If my visit to the “Superstore” set can be taken as representative, being closely involved with the production of popular TV commercials for large national brands is the best possible outcome for a human life. The scale and complexity of the operation at the center of Courtney’s work is eye-popping. Every fleeting football-game-interrupting Progressive ad is the product of hours of labor from more than a hundred people. On set, a cat wrangler stood just out of frame, ready to pounce with a backup cat if the primary cat failed. Trays of lickerish delights — crostini with prosciutto, cups of ethereal parfait — were discreetly proffered, at frequent intervals, to people scrutinizing monitors. Every lens, light and politely anxious face was turned heliotropically toward Courtney, in a rented living room, trying to remember, while delivering her line, that Progressive was offering deals “for new parents” rather than “to new parents” — a possibly meaningful distinction. This wasn’t a critically acclaimed Hulu series; there was actually a lot riding on this. It needed to be the same, but slightly different, and every bit as successful as the 200 that had come before it, so that everyone would be asked to return to this job — not necessarily, perhaps not exactly, the job of their dreams, but a better job than anyone could ever hope for, bolstered by friendly faces and fantastic catering and a sumptuous corporate budget — in perpetuity.

Back when I was feeling lost in Los Angeles with Bourdain as my guide, that’s exactly what I did. I moved. I explored my new city with an open mind and an appetite. I familiarized myself with its limited and underutilized public transit system, traveling every direction off the metro line that city bus routes would allow. As I trekked farther and farther away from home, each stop introduced me to a new corner of the city, from the untamed stretches of the Los Angeles river to the thriving ramen shops off Sawtelle Boulevard.

When I traveled through Morocco, I never felt as if I were that unwelcome or disruptive presence that seems foundational to influencer culture, but I know that, if I ever go back, there are other things I would do to more deeply engage with the people I meet. At the very least, I would be less concerned with developing my own narrative and more concerned with understanding the narratives of those around me, and that’s largely thanks to the way Bourdain reoriented my attitude to the city I live in today.

What are finalists’ audition videos like? What traits do the producers look for? (Spoiler: drive, self-awareness, and the ability to tell a good story.) Dalton Ross traces the journeys of five different players from the new season. Snippets of their audition videos are entertaining to watch, and Probst’s notes on people’s interviews are also fun to read.

The approximately 24 people who make it past all of that are eventually brought out to Los Angeles in February for the in-person meetings that constitute the last round of casting finals. “If a player is going to panic, this is the stage where it happens,” says Probst. “The pressure ratchets up when the room is full of producers and CBS executives. This too is by design. If you drop the ball at this stage, you probably won’t get on the show this season.” Once those in-person L.A. interviews are complete, the casts for the next two Survivor seasons are finally set.

It’s a long, arduous experience. But for Brandon Donlon, the casting journey started much, much earlier than all of that. Brandon still remembers watching Survivor for the first time during the Gabon season in September 2008. “It felt like this religious experience,” he explains. “It felt like I was watching some higher power who was like, ‘This is going to change your life. Whatever this thing is, you have to do it.'” He immediately sent in an application. Just one problem: Brandon was 11 years old.

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Seth Simons | Longreads | August 17, 2023 | 15 minutes (4,165 words)

When Hollywood studio executives refused to meet the reasonable demands of the writers who had made them richer than kings, they deprived the world of a historic spectacle: Pete Davidson’s return to the show that transformed him from a human being into a celebrity. The comedian was set to host Saturday Night Live on May 6, a booking timed to promote his semi-autobiographical TV series Bupkis, not to be confused with his semi-autobiographical film The King of Staten Island (itself not to be confused with Staten Island Summer, the semi-autobiographical film penned by fellow SNL star Colin Jost). Then again, maybe some confusion is appropriate. These works may not be particularly memorable or well-reviewed, but they represent a peculiar version of the American dream, one that very few people have realized and a great many have pursued. For those who attain it, an upper-class life awaits: fame, wealth, adoring fans, the freedom to make the art they wish to make, and to make it with their friends and peers, even if it’s not very good. All they have to do to earn this freedom is devote their lives to one strange and powerful man. 

I refer, of course, to SNL creator and executive producer Lorne Michaels, who receives a writing credit on every episode of the long-running variety series and waited until more than a month into the strike to comment on it publicly—in an interview at the Cannes Lions advertising festival. Perhaps he was unaccustomed to encountering the outer limits of his power. The strike achieved something not even COVID-19 could do three years earlier, when Michaels continued producing the show with a live, unvaccinated studio audience, in seeming defiance of New York guidelines. It’s a testament to SNL’s astonishing cultural influence that he was able to game a state government’s health policy during the height of a pandemic. And it’s a testament to the power of Hollywood’s writers—and to the dire conditions they work under—that this time, the show did not go on. 

