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As I write this, there are two episodes left. Soon, there will be none. Although Jesse Armstrong’s decision to end Succession with its fourth season is doubtless wise — it’s a relief to know the show won’t dwindle past its sell-by date like so many other cultural behemoths — the thought of no more new installments to feverishly anticipate, and then devour, remains a deeply depressing one.

It’s in the very nature of episodic television, where you watch a group of characters face a distinct set of challenges week after week, year after year, that you come to care about the people you’re watching. After all, if you didn’t care, then why would you keep watching? That’s what I tell myself, anyway, whenever I’ve found myself worryingly invested in the lives of the Roys, the deeply dysfunctional family at the heart of the TV megahit. 

The Roys, by just about any measure, are awful people. The owners of a gargantuan right-wing media empire, perennially battling over who will inherit the kingdom from their ailing octogenarian patriarch, their concerns are borne of avarice and pride and immense self-interest. Almost every relationship depicted on the show is a transactional one, and any brief flicker of kindness is quick to be extinguished. We’re left in little doubt that none of the four adult Roy kids would have amassed any power under their own steam; that they’re afflicted with varying degrees of ineptitude has proven no barrier to their standing. 

Nevertheless, I’ve become fascinated by, and even — somewhat guiltily — fond of these dreadful, ruinous nepo babies. However much they wound each other and the poor souls unlucky enough to cross their paths, the richness with which they’re drawn by the virtuosic writers and played by the spectacular cast exposes the warped vulnerability beneath their obscene privilege. Succession is deeply, lavishly funny, and peppered with some of the silliest and most creative uses of profanity that television has ever hosted, but the whole series is built on a foundation of tremendous sadness. These people may have all the money in the world, but as the last four seasons have shown us in vivid, lacerating detail, their cold, loveless lives inspire little envy. 

Guessing how this whole internecine struggle will ultimately resolve feels like a futile task, although it hasn’t stopped me from doing so. When a happy ending for any of the show’s core characters would likely be disastrous for the world in general, it’s hard to even know who or what to root for. 

So in an attempt to escape pointless prognostication, I’ve been thinking about a different aspect of its massive success over the last five years — the many astute, amusing, and illuminating articles that it has inspired. After all, great writing begets great writing, so it stands to reason that the commentary around Succession would be some of the best around. Here are just five of the wonderful pieces written during the course of its phenomenal run, covering the show’s style, substance, and real-world inspiration. 

Twenty Per Cent Less Hope: The Very English Satire of Succession (Hannah Mackay, Sight and Sound, January 2020)

Succession is an American-set series with a largely British writers’ room, and Hannah Mackay’s essay posits that the push and pull between those broadly opposing national sensibilities is one of the chief factors in its success. Mackay describes how Succession has never followed the U.S. network tradition “of depict[ing] power in its most potent, aphrodisiacal form,” instead hewing more to the U.K.’s innate cynicism by depicting the frighteningly influential Roys as “inept, fragile, [and] lost.” She examines that theme through an aesthetic lens; with both the Roys’ sartorial choices and the spaces they inhabit exhibiting a distinct lack of character, this is not a show that makes being fabulously wealthy look all that fabulous.

Three exhausting years after Mackay’s piece was published, it’s fair to say that audiences on both sides of the Atlantic are feeling far warier of the powerful than they were in January 2020. Still, positioning Succession as the product of utter disillusionment with the one percent is, if anything, more on point now than it was back then.

By contrast, nobody in Succession dresses well, a sign of the show’s refusal to sign up to traditional US TV aesthetics when it comes to depicting wealth and power – and a tribute to the show’s much-lauded costume designer Michelle Matland (it’s famously much harder to dress shows in which people have bad taste, or no taste, than it is to dress shows in which people make flamboyant and creative choices, which are more fun). Everybody in Succession has the means to dress well — but nobody has the confidence to make a flamboyant choice, sartorially or otherwise. Stepping out is too dangerous.

As the UK and US drift ever further into uncharted political territory, it has begun to feel that there are no longer any consequences to anything. The US president has been accused of sexual harassment by more than 20 women, and yet he is still the president. Both he and his British counterpart continue, so far, unhindered by the growing whiff of scandal and corruption. We can end up feeling like Reggie Perrin ourselves, running pointlessly into the sea to make a point nobody wants to hear. But at least we have Succession to watch while we’re doing it.

The Four F’s of Trauma Response and the Four Roy Kids of Succession (Emily St. James, Vox, November 2021)

However much their gargantuan privilege and venomous behavior patently suggests that they don’t deserve our pity, to be a fan of Succession is to find yourself, again and again, feeling sympathy for some immensely rich devils. 

Emily St. James had already written an essay for Vox about how the show depicts the effects of growing up with an abusive parent, and here she lays out how the four Roy kids’ dynamics with their father demonstrate a typology known as the four Fs of trauma response: fight, flight, fawn, and freeze. She also discusses how the show’s love of wide shots enables Succession to more fully display how the family drama affects and discomfits innocent bystanders. 

Kendall, meanwhile, takes and takes and takes his father’s abuse, but eventually, he gets frustrated and fights back, as he’s been doing all season. He’s the most ineffectual of his siblings in this episode, but there are still a few moments where his “fight” impulse engages: when he enters the family’s suite and tries to bully them into holding everything together, for example, or when he gets onstage to read the names of the victims of the cruise line scandal that’s plaguing the company. Kendall likes to make himself the biggest, easiest target — a fairly classic “fight” response that can also be attuned to protecting younger siblings.

After all, Succession’s wide shots often capture the random other people who end up trapped in a room with the Roys, forced to watch them play out their elaborate psychodramas. And most of the time, those other people are nowhere near as rich as the Roys, because who possibly could be? Their reactions to what the Roys say and do serve to deepen our understanding of the family’s many dysfunctions.

On “Succession,” Jeremy Strong Doesn’t Get the Joke (Michael Schulman, The New Yorker, December 2021)

When Michael Schulman’s New Yorker profile of Jeremy Strong was published just as the third season of Succession was drawing to a close, it seemed like the only thing anyone on the internet was talking about. That was not good news for Strong. 

Although not an out-and-out hit piece, it’s still difficult to read Schulman’s vivid, engrossing profile without wincing. It paints Strong as someone who at best approaches the role of Kendall Roy with a full-throatedness that borders on the unhealthy, and at worst applies a self-serious dedication to his craft that makes him almost impossible to work with. The profile is littered with painfully specific details about Strong’s intense acting philosophy — Strong calls his technique “identity diffusion” — along with quotes from cast and crew members who remain unconvinced of the technique’s necessity.

Strong, who is now forty-two, has the hangdog face of someone who wasn’t destined for stardom. But his mild appearance belies a relentless, sometimes preening intensity. He speaks with a slow, deliberate cadence, especially when talking about acting, which he does with a monk-like solemnity. “To me, the stakes are life and death,” he told me, about playing Kendall. “I take him as seriously as I take my own life.” He does not find the character funny, which is probably why he’s so funny in the role.

Last year, he played the Yippie activist Jerry Rubin in Aaron Sorkin’s film “The Trial of the Chicago 7.” While shooting the 1968 protest scenes, Strong asked a stunt coördinator to rough him up; he also requested to be sprayed with real tear gas. “I don’t like saying no to Jeremy,” Sorkin told me. “But there were two hundred people in that scene and another seventy on the crew, so I declined to spray them with poison gas.”

Misery Loves Matrimony: The Beautiful, Bleak Science Behind ‘Succession’ Weddings (Alyssa Bereznak, The Ringer, April 2023)

Succession consistently questions whether any of its core characters are even capable of love — and yet there’s no set piece the show prefers to a wedding. Three of the four seasons have plotted their most vital events around these seemingly damned unions, the fairytale promise of happily ever after making a caustic backdrop to palace intrigue and corporate skullduggery. And with the Roys having almost limitless funds at their disposal, their weddings are always eye-wateringly extravagant.

In her piece for The Ringer, Alyssa Bereznak digs into the role these opulent affairs play on Succession, talking to the production designers who “adopted a role as a Roy family wedding planner” and exploring how the weddings are often our best shot at gleaning details from the Roy kids’ little-mentioned but tumultuous upbringings.

