Review: Succession, "Living+" | Season 4, Episode 6

The Roys go to Hollywood, where there's one role everyone in town wants to play: Logan Roy.

May 01, 2023

It’s a tired old story, but it bears retelling: Walt Disney didn’t conceive Epcot as a theme park. As documented in a filmed presentation from 1966, E.P.C.O.T.—Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow—was to be a fully functioning city adjacent to what became Walt Disney World. That film’s intended audience were Florida lawmakers, but thanks to archival efforts of the Walt Disney Company and gray market bootleggers like the eBay seller who provided the DVD copy I received as a birthday gift a few years back, we can all bear witness to Disney’s only slightly spooky sales pitch for his vision of modern living, presented as if it’s a prelude to the next installment of Davy Crockett.

Hopped up on ideas of utopian futurism, inspired by notions of urban planning and public transit previously deployed in Disneyland, and weeks away from dying of lung cancer, Disney teases a city free of traffic congestion, cleanly segmented to promote a separation of work and life, and partially enclosed to protect against inclement weather. Needless to say, these ideas did not come to pass, but the film and what it proposed were instrumental to the creation of the Reedy Creek Improvement District, a non-governmental body that you may have read about in the news lately.

It would be years before any shred of Disney’s E.P.C.O.T. plan could be realized as the original, “permanent world’s fair” EPCOT Center, and much longer before echoes of the pitch could resound through the Imagineering-meets-real-estate concept of Storyliving by Disney. And as far as I know, none of Walt’s currently living heirs have ordered an overworked video editor to chop up pieces of the E.P.C.O.T. film into a taunt about their siblings’ lackluster genitalia.

Such background isn’t prerequisite for enjoying Succession’s funhouse-mirror version of the media world built by Disney’s successors and imitators. But it is an instructive illustration of what the show is doing with the posthumous footage of Logan Roy that recurs throughout “Living+,” from the raw, quasi-“Frozen Peas” outtake that opens the episode to the manipulated edits that Kendall uses to achieve his most grandiose and petty aims. Walt Disney smoked like a chimney, was virulently anti-labor, and favored a cocktail that’s just Scotch poured over crushed ice and garnished with a lemon zest, but none of that prevented him from being seen as the paragon of American family entertainment. We know enough about Logan to see him as a Disneyesque figure only due to the stature of his media empire, but this “Living+” motif gives us a glimpse at how the world of Succession might view him otherwise.

For the Roy children, the video is also tangible evidence of something they will never know, which is their father’s intentions for his business post-GoJo deal, and how he would navigate the bumps in the road that emerge along the way. I find myself passively curious about the ATN remodel he was promising in “Rehearsal”—if those promises were anything more than the ramblings of a billionaire high on his own supply and slipping into senility—but Kendall, Siobhan, and Roman are clearly plagued by “What would dad do?” doubts as they approach their first face-to-face with Waystar investors after Logan’s death. Kendall’s the only one getting up on that stage, but the camera gives us a sense that all three sibs are pitching themselves as Logan 2.0—all the extreme close-ups of “Living+” making sense when we see Ken in a similar composition on the Jumbotrons during his Living+ keynote.

This new effort from parks and cruises to, in the facetious words of the script, “warehouse the elderly and get them drunk on content and suck them dollar dry,” is at the center of Ken’s latest stab at getting Mattson to fuck off. If the firm’s expansion into real estate development looks sufficiently tasty to investors, that would increase the value of the Waystar stock that GoJo is purchasing, potentially driving the offering price higher than Mattson can stomach. Now, because he’s a wealth-hoarding freak operating in an economic hellscape that enables and incentivizes him and his company to accumulate riches that would make Croesus say, “Hey, maybe rein it in a bit, bub,” Mattson can stomach a lot. Kendall’s solution to this problem: “Unbelievable growth.” As in, you truly can’t believe how big Living+ can get, because the math behind it is nothing but wishful thinking.

