your father’s attention, but when you add this other element, the obscene wealth and the power and the influence, their dysfunction affects the entire planet.’ I thought that was a really interesting way to do a family show.”37
Bloys has a degree in economics, and he was also interested in the political angle. “Since the 1980s, we as a country have made decisions—tax cuts, deregulation—that have concentrated wealth in a smaller and smaller number of hands,” he continues. “And there are consequences to that,” namely, the creation of a new class of robber barons, comparable to those of the nineteenth century.38 When Bloys replaced Lombardo as HBO’s president of programming, he was in a position to do something about Armstrong’s pitch.
Succession had the added appeal of lacking stars, with the exception, perhaps, of Brian Cox. Taking the lessons of Vinyl to heart, Bloys was not about to put himself in the position of servicing talent. Like any number of his other shows, there would be no celebrity names behind and/or before the camera. Succession was the anti-Vinyl, a throwback to the kind of shows HBO was known for in the old days, where the talent served the show, not the other way around. Nor did it come encumbered with massive, bestseller IP. Said Bloys, immodestly, “At HBO, we make our own stars.”39
The contemporary context is the entrance of Big Tech into the media space. “There’s another . . . succession going on,” explains Armstrong.40 He is referring to “the big news companies [that are] under massive strain [when] Netflix and Apple [come] knocking at their door.” He continues, “We can see these media consolidations in response to that. [It’s] hopefully in the DNA of the show.”41
Succession was marinated in the brine of the Trump era. “After taking a backseat for about fifty or sixty years, inherited wealth and nepotism seem to have come back with a vengeance,” observes Adam McKay, the auteur of The Big Short and Don’t Look Up, who executive-produced Succession.42
With a touch of King Lear, at eighty and in poor health, Logan Roy pits his children against one another in the struggle to succeed him. Born to money, pampered, cossetted, and coddled to the point of curdling, with silver spoons lodged in every orifice, none of the Roy children seems to have the mettle needed to run the company, let alone determine its future. Meanwhile, Logan, frustrated by his inability to step down, targets each of them with his volcanic temper. Zaslav, anyone?
The sadistic apogee of the show is the infamous third episode of Season 2, called “Boar on the Floor,” in which he humiliates his subordinates by making them crawl on all fours, oinking like pigs as they hunt for sausages like truffles.
Armstrong says casting Cox as the patriarch was practically a foregone conclusion, since he was on everyone’s wish list. Cox, whom we last saw as the impresario in the aborted third season of Deadwood and who trails a mile-long list of theater and movie credits in his wake, says he can’t resist TV because it “liberates” him from the three-act structure—beginning, middle, and end—of theatrical drama that he finds inhibiting. He goes on, “The beginning is inevitable, the end is inevitable, but the middle is not so inevitable, and television is about the middle.”43
Cox is perfect as Roy, accurately describing himself as an actor able to go “from a roar to whisper within the space of a single line of dialogue,”44 although usually it’s the other way around. He continues, “It’s wonderful when you see an actor nail a phrase so completely that you think to yourself, ‘Nobody will ever be able to say that again.’” In his case the line, for better or worse, is his furiously uttered “Fuck off!” or, better, “Fuck the fuck off,” which he uses to such effect, with so many inflections, that it has become the mantra of the show.45
Cox is somewhat dismissive of directors, whom he occasionally refers to as “pests,” more interested in the lighting than the performances. On Succession, he says, even after multiple seasons, “The cast, as veteran a unit as you could find, are still getting notes from newcomer directors. One newbie said to Kieran Culkin, ‘Do you always have to talk so fast?’ Well, hang on. This is who his character is.”46 He continues, “[Kieran] is an actor who’s calibrated the patterns of his character’s delivery over the course of three previous seasons . . . He’s not going to suddenly slow down just because you’ve given him a note. But that’s directors for you.”47
Cox describes Succession as “a writers’ show,” and calls Armstrong a “modern Jonathan Swift.”48 He explains that “If I wanted to change a word, just a single word of Logan’s dialogue, I know that I’d have a fight on my hands.”49 When one character abusively calls another a “nancy,” he recalls, “I thought ‘faggot’ was a much better word than ‘nancy,’ because I think ‘faggot’ is more American, and ‘nancy’s’ very British. I won that one.”50
The superrich aren’t like you and me, and consultants advised the actors on their habits. Example: the proper way to exit a helicopter. “You wouldn’t duck,” says Culkin. “Because we grew up getting out of helicopters, you just walk right the fuck out.” Nor would he or any of his family wear overcoats, because it was door to door, from chopper to limo to mansion. Armstrong decided against including the pandemic in the third season, because he guessed that it would never impact the Roys, insulated as they are in their bubble of privilege.