Just as far-flung family members fill in the blanks of the Roy progeny’s upbringing, so does the sprawling property chosen for Shiv’s wedding. “The house, Eastnor house, was, in the story line, a special one of the family’s country estates,” said Newman, who decorated the set for the episodes “Pre-nuptial” and “Nobody Is Ever Missing.” As Connor recounts to Willa when they arrive, one of the homes became a “thorn in Caroline’s side” because she was screwed out of inheriting it. Elsewhere, Caroline gestures at portraits of all of her “disreputable slave-owning ancestors.” “In Eastnor Castle there’s wonderful bits of art,” Newman said. “Even wallpapers and the furnishing, carpets and rugs and things like this, nothing is new. Everything has a personality, has a history and a provenance. … That’s the key, is that it’s layered.”

Inside Rupert Murdoch’s Succession Drama (Gabriel Sherman, Vanity Fair, April 2023)

While creator Jesse Armstrong has cited various inspirations for the Roy family, the one that comes up the most often by far is the Murdochs. From an elderly patriarch who refuses to acknowledge his mortality, to the two sons and a daughter battling over the crown, to the noxiousness of their right-wing media empire and its influence over a disturbingly demagogic presidential candidate, it’s hard not to see their shadow looming over Succession. 

Though Sherman’s piece contains only glancing mentions of the show (amusingly, one of the conditions of Rupert Murdoch’s recent settlement agreement from fourth wife Jerry Hall was that she wasn’t allowed to pitch story ideas to the writers), the details of how running a multibillion dollar company is so regularly entwined with the petty squabbles of a troubled family demonstrate that, despite its more ridiculous twists and turns, Succession has been far truer to life than one might think. 

He long wanted one of his three children from his second wife, Anna—Elisabeth, 54, Lachlan, 51, and James, 50—to take over the company one day. Murdoch believed a Darwinian struggle would produce the most capable heir. “He pitted his kids against each other their entire lives. It’s sad,” a person close to the family said. Elisabeth was by many accounts the sharpest, but she is a woman, and Murdoch subscribed to old-fashioned primogeniture. She quit the family business in 2000 and launched her own phenomenally successful television production company. Lachlan shared Murdoch’s right-wing politics and atavistic love for newsprint and their homeland, Australia. “Lachlan was the golden child,” the person close to the family said. But Murdoch worried that his easygoing son, who seemed happiest rock climbing, did not want the top job badly enough. 

Chloe Walker is a writer based in the U.K. She is a regular contributor to Paste Magazine and the BFI.

Editor: Peter Rubin

Copy Editor: Krista Stevens

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When we first meet Tom, he’s standing outside a luxury jewelry store in New York, earnestly strategizing with his future wife about an 80th-birthday gift for her father, Logan. When she tells him that her dad “doesn’t really like things,” he blows right through her warning. “It needs to say,” he replies, “‘I respect you, but I’m not awed by you. And that I like you—but I need you to like me before I can love you.’”

That kind of moment — wild, tormented, funny — has become Tom’s signature. When asked, Macfadyen can’t think of other acting performances that helped him develop the character’s frenzied aura, but when he ponders playing Tom, Steve Martin sometimes comes to mind. “There’s a Steve Martin thing he does in various films, and he’s just sort of improvising wildly to try to get what he wants,” Macfadyen says. “He’s such a brilliant actor. There’s a sort of terrible panic about not getting what he wants and trying to do the right thing and pleasing.”

Early in the pilot, Tom tries to hand his still-unrevealed gift to Brian Cox’s Logan, who ignores the gesture. The far-too-eager-to-please future son-in-law finally gets his chance at the family’s annual celebratory softball game. Along with a five-figure Patek Philippe watch, Tom delivers a joke to Logan: “It’s incredibly accurate. Every time you look at it, it tells you exactly how rich you are.” Unimpressed, Logan says, “That’s very funny. Did you rehearse that?” Macfadyen improvised Tom’s response, first letting out a painfully awkward laugh, then saying, “No. Well, no. Yes, but …” Then Tom stops himself, forces a toothless smile, and shakes his head.

“That reaction he had to Logan Roy is an incredibly difficult thing to pull off because you’re going to say, ‘No,’ and then you’re going to betray yourself because you’re so intimidated you tell him you actually practiced it,” says McKay, who directed the episode. “People do that in real life. But traditionally, when you see a moment like that, it’s played for high comedy. Macfadyen’s a master. It’s a comedic moment, but still, it felt real.”

As fall crept up and sofas beckoned, two streaming giants went head-to-head with fantasy offerings: Amazon Prime with the laboriously titled The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, a prequel to (you guessed it) The Lord of the Rings; and HBO with House of the Dragon, a prequel to Game of Thrones. Similar as these offerings may initially seem, they are at different ends of the fantasy spectrum. Where Rings of Power is high-end — think elven Kings and noble quests across vast lands — House of the Dragon, with its street brawls and brothels, is more a pint of lager than fine wine. Delighted to delve into any fantasy world, I was happy to bounce between the two. Both eschew streaming’s all-at-once cadence for weekly episodes, leaving me plenty of time in between to do some light background reading on Middle Earth and Westeros. That reading led me back to Adrian Daub’s 2017 Longreads essay “Here at the End of All Things.” 

In his piece Daub focuses on the role of maps in building fantasy lands (particularly the two lands that birthed these series, J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth and George R.R. Martin’s Westeros), and recounts with pride how much he relished such maps as a child. I remember the same thing: poring over deliciously unfamiliar names, elaborately penned on an inky map under a book cover, constantly looking back as quests reached new lands. For a reader, a map brings a new world to life; for a writer, it can help them craft it in the first place. Tolkien was one of the first to use such maps, and Daub details how crucial this was to the writer’s storytelling: “Through map design, Tolkien could telegraph some of the complicated culture he had dreamed up for Middle Earth: the maps for The Hobbit were full of Runic inscriptions and historical notes, to the point that several scholarly books have devoted chapters to a detailed reading of these maps alone.” 

Even as those worlds leapt from the page to the screen, their cartography remained crucial. The Rings of Power uses maps between scenes to track location in the huge world portrayed, which this time reaches far beyond Middle Earth. Daub explains that Tolkien based Middle Earth on medieval Europe, with the land beyond deemed something more “exotic.” Westeros, too, has been compared to Europe, despite its American creator, and Daub reminds me of Game of Thrones’s glorious opening credit swoop over its inverted-UK terrain. Sadly, in House of the Dragon, the map has been replaced by what seems to be some very viscous blood seeping over stone. (With less travel in this series, it’s not as crucial for story-building.) 

Revisiting this essay was a treat, filled as it is with both nostalgia and fascinating information. Daub refers to himself as a “geek,” but I will dub him an expert. We are roughly at the halfway point of both House of the Dragon and Rings of Power; read this lovely essay before the second act, and remind yourself of how such elaborate fantasy worlds come into existence.

For every moment when we take in glumly how far our heroes still have to travel, there are ten moments of the opposite: of luxuriating in how much world is yet out there for our heroes to traverse, a burning desire to see the lines and shadings filled in with people and story. This, too, is part of Tolkien’s maps. Between the world wars, the British Isles were seized by a hiking craze. Maps, organized tours, and walking guides proliferated during the years Tolkien began charting Bilbo’s great hike towards the Lonely Mountain. Thror’s Map, which Tolkien himself drew and which his characters use as a guide to get into the Mountain, may look like the map of Treasure Island that Robert Louis Stevenson included as a frontispiece in his 1883 novel. But the paths and pointers, the famous sight at the center, and the reams of text and historic markers make it feel like a hiking map.

As the series progresses, the line between Fielder’s life and work blurs, until he finds himself at the center of his own experiment. At times, he seems to question the wisdom of manipulating people the way he does. When the teacher likens him to Willy Wonka, he looks disturbed. “Isn’t he the bad guy?” he asks.

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Sara Fredman | Longreads | November 2019 | 10 minutes (2,750 words)

What makes an antihero show work? In this Longreads series, It’s Not Easy Being Mean, Sara Fredman explores the fine-tuning that goes into writing a bad guy we can root for, and asks whether the same rules apply to women.
 