Michaels is intimately acquainted with this power, having spent the last half-century using SNL to launch bankable talents and profit from their careers. Bupkis isn’t just a Pete Davidson vehicle; it’s a Lorne Michaels production. So is Staten Island Summer, for that matter, and Shrill, The Tonight Show, Schmigadoon!, and That Damn Michael Che—not to mention the recently departed The Other Two and Kenan. The promise of SNL under Michaels’ leadership is simple: If you are loyal to the family, you will reap handsome rewards. Over almost 50 years, that promise has come to justify a legacy of alleged workplace abuses ranging from the familiar to the shocking. Beyond 30 Rock’s walls, it has become the promise of the massive live comedy ecosystem feeding SNL, an amorphous network of small businesses that successfully encoded their exploitative labor practices and regressive cultural norms into the industry’s DNA. As they churned ruthlessly through generations of comedy workers, they helped create the world we’re in now, the one Hollywood writers and actors are striking to change. It’s a world where talent and hard work aren’t nearly enough to earn a stable living; a world where a few fabulously wealthy men hold the power to shape entire art forms in their image. 

It’s a world where one of them already has. 

The critical discourse surrounding TV’s longest-running variety series traditionally revolves around a boring question: is it funny? That’s not why we’re here. As a comedy lover and critic, I’ve come to believe that whether a work contains the mystical quality of funniness—the power to reach inside your body and give you sudden, uncontrollable pleasure—is usually the most obvious and therefore least interesting thing about it. More interesting to consider is what the thing says, and whether what it says is true. More interesting still is what it costs, and whether this cost is worthwhile. 

In the age of mass media, the journey a joke takes from creator to audience is fraught with risk. It touches many people along the way, some in more vulnerable positions than others. Even the end of the journey is not really the end. Like all forms of communication, comedy has the power to influence people’s beliefs and behaviors, not least their behavior as comedy consumers. This gives it the power to earn significant capital for its creators—financial, social, cultural, even political—which they can use to enact their own desires. 

This is what interests me about SNL. For almost its entire existence, its workers have been very clear about its costs. From interns to stars, they’ve described the show as an intensely discriminatory workplace run by a cold, manipulative boss. As they’ve told us this, SNL has grown into one of the most important institutions in American culture. For the last five decades, it has served as a chokepoint in the Hollywood talent pipeline, plucking writers and performers from a precarious live comedy ecosystem and giving them the capital they need to play in the big leagues. Which they have. It would not be exaggerating to say their work has defined comedy practically since SNL premiered. Animal House, Beverly Hills Cop, Three Amigos, Wayne’s World, Ghostbusters, Austin Powers, Mean Girls, Mr. Show, 3rd Rock from the Sun, That ’70s Show, The Office, 30 Rock, Parks and Recreation, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Portlandia, Detroiters, the careers of Eddie Murphy, Chris Rock, Phil Hartman, Adam Sandler, Will Ferrell, Norm Macdonald, Molly Shannon, Conan O’Brien, Jimmy Fallon, Tina Fey, Seth Meyers, Amy Poehler, John Mulaney, Bill Hader—SNL’s contributions to the form are astounding. Not since the Hollywood studio system has one institution created so many careers.

With this in mind, I would like to discuss Lorne Michaels’ management style. 

A few things to remember. One: SNL operates in the image of its executive producer. He created it, he produces every episode, he selects every cast member and every host and every sketch, and he takes pride in knowing everything that goes on in his office. (“It’s not like me to not be aware of things,” he told Alison Castle in Saturday Night Live: The Book.) When he left in 1980, the show struggled so much that NBC brought him back five years later. He’s been there ever since, with relatively little interference from network brass. “It’s Lorne’s show,” NBCUniversal’s TV and streaming operations chairman Mark Lazarus told Variety recently. “He’s calling the shots.”

Two: If late night is big business, SNL appears to be the biggest business in late night. Its budget for Season 45, in 2018-2019, was at least $101 million, or about $4.8 million per episode. (The next season, the most recent for which this data is available, cost $91 million, likely due to several “at-home” episodes during the early pandemic lowering production costs.) In the 2021-2022 season, the average 30-second ad spot during the show’s broadcast cost $164,000. Multiply by 21 episodes with 26 minutes of commercials and you’ve got over $179 million in revenue from linear advertising alone. That Variety report offers useful context: in 2022, the seven major late night shows—SNL, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Late Night with Seth Meyers, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, The Daily Show, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and The Late Late Show with James Corden—made a combined $412.7 million from TV ads.