The Waystar Royco family of brands manufacturers a lot of bullshit, but its oft-ignored motion picture studio is the one arm of the company that’s explicitly in the business of fantasy and fakery. “Living+” has a lot of fun with that, using the show’s longest, most concentrated West Coast jaunt to put a dream factory spin on the grammar of Succession, at one point swooping over the backlot simulacra of New York City the same way the show normally does with the real thing. Boardroom playacting has always been in the sibs’ repertoire, but it comes to the fore here, and with varying levels of authenticity: Kendall and Roman’s “concerned CEOs” routine falls flat on its face with the senior leadership, because neither of them is as skilled at deception as Shiv is, nor are they creative enough to inflate the truth about their summit summit with Mattson to a degree that sufficiently spooks Geri, Karolina, Frank, Karl, and Tom. Roman doesn’t even get the chance to downplay his high-elevation kiss off as a negotiating tactic, because that’s exactly how Tom interprets the erratic behavior being attributed to Mattson.

Ken’s no actor—he’s a showman. Waystar under his exclusive leadership would be a disaster, but it would have a lot of cringe-worthy flash: His 11th hour plan to build a Living+ house onstage with practical clouds is abandoned (thus drawing the line between Kendall Roy and GOB Bluth), but the Kendall of “L To The OG” still shows up for Investor Day with his walk-up music and custom Waystar flight jacket. His co-pilot refuses to don his version of the jacket, which may hamper the impression of unified vision, but at least Roman isn’t playing dress-up games that involve an unfortunately phallic Brightstar Cruises patch. No, Roman prefers to make believe he’s the hair-trigger terminator version of Logan, firing anyone who doesn’t do exactly as he says. Back in the place where nobody would take his input on The Biggest Turkey In The World, chauffeured around in a vehicle that denies any passenger their dignity, he circumvents all legal and human resources best practices by impulsively handing walking papers to studio exec Joy (Annabeth Gish), then Geri.

But the firings are about as real as Kalispitron: Hibernation’s chances at winning Best Picture and grossing $1 billion worldwide; as season four has demonstrated time and again, there’s very little Roman can’t be talked into, and Geri seemingly gets him to back off on letting Joy go. When he tells Geri he wants her to believe that he can be as good at this job as his dad was, her reply points out that there’s a distinction between saying something and believing it. For example: Sarah Snook and Matthew Macfadyen are good at making us believe that Shiv and Tom’s flame has been reignited, though the sparks we’re seeing could just be words they’re saying to each other.

Swapping spit and biting your estranged spouse in the middle of a party? Now that’s really living plus. This twisted screwball comedy brings some varied texture to the episode, with Macfadyen’s monologue this week altering the polarity of the comforting words Tom gave Shiv at her father’s wake: Asked point blank why he betrayed his wife and sided with Logan at the end of season three, Tom owns up to not wanting to lose his money, then spins that into the double-edged question of whether Shiv would ever give up the trappings of wealth for “a date at a three-star Italian.”

Playing the most earnest of Succession characters, Macfadyen has perfected the stammering, circular manner in which Tom tries to talk around the thing he actually wants (see: his conversations with Logan in “The Munsters” and the sibs in “Honeymoon States”), which just makes it all the more effective when he’s as direct as he is in the bedroom with Shiv. MVP of the week honors to whoever made the decision to punctuate the scene not with Shiv’s laugh, but with the extra, intriguing bit of silence that follows the laugh.

Fair and accurate credit is hard to come by in “Living+.” There is no rapturous reception in the executive suite for the editors and engineers who lost a night’s sleep preparing Digital Logan to trade quips onstage or the accountants who made the big Living+ figures work even though “numbers aren’t just numbers—they’re numbers.” That all goes to the lame-duck CEO who appears to have vanquished Mattson’s Nazi tweet (“Doderick Macht Frei,” mashing up the name of Waystar’s Mickey Mouse with the slogan that appears over the gates of Auschwitz) with a few sincere extemporaneous words and tugs at the heartstrings. Nobody catches Shiv pulling the strings behind the scenes, exploiting a relationship that’s progressed from late-night confession sessions to trading flirty banter on private aircraft in order to get “Striking Viking” to back off. Shiv has enough influence over him now that she practically dictates the copy for his social media bombshell when she asks, “Oh what? You don’t want to make prison camps for grannies?”

While her brothers have to pretend like they’re filling roles and carrying out orders their dad left behind, Shiv’s really doing it. She can work with Mattson. She and Tom are taking over as hosts of Logan’s election night party. (Planting a seed for what I hope is the primary setting of the final season’s big election episode.) She’s in Roman’s ear, sowing doubts about Kendall’s fitness. Why mock Rome with his dad’s chopped up words when you can do a pitch-perfect Logan impression like “You know, he could do anything up there, and you’re a part of it”?