The question at the core of the antihero show has always been what it would take to turn the bad guy — the mobster, the drug kingpin, the Russian spy, the mad and murderous queen — into the hero of the story. And the answer is that our willingness to root for a bad person who does bad things, sometimes to good people, is dependent on a carefully constructed context. Successful antiheroes have all been portrayed in a certain way: as special — particularly skilled at something or somehow different than those around them — and as three-dimensional human beings with unmet desires. They are usually surrounded by even more unsavory antagonists and are invariably trying to survive within an oppressive system they can’t fully understand. Our empathy for them comes in large part from seeing their pain and the forces that oppress them even when they don’t, perhaps especially when they don’t. But our ability to relate to them also hinges on the possibility of redemption, if not its actualization. We see ourselves, however dimly, in antiheroes. Their potential for change is our own. We can stand to watch them do terrible things because we harbor hope that they, and we, can change.   

This is why the popularity of HBO’s Succession suggests that we have reached late-stage antihero show, the moment when the genre leans most fully into its absurdities without bothering to give viewers much of a reason to care for its protagonists. The first season of Succession was antiheroic nihilism, the antihero show as second-semester high school senior, wondering how little effort it can put in and still graduate with its class. Purportedly based in part on internecine conflict in uber-wealthy media families like the Murdochs and the Redstones, the show follows the Roy family as their media company’s founder and CEO, patriarch Logan Roy, decides who will succeed him. When we meet Logan, he is disoriented and peeing on the floor; by the beginning of the second episode he is in a coma in the ICU as his children ask the staff whether that’s “the best part of the hospital.”

That question of whether the ICU is the best place for a person who has just suffered a hemorrhagic stroke is our first indication that the Roy children are not superstars. It is clear that Logan is in decline but if we are meant to root for any of his children to take his place, it is not immediately apparent which one, or why. “Are we supposed to be rooting for these spoiled bozos?” I asked as I watched the first season, and it became abundantly clear that the only thing that makes the Roy children special is their wealth, which they have done nothing to earn. None of them are particularly good at … anything. The first episode finds Kendall, Logan’s heir apparent, flailing. Logan watches from afar as Kendall tries and fails to close a deal. Soon, his inheritance is no longer apparent. Siobhan (“Shiv”) is a political strategist but it isn’t clear whether her success is due to her skills or her proximity to corporate power; we mostly see political candidates trying to convince her to influence her family’s media outlets in their favor. Roman is the youngest Roy and is, in the words of cousin Greg, “widely known as a horrible person.” When he is put in charge of a Japanese rocket launch, the rocket explodes before it even leaves the ground. Separately, he is a lothario who is unable to consummate a sexual encounter. Connor, Logan’s oldest son with his first wife, is mostly there to provide easy laughs. He doesn’t appear to have ever held a job and spends his time bidding on “Napoleonica” like the Little Corporal’s shriveled penis. He wants the family’s foundation to pivot away from “sick kids and contemporary dance” and toward tax reform. 

Unlike, say, Walter White, who tugged at our heartstrings with his earnest desire to provide for his family even after his death, there are no questions of providing for family here. Kendall is the only Roy scion who has reproduced and his kids do not appear once during the show’s second season. There is no precarity beyond the precarity of who is Logan Roy’s “number one boy” at any given time. The system that oppresses the Roy children is just the manipulative horse race stoked by their father, so if we find ourselves rooting for any one of them to triumph, it means that we are rooting for them to win the prize of becoming that number one boy, which is to say that we are rooting for them to become an even richer person in charge of a corrupt and abusive corporation. To the extent that the first season had any pathos, it was in watching the Roy children try their best and still not succeed but none of them retained our sympathies or respect long enough to solidify their position as the show’s antihero. Instead, they took turns playing the antihero and the more unsavory foils who are supposed to make the antihero look better.

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During its first season the show just didn’t seem interested in answering the question of how bad a bad guy can be and still appeal to viewers, which was kind of refreshing. We’ve seen that show before. Instead, Succession asked how inept and inconsequential an unappealing character could be and still keep us watching. And the more I thought about it, the more delighted I became at the idea that the show might be finding a new way to tell a story about bad people. Would we be free, for once, of talking about likability? Was it challenging us to root for mediocrity? Were we falling to the occasion?

Or maybe — thrillingly — it was experimenting with a new antiheroic narrative structure. The show’s most intriguing characters weren’t members of the Roy family and they were all women: Logan’s third wife, Marcia, Waystar Royco general counsel Gerri, and Rhea Jarrell, the CEO of rival media company Pierce. When the show begins, Marcia is on her way to getting a significant voting stake on the company board and later has the temerity to call Shiv “a spoiled slut.” She doesn’t suffer fools and she kind of seems like she has a plan. Gerri, a fan favorite, is an actual smart person with actual professional credentials and skills. She is also portrayed as the most loyal Waystar employee, ably guiding the Roys through the choppy waters of self-inflicted corporate crisis. Rhea is Machiavellian, good at her job and savvy about the media world. She is everything the Roy spawn are not and outguns them for the CEO position of their own family business. All three of these women grabbed our attention. Their interiority — that narrative gift given to some characters and not others — simmered at the surface and we waited for it to overflow. We wanted to know more; it seemed possible they might reveal themselves to be more masterful plotters than the principal characters. It seemed possible, as the tension rose during the show’s second season, that Succession might reveal itself to be a new kind of genre-busting antihero show.

Unfortunately, like Roman’s “Eunuch bestie” Tabitha hoping to gain some sexual satisfaction, only disappointment followed. The show ended its second season by taking refuge in a more traditional antihero story. Looking back, it’s easy to see how this season, particularly the latter half, was calibrated differently than the first, emphasizing the disordered family dynamics created by the Roy parents and inviting us to sympathize with their children. Back in physical health, Logan became the unbridled antagonist, a manipulative and emotionally withholding parent and an unrepentant enabler of horrifying workplace abuse. The focus on his children’s pain was accompanied by a dialing down of their ineptitude. All of a sudden, there were reasons to cheer for these poor little captains of industry as they each enjoyed moments of either competence or pathos denied to them earlier on. Roman keeps his cool during a hostage situation in Turkey and later exhibits uncharacteristic savvy when he advises his father not to pin his hopes on the Azerbaijani money that would allow them to go private. Shiv and Kendall are the heroes of the congressional inquiry into Waystar Royco, Shiv by convincing a key witness not to come forward and Kendall with his successful testimony pointing out the hypocrisy of the crusading Senator Gil Eavis. The Roy kids also get a chance to showcase some (very relative) moral high ground when, in the season finale, Logan tries to decide which Waystar higher-up should take the blame for the company’s ethical lapses and pits his top execs against each other while they are trapped on his yacht. Roman cleverly defends Gerri and Shiv seemingly sacrifices her own ambitions to save Tom. Kendall is the chosen sheep but surprises everyone by sacrificing his father instead, becoming the killer Logan said he would never be. This twist is meant to land as Kendall’s redemption arc. He is off the wagon, has more or less shrugged off his kids, and recently vehicularly manslaughtered an innocent waiter but there is something like relief when he rises like a phoenix from the ashes of a Mediterranean yacht.

And what of all of those women on the periphery? Rhea, who had enough of a killer instinct herself to become Logan’s successor, is suddenly, inexplicably, out of her depth. The Roy kids outmaneuver her even though we have never seen them outmaneuver anyone, and she recedes when a major scandal hits, as if she couldn’t possibly have imagined that a major media company could have some buried bodies. Gerri, as Roman points out early in the series, knows all about the bodies, which becomes a double entendre this season when Roman finally achieves some sexual release to the sound of Gerri reprimanding him over the phone and from the other side of a bathroom door. We get excited about this alliance but were we to simply remove our rosé-colored glasses, we would see it for what it actually is: pretty straightforward sexual harassment. For Gerri, this is all business; she is doing what she needs to do in order to do and keep her actual job. When Roman defends her in the final episode, it’s in part because she has spent the season indulging and managing his professional and sexual anxieties. We may tsk at tales of Harvey Weinstein trying to enjoy himself out on the town but Succession succeeds in compelling us to cheer on a relationship grounded in harassment and an imbalance of power. This is a function of the antihero narrative, which has the power to dictate whom we root for, often in contravention of our own deeply held values and convictions, by selectively granting and withholding pathos and interiority. Meanwhile, Marcia — who had just an episode or two before seemed to be preparing for war against Rhea — simply disappears like the Not Real People who fell off of Waystar Royco’s cruise ships.