Three: Almost everything that you are about to read has been a matter of public record for years, if not decades.

As original cast member Dan Aykroyd and current cast member Colin Jost have said, SNL is a young person’s game. The show hires talented early-career artists and asks them to give it everything; all-nighters and 90-hour weeks aren’t out of the ordinary. The pressures are high, as are the potential rewards: An SNL credit is a golden ticket not only for relatively well-paid writers and performers, but also for interns, assistants, and other production staffers, whose jobs are even more precarious than their colleagues above the line. No matter where they appear in the credits, however, SNL is a workplace where everyone ends up feeling expendable. That’s because the job is ultimately much more than making comedy. It’s navigating what former cast member Harry Shearer once called “a highly complex, highly political hierarchical organization masquerading as a college dorm.” At the top of that hierarchy is SNL’s soft-spoken, 78-year-old executive producer.

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What do we know about how Michaels runs things? Quite a bit. Described in James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales’ oral history Live From New York as both “a psychological terrorist” and “Daddy,” Michaels has cultivated a paternal relationship with his employees since the show’s earliest days. To be clear, paternal does not mean warm. By an astonishing number of accounts, his modus operandi is to remain distant and cold (to use Bob Odenkirk’s words in that book) toward the people under him, meticulously withholding praise to the point that they’ll do whatever it takes to earn his approval. He establishes this dynamic at the beginning of a relationship—refusing to laugh during auditions, making prospective hires wait for hours before he meets with them—and maintains it even with tenured company men. “Lorne wants people to feel insecure,” a former star told New York’s Chris Smith in 1995. “It’s the same techniques cults use—they keep you up for hours, they never let you know that you’re okay, and they always make you think that your spot could be taken at any moment by someone else.”

“He rules on the theory of a house divided is a house that’s more easily controlled,” Janeane Garofalo once said, echoing others who observed that Michaels is more apt to reward difficult or childish people than loyal foot soldiers. At the same time, he diligently extracts loyalty through bizarre tests and unspoken rules. According to New York, Michaels is known to punish cast members who displease him—for instance, by taking roles in movies he’s not producing—by nixing their sketches or assigning unfavorable time slots. When Bill Hader was cast, SNL flew him to New York on the same flight as a not-yet-hired Andy Samberg, from whom Hader was instructed to keep his own hiring a secret. After Colin Jost’s first season as “Weekend Update” anchor, he was invited to re-audition for the gig, learned from his manager that his audition was successful, then received a furious call from a producer who told him Michaels was angry that Jost had told his manager the news. (To recap: he hadn’t.) By that point, Jost was a nine-year SNL veteran and co-head writer. “Until you’re actually on the air,” he wrote in his memoir, “you have no idea if Lorne will change his mind and give it to someone else.”

It would be one thing if Michaels were simply a weird, old-fashioned guy who plays mind games with his employees. The problem is that SNL has an extensive history of much more hostile work conditions. “There was a certain pride taken in not treating people well,” one ’70s-era assistant said in Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad’s 1986 book, Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live. Or, as writer Fred Wolf recalled an unidentified woman from the original cast telling him in the ’90s: “That place is evil.”

Gender-based harassment has blossomed under Michaels’ leadership since year one, when John Belushi refused to perform in sketches written by women and intentionally sabotaged them during read-throughs. The boys’ club atmosphere persisted through the ‘90s, when Chris Farley’s handsiness with women was so frequent that longtime producers Mike Shoemaker and Jim Downey pranked him with a fake sexual harassment lawsuit (while brushing aside the extra who lodged a real complaint against him). Last year, former production staffers told Insider about the demeaning sexual jokes and unwanted advances they dealt with in the early 2000s, an era when “male members of the cast and staff would hook up with female college-age interns at post-show parties.” Former cast member Jerry Minor recalled feeling “disturbed” by the presence of “obviously teenage girls” at these events. This was the same era, according to a lawsuit settled last year, when Horatio Sanz groomed and abused a teenage fan whom he brought to SNL cast parties—including one where Jimmy Fallon introduced her to Michaels himself, and another one where Sanz assaulted her as fellow cast members looked on. “If you want to metoo me you have every right,” Sanz allegedly texted her in 2019, insisting he would “swear on a stack of improv books … I’m a different person.” (His attorney denied the allegations, while NBC argued in court filings that it was not liable for actions that allegedly took place off its premises.) 