I’ll admit to being caught off guard by the positive response to Kendall’s spitballing in the wake of the tweet. There’s a fair amount of dead air while Ken pulls out his phone to read what Mattson tweeted, and his “Not going to fav it” joke doesn’t land. There’s also that wide shot when he’s stuck in the “If and when” loop of his Q&A response that makes him look so tiny and desperate, while the dialogue calls back to the way he couldn’t get past “Big shoes” at the top of the speech.

After thinking about it for a while, though, I feel like this is just one last “Living+” fairy tale, “The Emperor’s New Clothes” for the Waystar C-suite. Even if Living+ comes to be, it’s not going to fulfill all the promises Kendall makes on that stage—least of all the bit that pushes the project into the tech realm, vowing “privileged access to life enhancement” and other science-fiction snake oil. The Succession viewer has their own privileged access: understanding that words are being put in the late CEO’s mouth, seeing the Living+ presentation for what it is, knowing that it’s built on juked stats and secret phone calls, watching the people who greet Ken as a hero tearing him to shreds just moments earlier.

It’s one more game of perception versus reality, a winning sales pitch as phony and flimsy as the Digital Logan. The emotions are real, and I don’t doubt the release Kendall feels as he bobs along in the ocean, doing the opposite of his face-down season-three pool float. But the rest is just for show, Hollywood through and through—manicured, choreographed, sanitized, and intended to keep out the type of chaos that Mattson is so skilled at sowing. Save the real life for when they get back to New York. For now, somebody hand them a pointer and plop them in front of a big map so they can get everything they can out of life+ in LA.

Programming note

So this is a little more personal than I typically care to get in my critical writing, but I feel like I owe y’all the transparency: For the past few weeks, I’ve been going through the extremely surreal experience of watching and writing about the Roys mourning Logan while staying at my parents’ house and helping to care for my father as he succumbed to metastatic prostate cancer. I wrote most of this review Thursday afternoon, but stopped so I could sit at Dad’s bedside for a little while. A few hours later, surrounded by loved ones and listening to some of his favorite songs, Dad died.

I wavered over whether or not I should complete the review; Ben’s filling in for me next week, and I’m sure he would’ve stepped up and done so this week as well. But I opted to see it through, in honor of one of my earliest readers, the guy who introduced me to the joys of appointment television through weekly family viewings of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Max Headroom, and taught me the virtues of finishing what I’ve started. Here’s to my dad, a better man and a better father than Logan Roy could ever hope to be.

Stray observations

I don’t know about anybody else, but “Living+” gave me a hankering to revisit the California episodes of Mad Men.
Maximum Mattson: It’s a great character detail that Mattson not only flies barefoot, but doesn’t stop to put on shoes before boarding someone else’s plane, either.
Hot new Waystar property: Morons. Like the Minions, but more so.
More Bluth-Roy parallels: Like the errant ice cream scoop that caused George Sr. to ban all food from family vehicles, Kendall and Roman had a dairy mishap in a Range Rover—a chocolate milk spill they tried to pin on Shiv. I don’t know what’s going on with the hint of German accent that sneaks into Snook’s reading of that line reading, but I don’t hate it.
Cousin Greg, a.k.a. PitchBot, has some thoughts about selling Silicon Valley on Living+: “I think it’s hard to make houses seem like tech, because we’ve had houses for a while now.”
Roman Roy, wizard of semantics: “I didn’t fire her, I said she was fired to her.”
Lots of good wordless reactions from Sarah Snook in “Living+,” the best being the faces Shiv makes after Tom says, “I think I would like this back.”
Shiv goes to the party prepared to spar: Her outfit looks like a couture karate gi, complete with black belt.
The lighting on Peter Friedman, David Rasche, and J. Smith-Cameron in the balcony is a nice touch. When the camera checks back in with them post-tweet, they look like they’re in a Dutch Golden Age painting.
Roman’s early review of the Living+ presentation: “If I cringe any harder, I might become a fossil.”
Things that are funnier now than they were when they were written: The inane Living+ tweets that show up on Hugo’s phone after Mattson’s—“What would you say to an offer of immortality? I’d say yes fucking please dog. Even if the offer is from a talking dog.” and “Who wants to live forever? Me! I’m in! #LivingPlus #YesPlease”—come from blue checkmark randos.

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