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Succession reminds me of the Horatio Alger Jr. stories, or at least the takeaway from the Horatio Alger stories I absorbed at some point in my education. Chronicling the rags-to-riches rise of honest boys who do honest things and attract the attention of benevolent wealthy people, Alger’s books gave those of humble means reason to believe they might rise in the economic ranks if they only worked hard and with integrity. And they played an important role in the mythmaking of American capitalism, obscuring its abuses by advertising its accessibility. They did this in part by depicting a world of individuals rather than systems. Succession has no designs on portraying accessible wealth but it too occludes systems by focusing on some individuals and not others. It turns the Roy children into antiheroes with pathos and skill while merely glancing at those — like the doomed waiter and the witness Shiv convinces not to testify — caught up in the system the Roys control. These “normos,” as Roman might call them, are exceptional not just because most of the show’s characters exert either political or financial power but because they are denied the kind of interiority given to the Roy kids. In fact, the Roys’ interiority often comes at their expense. We may feel sad looking at all of the pictures of Kendall’s doomed passenger on the wall of his parents’ home but we’re mostly thinking about the emotional abuse Logan is perpetrating on his son by making him be there. To focus, as the show does, on the oppressive system Logan Roy constructs for his children is to obscure the far more oppressive system he constructs for everyone else.

Am I a party pooper? A sad sack at the wasp trap? Why can’t I just enjoy the show as the comedy that it so clearly is? I would, in fact, be delighted to watch it as a straight comedy if the moody orchestral music and the show’s creator weren’t asking me to take all of it so seriously. And we know what a comedy about terrible people doing terrible things looks like. It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, like Succession, has no use for introspection or moral growth. Its characters are delusional, self-important, and amoral; they’re certainly not the smartest group in Philadelphia. They are the worst and they will never change. We watch because they’re funny but they’re funny mostly because they hold up an unflattering mirror to our own unsavory thoughts and behaviors, often functioning as absurdist send-ups of our own inability to accept cultural change. “Time’s Up for the Gang,” an episode in season 13, showed the gang attending a sexual harassment seminar after their bar is included on a “shitty bar list” of establishments hostile to women. This provides an opportunity to put Danny DeVito in a Harvey Weinstein-evoking robe and generally let the gang do their offensive best. But it also voices some of the reservations It’s Always Sunny viewers might actually have about the shifting landscape of gender relations. “Their powers are growing,” Dennis warns when Dee feigns having her ass grabbed, causing the men around her to quickly scatter. When we laugh at the gang’s inability to understand what constitutes sexual harassment, or, in Dennis’ case, his use of sexual politics for his own ridiculous purposes, we also internalize the show’s censure of it. If the bozos are doing it, we had better not. In a true satire, despicable behavior functions as a social commentary that questions entrenched systems rather than reinforcing them. 

It would be charitable to say that Succession is caught between genres, that it can’t decide whether it wants us to laugh and distance ourselves from the Roy children or cry and root for them. But the truth is that the show’s humor is strategic; it functions as plausible deniability and deflection. If we say the show glorifies the abuses of the super-rich, we’re bad viewers for missing its comedy. When we enjoy the comedy, as I think anyone who watches past the pilot must, we open ourselves up to the machinations of the antihero plot. We might tell ourselves, as Naomi Pierce tells Kendall, that watching the Roys melt down “is the most deeply satisfying activity on the planet earth,” that the pleasure of the show comes from luxuriating in their foibles. But we would be deluding ourselves because, like Naomi, we have become invested in Kendall’s redemption. The comedy allows us to think that what we’re feeling is schadenfreude when it’s really empathy and affinity. The antihero plot turns Kendall into the bozo to root for as he works to overcome the oppressive forces that try so hard to keep him down. Portraying a nefarious billionaire who benefited from privilege and deregulation as a plucky bootstrapper is not fiction and it has real stakes. Succession reveals the role that escapism plays in the antihero genre. Making a bad guy not quite so bad lets us enjoy something we’re used to fearing. What a relief it is to root for Tony Soprano instead of being afraid of him. What a relief it is to laugh at and then feel bad for a billionaire instead of being afraid of the world he is creating. Succession is Tom Wambsgans using a person as a coffee table; it’s all in good fun unless you’re the one who’s lost the bet. 

Previous installments in this series:
The Blaming of the Shrew
The Good Bad Wives of Ozark and House of Cards
Mother/Russia
And What of My Wrath?
How Do You Move Past a Dad?

* * *

Sara Fredman is a writer and editor living in St. Louis. Her work has been featured in Longreads, The Rumpus, Tablet, and Lilith.

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Illustrator: Zoë van Dijk

This story was funded by our members. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.

Jeanna Kadlec | Longreads | June 2019 | 12 minutes (3,114 words)

When we call Anne Lister, the 19th century British diarist and adventurer reimagined in HBO’s hit series Gentleman Jack, the “first modern lesbian,” what do we mean, precisely? Critics don’t seem to know. The catchy tagline coined by Lister’s devotees and perpetuated by the show’s marketing is good branding, but makes for a slightly confusing moniker: what is it, exactly, that makes Anne Lister a “modern” lesbian, let alone the first?

The answer goes beyond a casual Wikipedia-esque list of Lister’s propensities and accomplishments that most coverage of the show has thus far relied on. To understand what makes Anne Lister unique, you have to understand how lesbianism and identity were understood in the 1830s — and it’s far too simplistic to say that women with women was simply “unimaginable” for the time, that Lister was completely solitary in her pursuit of as public a commitment as would have been socially acceptable.

Lesbian content was not unfamiliar to 17th, 18th, and 19th century audiences. From lesbian eroticism in pornographic texts such as the psuedonymous Abbé du Prat’s The Venus in the Cloister: or, the Nun in Her Smock, published in 1683, to the trope of a “Female Husband” (which had historical grounding in famous figures like Mary Hamilton) to the romantic friendship of Ladies of Llangollen, who were contemporaries of Lister’s, the idea of women loving (and fucking) women was hardly new, if deeply socially unacceptable. Among women of the upper class with means, Lister was hardly alone in forging her own kind of life. The “first”? No.

Lister was ahead of her time, but not in the obvious way: not because of her desire, or even her willingness to throw off norms. Rather, her desire to live what we would identify as an “out” life (or, as “out” a life as possible) was informed by a distinctly Enlightenment-informed conception of her individuality and her psychosexual identity that would have been more at home in 2019 than 1839. In Lister’s time, lesbian wasn’t the distinct identity category it would later become. Lister’s prescient insistence on a cohesion between her public and private personas — an insistence on her sexuality as a vital component of her identity — was remarkable. Thanks to her diaries, we also have unprecedented access to how she herself thought of her identity and sexuality, as well as an explicit record of sexual activity. Ultimately, this means that Lister is a historical figure made for 21st century consumption, onto whose life we can easily project (if anachronistically) ideas like that of the closet and the difficulty of living an “out” life in Regency England.

***

The first published use of the word lesbian to connote what the Oxford English Dictionary calls “A woman who engages in sexual activity with other women; a woman who is sexually or romantically attracted (esp. wholly or largely) to other women; or, a homosexual woman” dates to 1732, in Oxford don William King’s vicious satire The Toast, which fictionalizes the Duchess of Newburgh (Lady Frances Brudenell) as a witch and lesbian named ‘Myra.’ In this, he beats 20th and 21st American conservatives like Pat Robertson to the punch of collapsing witches and lesbians together. He writes, “This little Woman gave Myra more Pleasure than all the rest of her Lovers and Mistresses. She was therefore dignified with the Title of Chief of the Tribades or Lesbians.” (Not a bad title, I think.) Though intended as revenge for Newburgh’s victory over him in court, it also is our first recorded instance in the English language of the word lesbian in its modern sense, of a woman whose sole sexual interest is other women.

In the 18th and early 19th centuries, lesbian was one word among many: tribade, sodomitesse, sapphist, amazon, tommy, anandryne. As Susan Lanser notes in The Sexuality of History, there were numerous labels applied to homoerotic behaviors and the women who practiced them, although these would not have categories of identification as we think of them today. “Lesbian” was not a word you’d have put on your Tinder or Twitter bio if either platform had existed; it was, essentially, slander.