The writers were initially concerned that audiences would have little interest in the ethereal world of the superrich and their high-class problems. Culkin wondered, “Who gives a shit about these rich motherfuckers?”51 Luckily, that proved not to be the case, a tribute to dialogue so ribald and performances so sparkling that the Roys give familial dysfunction a good name. There are more than enough familiar types to whom viewers can relate. Indeed, the characters invite a peculiar combination of attraction and repulsion. Or, as Cox puts it, the show is so successful because it reflects the fact that “we live in this age of wealth and entitlement. Look at the Kushners and Ivankas of the world—a lot of them are behaving horribly. [It’s] a bit of a cancer in our society.”52
Succession can boast dialogue that would be the envy of any show on small screen or large. The children and assorted hangers-on—the sycophants, schemers, and self-promoters, all barely afloat in the choppy Roy seas—often thrash about in a state of utter confusion, but are rarely at a loss for words. Often they would be better off saying nothing at all, but they can’t keep their mouths shut, and give themselves away by constructing comical simulacra of everyday speech ridiculously conflating florid circumlocutions with gutter sniping, Julian Fellowes or Peter Morgan by way of David Mamet—because they’re too frightened of their father to say what they mean. Here’s Kendall Roy threatening a “friend” in one oft-quoted example of the show’s inspired scatology: “I will come to you at night with a fucking razor blade and I will cut your”—the “friend” interrupts, finishing his sentence with—“dick off, and then push it up your cunt until poo-poo pops out of my nose hole.”
The dialogue is so rapier sharp, so charged with zingers, that it becomes the verbal equivalent of the thrust and parry of swords in, say, the Battle of the Bastards. Indeed, the show has become the new Game of Thrones, with Roy a dinosaur instead of a dragon. Succession is about the twilight of a dying generation, that of the white patriarch. Says Cox, “White, essentially male, dinosaurs are in a death throes,”53 although looking at the entertainment business that sounds like wishful thinking.
Showrunner Armstrong makes this literal by killing off Logan Roy in the third episode of the ten-episode-long fourth and final season, a shock to Roy’s children and the show’s fans, for whom it was like killing off Tony Soprano in the middle of a crime spree.
Cox thinks Armstrong was burned out. The obligation of churning out the hottest show on television was draining. But, he says, “I think Armstrong slightly shot himself in the foot by making Logan’s demise a couple of episodes too early. I think he may have underestimated how challenging it would be, writing-wise, to have the show sans Logan.”54 It must have been odd for Cox to look down from the afterlife, the special heaven or hell his character occupied, at all the fun that followed upon his death. He said he felt “a little bit rejected [given] all the work I’ve done.”55
The parallels between the show’s plotting and reality are eerie. In the final season, after the Roys’ right-leaning TV news network ATN ignores a suspicious fire that burns 100,000 absentee ballots at a vote-counting center in Democrat-heavy Milwaukee, and calls a presidential election for the Nazi-dinged Republican candidate, Roman congratulates everyone, saying, “We just made a night of good TV”—while, in the real world, CNN head Chris Licht likewise congratulated himself after airing the widely derided Trump town hall in New Hampshire, saying, We “made news. Made a lot of news.”56 (The Zaslav-appointed Licht was Zaslav-fired in mid-2023.) As Kurt Andersen writes, the show caught on because “a critical mass of Americans has come to understand that big business and the rich hijacked and corrupted our political economy.”57
Zaslav, on the other hand, is no dinosaur. If we persist in looking at some of these shows as metafictions, as shows about themselves, where is he in the Where’s Waldo? maze of Succession? He styles himself the son of Bob Evans, but by some accounts, he’s more the son of John Malone—which makes him who? Personality-wise, he resembles Logan Roy, of course, the ruthless entrepreneur with a volcanic temper who sullies all he touches. But, as the GoJo deal goes through, with the streamer acquiring Waystar, he has to be its owner, Lukas Mattson, who screws, figuratively speaking, his Roy ally Shiv when she threatens to eclipse him by overplaying her hand, which he realizes when he sees her cartooned in a Vanity Fair–like magazine pulling his strings. He gives the reins of ATN to her docile husband Tom, because he’s competent and won’t make any waves, which makes the latter loosely analogous to Casey Bloys, who rose to the top of HBO by successfully navigated its poisonous politics.
