Ten years ago, you might remember the cultural conversation being dominated by the question of whether Don Draper, the well-tailored antihero of AMC’s period drama Mad Men, would die in the show’s finale. The clues, people would say, were always there, from the cartoon of a man in a suit falling from a skyscraper in the opening credits to the ad Don (Jon Hamm) pitched which seemed to hint at death by drowning, and there was no other place for someone who had burned so brightly and brooded so cinematically to go but crashing down. This was not, of course, what happened; in fact, Don ended the show at a retreat, dressed in white and meditating, coming up with the idea for an iconic ad for Coca Cola, in a twist that turned out to be just as ugly as a death. No escape, no enlightenment, just commerce – a snapshot of a man’s interior life revealing nothing but an ad spot, another alluring lie.
Fast forward to this morning, and those viewers who remember the discussion about alleged signposts for Don Draper’s death may be experiencing déjà vu. As all Succession-heads know, the titles of each of the show’s season finales are drawn from a poem by John Berryman, “Dream Song 29”, and that poem is a dark one. “There sat down, once, a thing on Henry’s heart/só heavy, if he had a hundred years/ & more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time,” it begins, “Henry could not make good.”