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Lister had contemporaries who lived quite openly, though these couples were certainly uncommon. At the time Gentleman Jack, the series, takes place in 1832, a real life couple, Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake, had just celebrated their 29th anniversary. Bryant and Drake lived an openly married life together in Massachusetts that would be quite publicly recorded during their lifetime by Bryant’s nephew, who wrote about his aunts’ 40th anniversary in the New-York Evening Post, of all places. While sexual discretion was a part of their public life, as it was Lister’s and that of other queer women of the time, their relationship was well known to their Weybridge community. Bryant called Drake her “help-meet,” an early American synonym for wife taken from the Book of Genesis. Rachel Hope Cleves, who wrote Charity & Sylvia: A Same Sex Marriage in Early America, says, “Charity’s sister-in-law, and good friend, Sally Snell Bryant, wrote to the women in 1843, ‘I consider you both one as man and wife are one.’” Cleves also notes that their community was delicate with the relationship, as when Drake’s brother “likened the women’s relationship to a marriage [in his memoir],” explaining that his sister had never married but, rather, had spent her life “in company with Miss Charity Bryant.” Bryant and Drake, active in their community and well beloved, were ultimately buried together, a right typically reserved for married couples.

More common was for Regency women to live under the guise of so-called “romantic friendship,” a same-sex category for both men and women that afforded an intense public physical and emotional intimacy that simultaneously shielded any sexual intimacy that took place. While scholars often uses the term “romantic friendship” to indicate emotionally intense but nonsexual relationships, the term is still important to consider for the fact that the category was embraced by the women to whom it afforded a complete freedom from compulsory heterosexuality and marriage. As Valerie Traub has discussed in “The (In)Significance of Lesbian Desire,” one of the most prominent characteristics of female sexual representation is the persistent questioning of whether something sexual is there at all.

The two women most famous for their romantic friendship in the 18th century were the Ladies of Llangollen, Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby. Slightly older contemporaries of Lister’s who were downright obsessed with each other, their families tried to keep them apart in their youth and failed spectacularly, with the women ultimately moving from their native Ireland to the Vale of Llangollen in Wales, where they lived together for 50 years. Again, social rank is relevant: Butler was from a noble family, and they had education, money (though they were often in debt), and the ability to live independently and receive visitors from the highest echelons of society. Like Lister, they wore top hats; visitors like Anna Seward and William Wordsworth both wrote and dedicated poetry to them. They even received a pension from the Queen for the example they set with their relationship.

Because they were so famous, many of the Ladies’ letters have survived. There are a number in the Pforzheimer Collection at The New York Public Library. While many of the NYPL’s letters are somewhat typical correspondence, one — to conservative education reformer Hannah More (the woman to whom we can credit modern-day Sunday Schools) — speaks to the Ladies’ mutual religious devotion and conservatism, as well as to their breadth of social circle: they entertained people as varied as More, Lady Caroline Lamb (the married lover of Lord Byron), and even Anne Lister, who was purportedly inspired to go home and get married after visiting with them. Eleanor and Sarah often signed their letters on behalf of the other (as one from Sarah: “kindest regards from myself and Lady Eleanor”), signifying their mutual duality as a paired couple, even if they were not interpreted as a romantic one, in the modern day sense of the word.

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In her letters — and as is represented in Gentleman Jack — Anne Lister entreats Ann Walker to a romantic partnership that would appear completely respectable to polite society. Privately, they would marry; publicly, they would live together as two wealthy women in respectable, partnered friendship — essentially, exactly as the Ladies of Llangollen. “Might we not live together, set up home together, as companions?” Lister asks Walker in episode three.

“Like a marriage?” Walker asks.

“Quite as good, or better,” Lister responds.

Sexual discretion within romantic friendship — even if that “friendship”  is essentially an open secret, as with Charity and Sylvia, or Anne Lister and Ann Walker — was essential for complying with the sexual mores of the time. Explicit sexual activity between women, while not criminalized as it was with men, was still grounds for public shaming and ostracization; pornographic lesbian materials were disseminated to discredit Marie Antoinette during the French Revolution, and independently minded, unmarried women in Romantic and Victorian-era England who lived alone, and not with a companion under the umbrella of “romantic friendship,” were often followed by suspicion.

Part of the fascination with Lister is that she viewed herself and her sexuality in a way rather consistent with our contemporary views of sexual identity. It also cannot be overstated that Lister kept a sexually explicit diary — a rarity for any historical queer, but especially for a woman. There has been speculation for years, for example, about whether the Ladies of Llangollen had a sexual relationship — some argue they were too conservative and religious to have had sex, which seems an odd argument, to say the least (Lister was religious, too); others point to a lack of explicit eroticism in their letters, and still others point out the rather obvious fact that the two women shared a bed for decades, so: draw your own conclusions. In comparison, Lister’s blatant, so explicit it is impossible to misinterpret diaries recording how often she made her various lovers orgasm seems a blessed relief for historians who are so often left having to parse the nuances of whether people even considered themselves queer, let alone the details of how they actually lived their lives. Lister, like Walt Whitman after her, was so obsessed with recording herself that it she makes it easy for us.  

Whereas Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake and the Ladies of Llangollen provide a more direct comparison to Lister, there are other prominent examples of what we would call queer relationships between women and queers of the time. In the Pforzheimer Collection at the NYPL, the Ladies of Llangollen’s letters are marked under the following designation: Women in Trouble/Lesbians, Female Husbands, and Other Passing Women. “Female husband,” looking through a contemporary lens, is a wildly loaded term, bringing to mind all manner of transphobic arguments about who does and doesn’t count, arguments brought by sects of society as varied as the Religious Right and Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist (TERF) lesbians.

Shifting conceptions of identity and a significant lack of historical documentation (in the Lister sense, of having sheaves of diaries) can make it difficult to understand precisely where many of the Assigned Female at Birth (AFAB) people who took on this “female husband” identity were coming from. A problematic aspect of queer historiography, particularly in regards to gender identity, is that people we would today identify as transgender, or perhaps non-binary or genderfluid, have certainly always been here. The language and constructions of self-identification have not always been the same; how did the person see themselves and their desires, is a constant question when considering historical queers. Language is constantly shifting, creating a process of untangling for historians that can feel more morass than mosaic. However: those who renamed themselves Charles or Walter, worked professionally (and, obviously, in the closet) in careers that were exclusively available to men (such as medicine), and took wives, certainly seem, by modern rubrics, to have lived lives which are identifiable, as Victorianist Grace Lavery writes, as “a kind of trans experience.”

What is unique about the “female husband” is that, in the most famous historical cases (which is to say, ones where the individual was publicly outed and typically prosecuted for fraud), the women they had married claimed absolutely no knowledge of her spouse’s sex. Charles Hamilton, who was christened (and later written about as) Mary Hamilton, worked as a doctor and took a wife. Hamilton is perhaps the most famous 18th century case, in part because Henry Fielding published a highly sensationalized (and cruel) 23-page fictionalized “biographical” account, The Female Husband, in which he presents Hamilton as “unnatural” and “monstrous.” Fielding claimed the novella to have been based on interviews with Hamilton, a claim historians have thoroughly challenged. What is certain is that in 1746, Hamilton’s wife of two months, Mary Price, reported Hamilton to the authorities, claiming total ignorance of her spouse’s sex prior to marriage. Ultimately, Hamilton was given a six-month prison sentence and publicly whipped.

A female husband figure who was more contemporary to Lister was Walter Sholto Douglas, who also wrote as Charles Lyndsay and has been written about in scholarship under their christened name, Mary Diana Dods. Douglas’ story, best documented in Betty T. Bennett’s groundbreaking Mary Diana Dods: A Gentleman and a Scholar (1991), highlights the nuances of a life — and identity — that begs to be adapted for the screen, but, due to a lack of clarity around their precise consideration of their own gender and sexuality, would be a fraught enterprise for adaptation. Douglas wrote professionally (and successfully) under the name Charles Lyndsay for years, and fully taking on the Douglas name when they lived as a diplomat and writer abroad. Douglas fled England, to the best of our knowledge not due to anxieties over the expression of gender or sexuality but rather because they were significantly in debt. As anyone who’s read a Dickens novel knows, people in nineteenth century England were regularly imprisoned for debt. But Douglas also found another reason to flee: to wed a friend, Isabella Robinson (also a friend of Mary Shelley’s), at least in part as a cover for Robinson’s illegitimate pregnancy. Letters between Douglas and Mary Shelley indicate that Shelley assisted in the couple’s escape from England, a progressive ally who was fully aware of Douglas’ history. Douglas and Robinson lived together with their daughter, who considered Douglas to be her father and who she later listed as such on her marriage license, for the duration of their lives.