Just as SNL’s maleness empowered its men to mistreat their female colleagues, the show’s whiteness made it an environment where, to name just a few examples: Black actors were given few and stereotypical characters by white writers; Michaels was unlikely to place two sketches about Black characters in succession; performers wore blackface well into the early 2000s, with Michaels defending the practice in 2008; and future The White Lotus and Insecure star Natasha Rothwell resorted to raising her hand in order to pitch jokes in the writers’ room less than a decade ago. The show’s poor record is difficult to divorce from its leadership: if SNL was ever a show by white men, for white men, it was because Michaels didn’t care to make it anything else.

One incident illuminates this clearly. In 2013, cast members Kenan Thompson and Jay Pharoah made headlines when they criticized SNL’s longstanding failures to hire Black women. Asked about this controversy in Live From New York, Michaels and his deputies magnanimously forgave Thompson and Pharoah for being so careless as to get suckered by the press. (Pharoah later said he was nearly fired for his remarks.) Blithely noting that SNL is not taxpayer-funded, Michaels added that he’d seen “fifty or sixty” Black women audition over the years—one or two per season—but “we’re about finding people who are funny.” 

It’s an interesting thing about people in his position: They rarely seem to consider that their senses of humor might be informed by their identities: their race, for instance, or gender, age, class, or whether they’ve spent 40 years making a sketch comedy show for NBC. Nor do they seem interested in the systemic effects of the systems they run. In that same section of Live From New York, former producer Lindsay Shookus complained that even after “the flap about ethnic casting,” as Michaels called it, barely any talent representatives submitted Black women to the show. Longtime writer Paula Pell blamed the pipeline. “There were many times with auditions, you know, that we weren’t getting as many diverse people that we needed to,” she said, echoing her remarks on SNL’s failure to hire women and gay people: “A lot of times, people auditioning for SNL came from that sea of improvisational comedians—Second City and Groundlings and UCB—and oftentimes that community of people was not quite as diverse as you would wish.”

Well, yes. It was designed that way.

I am going to say something crazy: talent is not rare. Talent is plentiful. I can go to any comedy theater or club or DIY show in New York tonight and see professional-grade work by some of the funniest people I’ll ever see. Many of these comedians would kill to work at SNL, even knowing everything we know about it. I can’t blame them. SNL is a great job. It’s one of the few places you can make comedy for a large audience and make a livable income. This has always been true, but lately it matters more. It’s a network show with a massive writers’ room in an industry where rooms are shrinking; it has long seasons in a medium where they’re getting shorter; it trains writers in every aspect of TV production, a norm that’s increasingly falling out of practice; and for those who play the game well, it ensures high-paying work for life. (Colin Jost has commanded a fee of $70,000 per hour for recent college standup gigs.)

It’s also virtually the only place you can livably make sketch comedy, a rich art form that mostly exists in free web videos, family-friendly late-night talk shows (two of which are produced by Michaels), comedy theaters like the Upright Citizens Brigade (which only started paying talent last year, after decades of selling tickets to performances by comics who had themselves paid to train at UCB) and Second City (which, to its credit, has paid as far back as the 1960s), and inevitably short-lived cable or streaming series (no disrespect). If you’re a young comedian looking to make short-form work that people watch, you’d best do everything you can to work for Lorne Michaels.

And there’s the rub. Talent abounds because it occurs naturally. What’s rare are opportunities to develop talent. These are kept artificially scarce by a live comedy ecosystem that profits off comedians while telling them their work is worthless. Its low wages, pay-to-play business models, and conservative social politics act as a filter, ensuring that few are able to gain access to gatekeepers and build competitive levels of craftsmanship. (Because the industry is located in cities with high costs of living, certain demographics tend to reach these levels more easily: perhaps there is an inverse correlation between rent prices and SNL’s quality.) The survivors are then offered up to Lorne Michaels, who every year gets his pick of the country’s finest early-career comedians—remember, SNL by design hires the young and hungry—and decides which ones get the grand prize of financial stability, even entrance into the upper class. If they play their cards right, he’ll produce their post-SNL projects through his company Broadway Video, giving himself sustained influence over their careers and a respectable share of their successes. (This is not an arrangement you typically see between TV producers and the talent they discover.) 

