Behind the scenes of Succession Season 3: From avoiding tackling the pandemic to renting planes for more than $100,000

The New Yorker

The New Yorker's Rebecca Mead profiles Succession creator Jesse Armstrong as he has to deal with an "embarrassment of airplanes" on location in Italy. Despite the pandemic causing production delays, Armstrong decided not to incorporate COVID into the Season 3 storyline. As a result, says Mead, "this time, the characters’ habitual jetting around may seem even more exorbitant than usual." Mead adds: "The show is so unsettling, in part, because it offers no vantage points exterior to its scrupulously rendered universe—there is no outsider figure who is easier to identify with than the amoral protagonists. The Roy family’s outsider, Cousin Greg, is as calculating as any member of the clan with whom he seeks to ingratiate himself. Culture critics have popularized the term 'wealth porn to characterize shows, such as Billions or Gossip Girl, that lavish attention on the consumption habits of the absurdly wealthy. But, if the shiny surface of Succession bears a relation to pornography, it is less because it titillates than because it partakes of pornography’s deadening relentlessness. Succession also withholds cheap catharsis. Kendall’s backsliding with drugs is only the most overt example of the show’s gothic sensibility: all the Roys have been poisoned by the toxic nature of the family fortune, and Armstrong refuses to impose on them the kind of artificial personal growth that fosters an easy bond with the audience....Given the care that Armstrong puts into making Succession a complex viewing experience, he is reluctant to explicate the show too much, as if it were reducible to a tidy set of themes and intentions. Nevertheless, his ambitions in Succession are driven not by a voyeuristic fascination with the rich—or by a righteous desire to expose the perfidies of inequity—but by a wish to tell, through the specific medium of a contemporary media dynasty, a more universal story about power and family relations, and to show how those forces can torque an individual’s humanity. It’s not so much Billions as Buddenbrooks, with more money and less grain."