The “female husband” was both a fictional trope and a lived experience for a number of couples. To a less extent, Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake themselves adopted roles that we might more consider to be an extremely traditional forerunner to butch/femme. Anne Lister, who in her diaries represents herself as a woman who wanted a wife, went by “Freddie” with many of her lovers, a nuance of self-expression that is represented in the pilot of Gentleman Jack and continues throughout the first season, with her ex-lover Mariana continually addressing her as “Dearest Fred” in letters. Relationships are ever changing, and language is slippery, so often less precise than we would like; “language forces us to make such choices when we refer to things, alas,” Lavery writes, when discussing the complex terrain of navigating transness, queerness, masculinity, femininity, and the whole scope of it all among historical figures. What is certain is that we were here.

***

The point is that queers took lovers, took wives, and lived as openly (or privately) as they could, assuming codes and ways of being that felt most real, whether it was “romantic friendship,” an identity as a “female husband,” or something else altogether. It is noteworthy that, for the most part, the cases we know of are either those tried under the law (like Hamilton), or women who occupied a sphere of society which guaranteed a certain amount of historical documentation and legacy, as with Lister and the Ladies of Llangollen. But there is nuance: there is an understanding of the codes like romantic friendship which allowed people like Bryant and Drake to thrive; there is also a need for understanding that how we conceive of identity would have been completely foreign to virtually all of the individuals being discussed in this article.

In this, Lister’s conception of herself, and the sheer amount of information we have to work with, easily lends itself to a modern audience of an HBO series. Because of Lister’s insistence on a permanent, sexual partnership — indeed, on a marriage, even a private one — an adaptation of her life does not necessarily require an audience to understand the veil of romantic friendship.  

It was not easy to be queer, in any sense, then. But even for the strides that the 2010s have made in representation, and particularly trans representation, on television — such as with FX’s nearly all-POC, all-trans cast on Pose, and Netflix’s regrettably now-canceled One Day at a Time, which featured Sid, a non-binary partner for the newly out Elena — historical dramas featuring queer characters still tend toward the direction of early 2000s representation for queer women, which is to say: femme on femme. Recent critical darlings like The Favourite and Colette feature actresses like Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone and Keira Knightley; even cult favorite Killing Eve, run me over with a car as it is, relies heavily on sexual tension between two cis femmes.

So Gentleman Jack is doing quite a bit in terms of historical representation for butches, for masculine-presenting and androgynous folks, in that its lead, and driving force, is a butch woman who wears a tophat, is a top in the bedroom, goes by Fred with many of her lovers, and sees no reason why she shouldn’t do literally everything that men do, since she can do it better.

But Gentleman Jack also brings to life a story about someone who, due to the voracity of her self-documentation, can be represented with a degree of accuracy and responsibility that is extremely unusual for a historical queer, someone whose private and public life historians and the show’s creators are quite certain of and agreed upon. Anne Lister was absolutely remarkable, a force of nature — but it is vital that we remember she was not alone, nor singular, nor “the first” in any sense of the word. And this is important: “The first modern lesbian” is good branding for HBO, but to repeat it without consideration for Lister’s own queer foreparents and contemporaries is to forget of our community’s extraordinary history — and capacity for survival.

* * *

Jeanna Kadlec is a freelance writer living in New York City. Her work has appeared in O the Oprah Magazine, Nylon, Allure, Literary Hub, Electric Literature, and more.

Editor: Sari Botton

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Sara Fredman | Longreads | May 2019 | 9 minutes (2,555 words)

What makes an antihero show work? In this Longreads series, It’s Not Easy Being Mean, Sara Fredman explores the fine-tuning that goes into writing a bad guy we can root for, and asks whether the same rules apply to women.

I didn’t want to write about Game of Thrones. Truly, I didn’t. In the first place, it is an ensemble show and therefore not technically an antihero vehicle. It is also generally the realm of the hot take and this series is usually a place for tepid, if not downright frigid, takes. It is Winterfell, not Dorne. But here we are in Dorne, talking about Game of Thrones, though probably a week or so after it would have been maximally festive. So maybe it’s more accurate to say that we’re in King’s Landing, which is perfect because we’re here to talk about how, on any other show, Cersei Lannister could have been the female antihero we’ve all been waiting for.

Cersei is the closest female analogue to the Golden Age antiheroes who turned the genre into a phenomenon. Those men — Tony Soprano, Don Draper, Walter White — all do terrible things for a host of reasons: because they want to, because power feels good, because they’re doing what they need to do to survive in the world. Despite the fact that these men do terrible things, we root for them because of a careful calibration of their characters and the environment in which they operate. They are marked as special, or especially skilled; they are humanized by their difficult pasts and their dedication to their children; and, finally, they are surrounded by other, more terrible people. Cersei has, at one point or another in the show’s eight-season run, fallen into all of these categories. She is smart and cunning. I recently rewatched a scene I had forgotten, early in the first season in which she pokes holes in the plan her dumb and petulant son Joffrey comes up with to gain control of the North. The scene shows us that she understands the stakes of the titular game and how to play it successfully: “A good king knows when to save his strength and when to destroy his enemies.” The audience knows that Joffrey can never be that king and, despite Cersei’s keen grasp of her political landscape, neither can she. She may be depicted as a villain throughout most of the series but she is also clearly a talent born into the wrong body, and she knows it. As she says to King Robert Baratheon: “I should wear the armor and you the gown.”

This brings us to our next antihero criterion, which is the humanizing influence of interiority and family. It is axiomatic among the show’s characters and creators that Cersei’s most humanizing characteristic is the love and dedication she shows her children. In their final scene together, her brother Tyrion begs her to surrender with the only card he believes will matter: “You’ve always loved your children more than yourself. More than Jaime. More than anything. I beg you if not for yourself then for your child. Your reign is over, but that doesn’t mean your life has to end. It doesn’t mean your baby has to die.” In showrunner David Benioff’s view, Cersei’s children were the only thing that could humanize her: “I think the idea of Cersei without her children is a pretty terrifying prospect because it was the one thing that really humanized her, you know — her love for her kids. As much of a monster as she could sometimes be, she was a mother who truly did love her children.”

It is of course true that Cersei loves her children, but it is hard to square Tyrion’s description of his sister with the Cersei of season two’s “Blackwater” who was prepared to kill herself and Tommen, her youngest son, rather than be taken alive by Stannis Baratheon and his army. Tyrion thinks that Cersei loves her children like a June Cleaver when she actually loves them like a Walter White. For the antihero, love of family is about self-advancement, not self-sacrifice. Invoking his children will not dissuade him from doing bad things because their existence is the very thing that motivates him to do them. This is why Walter White can yell “WE’RE A FAMILY” right before he takes his infant daughter away from her mother.

David Benioff’s assertion that Cersei’s love of her children is the only thing that humanizes her is possibly the best example of the way in which the Game of Thrones writers misunderstood their characters and their audience. It overlooks the other reasons the show gave us to root for Cersei and betrays an ignorance of the extent to which enduring patriarchy might itself be, for at least a portion of its audience, humanizing. It reveals an inability to grasp the possibility that the mother and the monster can be the same person. For a show dedicated to demonstrating just how thin the line is between good and evil, Game of Thrones was surprisingly blind to Cersei’s potential to become a compelling antihero, to be humanized by something other than her children. Or maybe the show realized it all too well.

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Seasons five and six in particular could have been a — forgive me — game changer for the audience’s relationship with Cersei. Their storyline has Cersei first trying to manipulate and then fighting off a band of homophobic and misogynist religious ascetics called the Sparrows. Initially, the audience appreciates the way the High Sparrow thwarts Cersei’s attempts to use religion to strengthen her own political position. She’s been a villain for four seasons and we relish seeing her hit a roadblock. But the High Sparrow and his sidekick Septa Unella take it too far and our allegiances begin to shift. Septa Unella tortures Cersei in prison and the High Sparrow declares that Cersei must take a walk of penance through the streets of King’s Landing. Her hair is shorn and she walks naked from the Sept of Baelor to the Red Keep as Septa Unella chants “shame” and rings a bell to draw onlookers. In that sequence, we don’t forget that Cersei’s done terrible things, but we feel sympathy for her because she is, in that moment, at the mercy of other, more sinister forces. We also feel sympathy for her because this showdown with the High Sparrow reminds us that her story is that of a woman living under patriarchy, that her autonomy has always been contingent and therefore largely an illusion. We remember that this is not the first time Cersei has been powerless, that in the first season we saw her husband hit her and then tell her to wear her bruise in silence or he would hit her again. We remember the way her father, Tywin Lannister, spoke to her (“Do you think you’ll be the first person dragged into the Sept to be married against her will?”), and we also remember that she was raped by the one man she loved next to the body of her murdered son.

