This week, the Roy siblings squabble over whether or not ATN should help a right-wing celebrity nut-job win the US presidential race, a completely fictional scenario that none of us have to feel concerned about since famously, all television news channels are bastions of morality and impartiality, and a right-wing celebrity nut-job would never successfully win the US presidential race (ha ha! Do you see what I did there? Been a weird decade for politics, hasn’t it?).
Anyway, what their dilemma amounts to is a battle for the soul of America: an unusual proposition, as it still isn’t entirely clear which of the Roys have souls themselves. This episode has some of the season’s funniest material; it is also genuinely hard to watch. Like all the best pitch-black comedy, Succession manages to side-swipe you with something truly nasty, now and then, by lulling you into a false sense of security with the rest of its dark-but-not-too-dark gags. When Roman made a “joke” about “the Blacks and the Jews” this week, my heart leapt into my mouth, just as it did in the second season when the acronym NRPI was first discussed – in both instances, the abstracted and amusing terribleness of the Roys crystallised for just a moment into something all too real, and the show felt less like a gallows comedy and more like a warning. It’s a pity that the warning in this instance comes too late.