Shows like these put moguls like Zaslav on the griddle, and some wonder if Zaslav will continue to mesh with Bloys. Zaslav is a type A, hard-charging, testosterone-driven, heterosexual man. Bloys is an introverted, openly gay man very focused on programming. If each stays in his own lane, all should be well. Reilly, who knows both men, says, “In my opinion, they’re not likely to be chumming it up around the country club, but Zaslav will not mess with Casey’s formula. It’s working well, so as long as it does, it doesn’t matter whether they’re buddies or not.”58
That sounds right, but we’ve heard it before, when Bewkes said the same thing about Stankey, before the latter took a wrecking ball to Time Warner/HBO. Still, Zaz locked up Bloys with a five-year contract. In other words, there’s blue sky, along with clouds on the horizon. HBO made $2 billion in 2019 but lost $3 billion in 2021, thanks to increased spending on content. But so far, he’s letting Bloys be Bloys, to the extent of programming some weird but wonderful shows like Landscapers, Somebody Somewhere, The Baby, and Rain Dogs that nobody in their right mind would put on TV due to their outré premises and/or unconventional leads, except for him, hand in hand with Carolyn Strauss, who executive produced The Baby and Somebody Somewhere.
Let’s hope Reilly is right, because under Bloys, HBO, or HBO Max, or Max—whatever it’s called—stands so far above the competition that messing with it beyond what Zaslav has already done would be a cultural tragedy that defies description. For example, says Robin Thede, whose series A Black Lady Sketch Show HBO has aired since 2019, “HBO, if people haven’t noticed, is Black woman central.” Indeed, of all the streamers, with the exception of BET (Black Entertainment Television), it’s the best place for watching while Black. Thede credits Insecure for opening the door for shows like Misha Green’s Lovecraft Country, with Jurnee Smollett and Jonathan Majors. To that list we can add Watchmen, starring Regina King, which shoehorns the infamous Tulsa race massacre of 1921 into the superhero genre. “I don’t think there’s any other place on television where Black women are telling their stories in such a high quality,” Thede continues. “And that’s no shade to anyone else. That’s not an accident; that’s being curated.”59
Like Rae, Thede never plays it safe. Episode 4 of Season 5 is titled, “Peek-a-Boob, Your Titty’s Out.” Episode 2 of that same season is called, “Baptism Runs on Dunkin,” and features an insane imitation of an NBA slam-dunk contest called a “Dunk-a-Thon,” wherein filthy-mouthed deacons compete to baptize the most babies by hurling infants through a basketball hoop.
Issa Rae herself followed up Insecure with a razor-sharp Rap Sh!t in 2022, similarly soaked in sex and politics, about two female Black rappers, Shawna and Mia, trying to hustle their way to fame and fortune. Shawna wants to rap about issues like predatory lending and the male gaze, but she’s not getting much engagement. Mia says she’s crazy and wants to rap about “fun bitch stuff,” like money and fast cars, such as, “If he drives a Rolls-Royce, don’t give it up until you see his license and registration!”
Bloys’s slate also included I May Destroy You, written, co-directed, and featuring the multihyphenate Michaela Coel, about the unraveling and raveling of a young Black writer after she is raped.