In most of the ways that matter, Cersei’s relationship with Sansa Stark, betrothed to marry Cersei’s abusive son Joffrey, is evidence of her villainy but it is also a frank education in what becoming a wife and mother means under patriarchy. Looking back on some of their scenes together, one gets the sense that Cersei feels compelled to explain to Sansa what she’s in for, to disabuse her of any notions of happily ever after and replace them with the reality of life as a political pawn, a prisoner in expensive dresses. We see this as coldhearted and evil because we hold out hope that Sansa will be able to remain an innocent princess looking for true love, but that’s not an option for girls like her, and Cersei knows it. In a heart-to-heart after Sansa gets her period for the first time, Cersei assures her that while she will never love the king, she will love her children. Sansa has just become a woman, which makes her eligible to be a wife and mother. Cersei knows that this is an occasion for a political lesson rather than a domestic one: “Permit me to share some womanly wisdom with you on this very special day. The more people you love, the weaker you are. You do things for them that you know you shouldn’t do, you’ll act the fool to make them happy, to keep them safe. Love no one but your children. On that front, a mother has no choice.” When we hear it from her own mouth, Cersei’s love for her children sounds less like deliberate self-sacrifice than yet another matter in which she has no choice.

It’s probably worthwhile to remember that the “game” we have spent eight years watching is only being played in the first place because Robert Baratheon assumed that a woman who left him had to have been taken (“I only know she was the one thing I ever wanted and someone took her away from me”). Women are things to be taken and traded; they are the tools men use to cement alliances and consolidate power. Freedom of movement and freedom of self-determination are precious commodities to which only some people in Westeros have access, either by birth or cunning. None of those people are women. Cersei is hardly the only victim of patriarchy on the show, but she could have been its most symbolic. More than anything, Cersei wants to control her own body and her own destiny. She wants to be a player, rather than a pawn. When Ned Stark confronts her about her relationship with Jaime and the illegitimacy of their children, he warns, “Wherever you go, Robert’s wrath will follow you.” Cersei replies, “And what of my wrath, Lord Stark?” This question is, of course, rhetorical — everyone knows that a woman’s anger only earns 78 cents on the dollar. We side with Ned, but on another show, Cersei’s question could have been a rallying cry. We might have written it on signs taken to #resistance rallies and anti-abortion protests. Neither Cersei nor Robert has been faithful, but Robert’s anger matters more because he is the king and Cersei’s infidelity matters more because her body is for making him a bloodline.

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The Sept of Baelor pyrotechnics in the season six finale could have easily been Cersei’s “Face Off” moment: a shocking triumph over her enemies showcasing her intelligence and tactical skill. The move was not only brilliantly efficient, killing off everyone who opposed her at once without leaving home, but also bursting with symbolism. She destroys the religious cult that stripped her of what little bodily and political autonomy she had and blows up the place where she married Robert and was raped by Jaime. Cersei watches from her window as the architectural incarnation of patriarchy goes up in green flames and then takes a sip of wine.

That masterfully shot suspenseful sequence is immediately followed by Cersei’s vengeful speech to her torturer, Septa Unella, before leaving her in the hands of Gregor Clegane:

“Confess, it felt good, beating me, starving me, frightening me, humiliating me. You didn’t do it because you cared about my atonement, you did it because it felt good. I understand. I do things because they feel good. I drink because it feels good. I killed my husband because it felt good to be rid of him. I fucked my brother, because it feels good to feel him inside of me. I lie about fucking my brother, because it feels good to keep our son safe from hateful hypocrites. I killed your High Sparrow, and all his little sparrows, all his septons and all his septas, all his filthy soldiers because it felt good to watch them burn. It felt good to imagine their shock and their pain. No thought has ever given me greater joy. Even confessing feels good under the right circumstances.”

Cersei is hardly the only victim of patriarchy on the show, but she could have been its most symbolic.

This is Cersei’s “I am the one who knocks” speech, the moment where the antihero lays bare her unsavory machinations, and we applaud because a formerly weak person now has some hard-won power. Walter White takes some time to understand that if he is to have any power, he must take it. Cersei has always understood that power is her only available means toward self-determination, a ballast against the whims and wishes of those who would try to use her to further their own storylines and try to capture a bigger piece of the Westeros pie. Power is, for her, a necessity rather than a perk. Thinking about Cersei as an antihero, however brief the time we spend cheering her on, makes clear the extent to which writing a successful antihero always involves portraying that character as but a small player in a much bigger game. This is Walter White up against Big Pharma, which cut him out of profits to which he feels entitled and is now forcing him to forfeit his family’s financial security to stay alive. It is Tony Soprano chafing against RICO and the possibility that anyone in his orbit could help the FBI lock him up. It is Don Draper trying to hold on to a life he was never supposed to have. And it is Philip and Elizabeth Jennings doing the job they were trained to do, while people we never see change the rules and determine its stakes. An antihero isn’t on top of the world but right there in the melee, jockeying for some small measure of self-determination. We realize, as they do, that no matter how much power or control they seem to have, they are only one step away from being literally or metaphorically paraded through the streets naked while someone rings a bell.

Cersei is the closest we’ve come to a female version of this kind of character. David Benioff is right: Cersei is a monster. But the thing about an antihero show is that it can turn any monster into a hero. It compels us to root for a monster by making us see the monstrosity lurking all around him and, in so doing, turns him into our monster. Monstrosity in Westeros is like wildfire under King’s Landing: There is more than enough of it to make Cersei a queen we root for while she sips her celebratory wine. Allowing Cersei to become a full-on antihero could have been incredible, giving the show an opportunity to explore the particular powerlessness of women under patriarchy. What difference does motherhood make? What particular vulnerabilities does it bestow, what kinds of unexpected powers or motivations? But this is the fantasy world we have, not the one we need, and Game of Thrones could never allow Cersei to fully become the antihero character they had temporarily conjured. Three weeks ago — on Mother’s Day no less — we saw her crushed by a building, dying in the arms of her rapist after begging him not to let her die. As bad as Game of Thrones was at writing women, it gave us one possible roadmap for creating a female antihero on par with the bad men we’ve seen win Emmys over the past two decades. But it also makes clear just how tough that road is to travel because it requires that we expand our idea of what kinds of people are allowed to do bad things in pursuit of their own self-determination, to become the one who knocks.

Next, we’ll dive into half-hour television for our first solo female antihero — single mom Sam Fox of Better Things — because there’s no audience more adept at pointing out a woman’s flaws than her children.

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Previous installments in this series:
The Blaming of the Shrew
The Good Bad Wives of Ozark and House of Cards
Mother/Russia

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Sara Fredman is a writer and editor living in St. Louis. Her work has been featured in Longreads, The Rumpus, Tablet, and Lilith.

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Illustrator: Zoë van Dijk

The first sex scene ever filmed was not a sex scene at all. It was a kiss. And there was way less kissing than talking. May Irwins’ make out session with John Rice, a recreation of the smooch from the Broadway musical The Widow Jones, took all of one second. Filmed in 1896 at Thomas Edison’s Black Maria Studio, the soundless footage — titled, simply, The Kiss — opens with Irwin deep in conversation with Rice. While it is impossible to tell what they are saying, the two actors appear to be discussing logistics. Thirteen seconds in they seem in agreement. Both pull back, Rice dramatically smooths out his moustache and, while Irwin is still talking, he cups her face and the two of them peck. Or, on his end, nibble. All in all, the actual moment their lips touch is almost nothing — 94 percent of the first sex scene was actually the discourse around it.

Were this to happen today, the actors would have had clearer direction. Last week Rolling Stone reported that HBO would be hiring intimacy coordinators for every show that called for it after “The Deuce” star Emily Meade, who plays a prostitute in the series, asked for help with her sex scenes. The network consulted Intimacy Directors International (IDI), a non-profit established in 2016 that represents theatre, tv and film directors and choreographers specializing in the carnal. “The Intimacy Director takes responsibility for the emotional safety of the actors and anyone else in the rehearsal hall while they are present,” their site explains, alongside a standard set of guidelines called The Pillars: context (understanding the story), communication, consent, choreography and closure (signaling the end of the scene).