These people become proof of the system’s value to all comedians, when really it’s directly opposed to their interests. Forget the lucky ones, the stars we’re not inclined to weep for. When we zoom out and view comedy workers as a class, we see that this system functions parasitically: it sucks them dry and discards them in its quest for the ones it can turn into Amazon shills (like Colin Jost) or political satirists happy to pal around with politicians (like Dana Carvey, Jimmy Fallon, and Colin Jost). As for those few? Well, good for them, but do let me know if you ever hear an SNL alum say a single word about the Horatio Sanz case. 

It’s true that there are other ways to make a living in comedy. SNL is not the end-all. It matters because it’s a uniquely powerful machine that has shaped the art form in America for almost half a century. To be specific, it has shaped the art form according to the whims of its central creative force, a “starfucker of the highest order” (per writer Tom Davis) who “wants everybody to love him” (Chris Elliott) and gets his way through tactics that his lieutenants are apparently free to emulate. This is a man who, according to Billie Eilish in 2021, ran the show while sick with COVID-19; who personally rebuked Cecily Strong for replying to sexist comments she received on Twitter; who allegedly pressured Chris Kattan to save a film project by sleeping with the director; who allegedly sat idly by while his employees brought underage girls to cast parties; who gave Donald Trump a hosting gig in 2015 and told his writers to go easy on the candidate; who only begrudgingly prioritized the hiring of Black women in 2014 after public controversy; who in 2020 referred to the George Floyd protests as “the beginnings of the Black Lives Matter;” and who, in spite of it all, remains one of Hollywood’s most revered icons, still in charge of the same show where all this shit happened, the beloved touchstone of American comedy he’s openly run like a cult for decades, his power and prestige unblemished. Immune. 

Very rarely can we see an entire system reflected through one person. Lorne Michaels is such a person. Popular culture would look totally different without him. It’s tempting to imagine the same stars, with their same intrinsic talents, still rising to the top in his absence, but this presumes Hollywood operates by natural selection. Michaels is not a neutral arbiter; he is a specific man with specific tastes. Comedy is not a meritocracy; it is an anti-meritocracy that explicitly uses the promise of shows like SNL to justify its practice of systemically removing talent from the pool. 

This is what I mean when I talk about costs. Every year Michaels chose not to hire a person of color, or hired only one, is a year he could have given the world any number of artists on par with the ones he did hire, potentially changing the face of comedy as we know it today. If he couldn’t find any, that’s only because he sits atop a system designed to prevent them from reaching him. The same is true for subversive, form-bending comedians who always seem to be outside the white-bread norm at SNL, even as they make some of its most lauded work. Comedy is full of Sarah Shermans and Bowen Yangs, writers like Celeste Yim and Jack Handey. They’re out there right now, grinding themselves to the bone making weird, funny work for drink tickets or cab fare or nothing at all. SNL’s function—the system’s function—is to keep them there.

Then there are the other costs. If what we’ve heard is true, many people have been hurt by this show. They’ve been tormented and harassed, abused, degraded, made to believe in their own disposability, used up, and tossed aside. And for what—comedy skits? For the Blues Brothers, for Church Lady and Stefon? For David S. Pumpkins? For a hundred or so people to live like royalty? For one man to rule an empire?

This is the question that matters most about SNL, an institution best regarded not as a comedy series but as a machine that makes people famous. For decades, Michaels has masterfully optimized it for this purpose, consolidating vast swaths of cultural production in a relatively small group of people he personally anointed. This is an astonishing achievement and a horrifying one. Whatever you may think of individual celebrities—I certainly admire a few—the phenomenon of celebrity is a grave social ill. To be a star is to lose something essential of yourself, to become divorced and insulated from the world as most people live it; to commit to a life of moral compromise and complicity in fundamentally destructive systems. 

Perhaps these trade-offs are worthwhile for some who make them, but there is no denying they must be made, nor that they invite pressures the human body is not built to sustain. We can see their effects clearly in Pete Davidson’s struggles on the national stage; in the deaths of John Belushi and Chris Farley; in Jimmy Fallon’s eyes every night on The Tonight Show; in the silence of liberal icons like Tina Fey and Seth Meyers about their erstwhile colleague Horatio Sanz; in the rightward trajectories of stars across Hollywood—not only SNL alumni like Rob Schneider and Jim Breuer, but world-famous talents like Dave Chappelle and Joe Rogan. All of these people have the same affliction, and that affliction is celebrity.

