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It Remains Unclear To Me Whether Succession Is A Baseball Show
On the strangest sequence in the HBO show.
This contains no real spoilers. It is, however, about a show that you might not be watching, so forgive me for that. Another non-Succession post is likely coming this week.
There was a moment Sunday, 51 minutes into the penultimate episode of Succession, when the four Roy siblings were gathered together and acting a bit mopey and sentimental, and I thought… maybe they’re going to go play baseball together now!
Of course, they weren’t going to play baseball. They were going to teeter off into various chaoses of their own making, and the series will end this Sunday in some wicked resolution that leaves no character fulfilled. A friendly, family baseball game doesn’t fit into their lives or this show, obviously.
Which is why I’ve spent the past four seasons trying to figure out what in the world a friendly family baseball game was doing in the pilot episode. I can’t figure out whether Succession is a baseball show, because I can’t figure out what that game was supposed to be about.
To refresh your memory: In the pilot, the Roy family gathers at a birthday lunch for family patriarch/billionaire media mogul Logan Roy. (Logan, in the previous scene, had just humiliated and betrayed his son/presumed successor Kendall in a private meeting, setting off the rest of the show’s “Succession” conflict.) A colleague toasts him, warmly. The family chatters amongst themselves. Logan looks stern and serious. Then he puts on his most stern and serious face and says this:
So.
I think it’s time—
—to play the game.
Those words send everybody into a flutter. The first reaction is Kendall’s:
And then Shiv laughs uncomfortably, and Roman gets the look of a sadistic child who is about to torture a cat.
Logan: “It’s my birthday, so yes, we’re playing the game.”
Cousin Greg reaction shot: Confused, nervous. “What’s the game?” More laughter, at naïve, simple Cousin Greg. More emphatically, pleadingly: “What’s the game!?”
Followed by several shots of helicopters flying in formation, what will become the familiar Roys-going-to-war foreshadowing visual, everything but Ride of the Valkyries playing.
This is Succession’s weirdest moment by far. Succession is a show about monsters who get off on cruelty and perversion and who have virtually nothing healthy or normal in their lives. The most comparable moment to the lunch scene is when, in season two, Logan demands an impromptu playing of a different game, Boar On The Floor, in which a few employees and relatives must get on the floor and fight for a sausage—the loser of the game will be scapegoated for some corporate sin, like an even more psychopathic version of trial by water. In that scene, a sense of foreboding (what’s boar on the floor???) pays off in something worse than you even imagined (boar on the floor!?!). But in the lunch scene, the sense that something terrible, something cruel, something stomach-turning is about to happen is paid off by… baseball. Or, technically, slow-pitch softball. That’s what Cousin Greg had to be nervous about.
Now, the game ultimately turns into a demonstration of Roy cruelty, when Roman offers the son of a worker at the ball field $1 million if the boy can hit a home run. (He can’t, and Roman tears up the check in front of the boy, giving him “a quarter million”—one quarter of the torn-up check.) If THAT was The Game—if every so often the Roys go out and play a “game” of tormenting a non-rich person—then you’d understand the evil/nervous/aghast cackles at the lunch table. But Roman’s stunt happens unexpectedly in the fourth inning, and everybody else looks at Roman disapprovingly, including Logan, so that wasn’t Logan Roy’s intent. No, they’re playing a real, sincere game out there. They warm up and take batting practice and keep score and everything!
Stranger still, there is no indication in the rest of the show’s run that this is a family with any interest in baseball. Or much of any sport. Logan, born in Scotland but orphaned during the war, maintains some loyalty to his childhood soccer club; the siblings are shown (as kids) in the opening credits participating in gilded-class sports (tennis, skiing, horseback riding). But sports are otherwise almost totally absent from the show, and like almost everything else normal and pleasant—pets, music, eating—almost totally absent from the grown children’s lives.
So, here we go. Three theories for why baseball:
1. It’s about Logan.
Logan likes to make other people compete for him. Simple as that. Every person who shows up at the field is shown throwing, catching, batting, or standing on the field during the game, except for Logan (and his bodyguard). His wife plays. His young grandchildren play. All of his billionaire children play and all of their spouses/significant others play. Logan’s role is to yell
and then sit in recline on an Adirondack chair.