The Pillars are similar to the Sex Scenes on Set guidelines endorsed by Women in Film and Television U.K., which were published in February. This was around the time the British actors’ union Equity announced that it was considering introducing standard intimacy practices. At the BAFTAs that month, actor and director Andy Serkis characterized the move as “censorship of creativity.” To that, guidelines creator Ita O’Brien uses the analogy of asking your actors to engage in a sword fight without preparation. I laugh at the prospect. “Exactly, you just laugh,” she says, “because you know how ridiculous that is and yet that’s what they’re asking people to do with sex scenes.” Where fights may inflict physical injury, however, intimacy is more likely to trigger emotional trauma, which is less quantifiable and thus less considered. It also tends to predominantly affect women.

Four years ago, The Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media reported that female characters on film were twice as likely to appear in “sexually revealing attire” and to be partially or fully nude. And even when the appearances are equivalent, the response is not. When Margo Stilley and Kieran O’Brien had unsimulated sex in Michael Winterbottom’s 9 Songs in 2004, it was Stilley who was deemed the bad role model. Since fucking went mainstream on screen, women have largely been the ones getting fucked over. In 1972, Bernardo Bertolucci had stars Marlon Brando, 48, and Maria Schneider, 19, engaging in violent simulated intercourse (the orgasm as “little death,” apparently) in Last Tango in Paris. Screening Sex author Linda Williams called the film, which was based on Bertolucci’s own sexual fantasies, a major event due to “the Americanization, through the body and voice of Brando, of a sexuality once associated with European sophistication.” It was a sexuality that sold out Schneider both on screen and off. Bertolucci admitted he conspired with Brando to introduce butter into the film’s infamous rape scene without telling the teenager. He said he “wanted her reaction as a girl, not as an actress.” And he got his wish. Schneider told The Daily Mail in 2007, “I felt humiliated and to be honest, I felt a little raped, both by Marlon and by Bertolucci.”

Television wasn’t as explicit in the ’70s, but that decade ejaculated the grossly named “jiggle TV” with shows like “Charlie’s Angels” in which, presumably, no one was wearing a bra. This developed into no one wearing pants in “NYPD Blue,” which was famous for its booty shots. But it took cable’s ascent in the ’90s for TV to let it all hang out. With no FCC rules to regulate them, channels like HBO and Showtime went all the way. The sex talk in “Sex and the City” dripped into the soft core of “True Blood” and then into the real core of “Girls.” Currently, HBO’s “Game of Thrones,” the show that birthed “sexposition,” is winning the battle for most exploitative cable series. Last year, Sara David at Broadly counted every instance of rape and nudity on the show and noted season 3 particularly had “numerous women killed in highly sexualized or gendered ways,” not to mention a later rape that turns consensual (as if such a thing existed). Natalia Tena, one of the many actresses who has stripped down in the series, told The Independent in 2012, “I think it’s really unfair, every actor, any actress has had her tits out. Every single actress I know. Blokes it’s like, let’s see some dick.”

Actresses have since become more vocal about their sexualization at the office. Eryn Jean Norvill has been in court in Australia over allegations that co-star Geoffrey Rush touched her breast and called her “yummy” during a 2015 production of King Lear. “Mogulettes’” Sarah Scott filed a complaint in August alleging that her television co-star Kip Pardue put her hand on his penis during a scene in which she was only wearing underwear, before masturbating in front of her in his dressing room. And earlier this year Sarah Tither-Kaplan alleged that James Franco removed actresses’ protective plastic covering while simulating oral sex in a group scene for his film The Long Home.

But it’s not just the actors who have been accused of mishandling intimacy on set. In 2013, Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos were awarded the Palme D’Or along with their director Abdellatif Kechiche for Blue Is the Warmest Colour, a film about the lifespan of a passionate lesbian relationship. Several months later, the actresses spoke out against Kechiche’s alleged abusive behavior on set including an unchoreographed 7-minute quasi-pornographic scene for which he did take after take after take of sucking, licking, slapping and scissoring. “Of course, it was kind of humiliating sometimes, I was feeling like a prostitute,” Seydoux told The Independent. She said she would never work with Kechiche again, while the director, who was recently accused by an unnamed actress of sexual assault, called the complaints “indecent.”

This is the type of situation that an intimacy director could have prevented. Tonia Sina, co-founder of Intimacy Directors International with Alicia Rodis (who works on “The Deuce”) and Siobhan Richardson, started choreographing sex scenes for theatre as a graduate student back in the early 2000s. In 2006 she wrote her thesis on staging intimacy and in 2014 published a seminal article for Fight Master magazine called “Safe Sex: A Look at the Intimacy Choreographer.” All three of the IDI founders have a background in fight choreography and while it could be considered counterintuitive for movement that is associated with connection to grow out of movement that is associated with disconnection, both disciplines require coordinating action and have the potential for injury.

U.K. intimacy expert Ita O’Brien also learned early on to model the planning of intimacy on stage combat. After realizing there were no guidelines in the U.K. while working on a play about abuse, she started developing her own four years ago. O’Brien consulted with Jennifer Ward-Lealand, the president of Equity New Zealand, which published perhaps the first official sex scene guidelines in 2015, following a panel discussion with about 80 actors and directors. “We had been hearing from a number of performers that they had experienced feeling unsafe and unsure on set or in rehearsals,” she says via email. “We believe that the more actors are educated (and thus have a sense of agency) then the less opportunity there is for exploitation or coercion.”

It is something of a happy ending (try not to) that the women who have faced exploitation for so long are now the ones providing a corrective. “If you haven’t experienced that vulnerability, it’s not even in your thoughts,” explains O’Brien, adding, “people are embarrassed and don’t know how to deal with it and so avoid it.” She has worked for Netflix, Amazon and HBO and says that the time constraints with film and television and the unclear rehearsal process make planning sex scenes harder than in theater, where there is more room for exploration. But some general rules apply at all times: having gender balance on set when a woman is performing, training actors to speak up when they feel uncomfortable — “I say your no is a gift, because then your fellow actor and the director can trust your yes,” explains O’Brien — and the capacity to stop if it all gets too intense. This goes for actresses performing assault, for instance, but also for embarrassed actors who have become inadvertently aroused — Henry Cavill, Ewan McGregor and James McAvoy have all copped to this. “It’s making it normal,” says O’Brien. “It is normal.”

Though #MeToo has been credited for Hollywood’s newfound awareness of intimacy choreography, it was President Trump’s election and sexual assault allegations that sent the discipline mainstream. “It made people more aware that they maybe in the past have overstepped some lines, and that they need re-examine the way they’re approaching their work,” Tonia Sina told The Huffington Post. Last spring, New York’s Tisch School of the Arts even introduced a Sex on Stage class. Which is not to say there are no models outside school or expert opinion. The year Chilean director Sebastián Lelio became the first Oscar winner of a trans storyline with a trans star (A Fantastic Woman), he also directed Rachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams in Disobedience. The 2017 film follows a woman (Weisz) who returns to her Orthodox Jewish community, where she engages with her childhood crush (McAdams) in one of the more lip-gnawingly scrutinized sex scenes in recent memory — all you need to know is lychee-flavored “spit” acts as surrogate ejaculate — despite the two actresses remaining clothed.

There were no details in the script, but Lelio spoke to his actresses two weeks before the shoot. He had consulted some lesbian friends and every gesture had been storyboarded. He explained why the scene had to be so long (6 minutes) and the reason for its specificity (force). On the day only a handful of people were present on set. Lelio stayed focused on his actress’ faces, making that the center of pleasure rather than their bodies. He later cut out Weisz’s character’s orgasm because it wasn’t needed. In short, he did everything right and in the end where Serkis warned of restriction came release instead. As Weisz explained to ScreenCrush, “I guess we felt safe because we knew what was required of us. We had to hit these points, and then we could abandon ourselves to doing our jobs, which was to feel. It was very vulnerable, very emotional. I’ve never done a sex scene that’s that full of emotion and longing and needing and release and desire. It was the culmination of many, many years of waiting.”

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Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.