At the same time, the entertainment industry’s devaluation of creativity has collapsed its middle class, giving rise to a system in which celebrity is the clearest path to financial security within it. You have to commodify yourself to succeed in Hollywood. You have to become a brand. Comedians have known this reality for a long time, which is why SNL has never lost its sway over the art form and likely never will: it does the work for them. Few have explained this power more succinctly than recent SNL breakout James Austin Johnson in an episode of WTF with Marc Maron last year. When his wife learned he got the job, Johnson told Maron, she started sobbing. She was devastated to lose the life they’d built in Los Angeles, for themselves and the child they were expecting. “That’s what she was grieving,” he said. “She had hormonal nesting grief that her bird’s nest was destroyed.” So he reassured her. 

“I was like, ‘I know this is hard for us right now, but this is how I feed us for the rest of our marriage,’” he recalled. “‘Even if I flame out spectacularly, even if I fuck everything up for us, even if I become an absolute piece of shit, from now on it’ll say SNL in the corner of my poster, and some people will come to my show.’”

“Even if I ruin our lives, I’ll always be able to feed us,” the Trump impressionist told his wife. “Because that’s what SNL does.”

That’s what SNL does.

Seth Simons writes Humorism, a newsletter about labor, inequality, and extremism in comedy. You can contact him here.

Editor: Peter Rubin
Copy editor: Carolyn Wells
Fact checker: Julie Schwietert Collazo

Robinson understands a nasty little paradox about rules: The more you believe in them — the more conscientious you are — the more time you will spend agonizing, worrying, wondering if you are doing things right.

This obsession makes “I Think You Should Leave” the perfect comedy for our overheated cultural moment. The 21st-century United States is, infamously, a preschool classroom of public argumentation. Our one true national pastime has become litigating the rules, at high volume, in good or neutral or very bad faith. “Norms,” a concept previously confined to psychology textbooks, has become a front-page concern. Donald Trump’s whole political existence seems like some kind of performance-art stunt about rule-breaking. The panics over “cancel culture” and the “woke mob” — these are symptoms of a fragmented society wondering if, in a time of flux, it still meaningfully shares social rules. Every time we wander out into the public square, we risk ending up screaming, or screamed at, red-faced, in tears.

Selman sees the show as a “Groundhog Day–type reality, where at the beginning of every episode, they’ve forgotten everything that’s happened before.” That frees the writers from the burden of story continuity, allowing them to push the boundaries of what The Simpsons can do. No recent episode defines the current spirit like “Lisa the Boy Scout,” a mind-bending postmodern intervention into the series. In it, hackers interrupt the episode to play supposed deleted scenes that would “ruin” the audience’s conception of The Simpsons universe. There’s a clip in which Carl learns that his best friend, Lenny, was actually a figment of his imagination and another in which it is revealed that Martin, Bart’s nerdiest classmate, is actually a grizzled 36-year-old father of three with an aging disorder that leaves him looking 10.

The other blending that Succession manages to pull off is the mix between its characters’ hyper-articulate moments and the frequent moments when they’re at a loss for words. One minute Kendall is name-checking Zadie Smith, the next he’s “just here to say: ‘yo.’” One minute Shiv is smooth-talking strategy about the India numbers, the next she’s having this simple conversation, to devastating effect:

Shiv: Yeah, you are not the most important one.

Kendall: I don’t think I am.

Shiv: Yes, you do. You do. You do. You fucking do. You do.

It’s a kind of verbal version of the way stylish people can pull off high-low fashion mixes, like Kristen Stewart pairing Chanel with Vans, and it’s a duality that the Succession writers can understand: They may love language, but that doesn’t mean they can always command it on cue.

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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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In 1993, Harry Eisenberg, a writer turned producer during the first seven years of the Jeopardy! reboot, published a dishy account of his time at the program. Inside Jeopardy!: What Really Goes on at TV’s Top Quiz Show swiftly landed Eisenberg in hot water with his former employer, chiefly over his description of the show systematically altering game material to provide easier clues for female contestants — an act that would amount to a violation of fairness rules enshrined by the Federal Communications Commission in the wake of the 1950s quiz show scandals. Jeopardy! denied that the show did any such thing; a later edition of Eisenberg’s book dropped the claim.

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“Her response was, ‘Who were Leopold and Leeb?’” Eisenberg wrote. “Alex ruled her incorrect, at which point she immediately shot back, ‘Leeb is just the German pronunciation of Loeb.’ Rather than get into an argument with her right in the middle of the show, Alex went ahead and gave it to her.”