The fact that this is a game none of them is interested in makes it more interesting to Logan. They have to perform competitiveness. (In an early script, the field is even covered with snow, a ridiculous and hostile baseball field.) From the moment Logan takes Kendall out of the succession seat (“it’s time to play the game”), this is what the rest of the series is, ultimately: The children are performing to win their dad’s affection, only to find out repeatedly that their dad doesn’t actually care about any of it. None of them ever win, because to their dad the sport is coercion, not a real game with real scores.
2. It’s about where the kid gets thrown out.
Roman offers the kid a million dollars if he can homer, the kid hits the ball, there’s a bunch of chasing after the ball, cut to the kid running around the bases, it seems like maybe he’s going to make it, and then… nooooo, Shiv’s fiancé Tom tags him out! At home plate, right? That’s how I had filed it away, at least.
But, no, in fact he was tagged out at third base. So the kid didn’t quite make it to third base.
Any significance to that base, third base? Any that you can think of? Of course there is. It’s that expression you hear about self-entitled rich kids, fail sons, nepotism hires and the like: That they were born on third base and thought they hit a triple. The creator of Succession is British. I don’t know how much he knows about baseball. But I’m reasonably sure he knows the “born on third” expression. The Roy kids were all born on third, beyond the point most normal people are will ever reach. In Roman’s words to the boy, third base is “so damned close!” And yet, none of the Roys could ever advance the final bit, to home, to their father’s level or whatever, because they weren’t serious people. All their plots to go past third base are fails and false-starts.
So that’s what baseball is doing here. Succession is not a baseball show. It’s a show about an aphorism that happens to use baseball markers.
3. It’s just a pilot-episode ghost.
Pilots are notorious for feeling slightly off. In this pilot, Roman is married! Remember Roman having a wife? No? He had a wife in the pilot, she was the pitcher in the baseball game, and they (or at least she) even had a child who was playing in the game. That’s classic pilot stuff: Shows are still figuring out their tone and their themes and sometimes even basic facts about their characters.
In an early draft for the Succession pilot, none of the family’s sadistic-seeming lunch-table reaction to It’s Time To Play The Game is actually written out. The entirety of the lunch scene, the It’s Time To Play The Game scene, is this short:
But as we watch the series, and as the actors, writers and editors come to create and understand their own series, certain themes, rhythms, neural pathways emerge. It becomes clear that these characters are monsters and that every emotion they show should be cause for concern because in their world emotion is always entangled with cruelty. That sadism actually starts to emerge in that scene, in the actors’ performances. But I’m not sure the production had nailed that tone yet, or even knew yet that the show was going to pursue that tone as far as they eventually did. Going back to Roman: In the pilot, he’s married with a kid, normalish-guy stuff. But what emerges is that, actually, he’s—well, you probably know what Roman is like when it comes to sex and relationships. Wildly abnormal! So in subsequent episodes the normal domesticity of wife/kid simply quit existing.
The thing about The Game in the original script and pilot is that it seems to be sincere—a family gathering to play a game and have mostly innocent fun together. In the early script, they even stop in the middle of the game so that Frank can warmly toast Logan Roy, the great man, on his birthday. The best conclusion might simply be that the baseball game is left over from a slightly more family-positive vision for the show, which progressively got replaced by something darker, meaner, and presumably better. TV shows learn from themselves and amplify what works. Maybe, in the original vision for the show, returning to the baseball field in the penultimate episode of the final season to bring everything full circle would even have made emotional sense! But whatever meaning The Game might have originally had, it has since changed.
The dramatic stakes for the final episode, airing this week, was set up 13 episodes ago in Season 3, when the family chose the terrifying Jeryd Mencken to be their news network’s preferred presidential candidate. That episode ends with everybody in a group photo: Shiv looks nauseated, Roman looks gleeful, Mencken looks sinister. A song begins to play as score. Its title:
Great as always, thanks. I just need to know if Tom is named after Bill Wambsganss, who turned the only unassisted triple play in World Series history in 1920. The only two times I’ve ever heard this name can’t be a coincidence, right?!
Succession would be a better show if Tom and Cousin Greg were the main/only characters.