Profiles dig deep, assembling original details to convey the essence of a person or place—and sometimes both—as you’ll see. These are the stories that gave us keen insight into the lives of others, drawn from hundreds of editors’ picks selected in 2023.

Amor Eterno

Skip Hollandsworth | Texas Monthly | May 8, 2023 | 7,531 words

Before May 24, 2022, Kimberly Mata-Rubio, a part-time local reporter and mother of six children living in Uvalde, Texas, was shy and quiet. After that horrific day at Robb Elementary School, when two teachers and 19 children were murdered—including her daughter, Lexi—Mata-Rubio was forever changed. She was overwhelmed with grief, but also felt compelled to speak, to do anything she could to fight for justice for Lexi. Shortly after the shooting, she testified in a hearing about gun violence. She then started to speak at rallies, at home and in Washington DC. She became a fierce advocate for gun control, even meeting with Ted Cruz to push him to support an assault weapons ban. (Not a spoiler: he didn’t.) In those months that followed, she realized that she had a voice. (Recently, in fact, she ran for mayor of Uvalde, though she lost the bid last month in a special election.) I’ve sat down several times to write why I picked this story by Skip Hollandsworth, but have scrapped numerous attempts. They all read hollow and repetitive, because I’ve written versions of them before. My Best of 2022 pick in this category was also a Uvalde profile, about student Caitlyne Gonzales, so it seems that I can’t help but return to this town, to this tragedy. Perhaps immersing ourselves in the narrative of tragedy is a form of emotional retreat, a way of numbing the constant onslaught of violence in the world. Hollandsworth’s piece reminds us that these stories do not end when the spotlight of our attention moves on, but continue to transform communities, families, and individuals. This is an emotional, difficult, but necessary portrait of a grieving mother finding meaningful ways to honor her daughter’s life, and perhaps help birth a better world for all of us. —CLR

Ginni and Clarence: A Love Story

Kerry Howley | New York Magazine | June 21, 2023 | 7,555 words

For the second year in a row, my favorite profile was written by the inimitable Kerry Howley, one of the great chroniclers of America’s right-wing resurgence. Last year, I adored—and seethed over—her profile of anti-abortion activist Marjorie Dannenfelser; this year, Howley turned her attention to Clarence and Ginni Thomas. The former, of course, is the conservative Supreme Court justice confirmed to the bench despite being credibly accused of sexual harassment—laying the groundwork for the Brett Kavanaugh fiasco a quarter-century later—who more recently was exposed for accepting expensive gifts from various billionaires. Ginni, Thomas’s wife, started a political consulting firm with money provided by one of those billionaires, and used her influential perch inside the Beltway to support the January 6 insurrection. In this profile, Howley illuminates how the Thomases’ almost alchemical bond as a couple makes them such a potent, ruinous force in the American project. The insight here is as sharp as the prose. “There was something in Ginni and Clarence that reinforced and refined a shared extremism, something beyond their shared intolerance for ambiguity,” Howley writes. “There was an interlocking set of beliefs, a fatalism born of the lived experience of racism and the entire heavily manned edifice of white ignorance.” When I got to the end of this piece, I whispered under my breath, to no one in particular, damn. —SD

Lucinda Williams and the Idea of Louisiana

Wyatt Williams | The Bitter Southerner | September 4, 2023 | 6,303 words

The stories I love best are slow and savor-y, served with a love that can transcend pain. Wyatt Williams’s ode to his mother, the state of of Louisiana, and the songwriter Lucinda Williams is a piece I reread often. I return to remember how great writing disappears in serving a story, or when I’m struggling with how to get my point across just so. I’m rewarded with new resonance every time. Williams’s mother and Lucinda were born in 1953 in Louisiana, a place known most often for the destruction wrought by hurricanes; both families endured the stormy weather of violence, alcoholism, and generational trauma. When Williams writes, “She had been through crisis before. She had her ways of getting through it,” he’s talking abut his mother but alluding to Lucinda and the state of Louisiana, all three of which, on deeper inspection, reveal a special kind of resilience. Writers grapple with how to convey inchoate and entangled ideas and feelings but Williams creates beauty out of the chaos by sheer repetition, just like listening to a song on repeat and discovering something new with each spin. “It seems almost impossible that someone could spend 14 years writing 34 lines of poetry,” he writes. “But one of the things to understand about the work is that it isn’t as much about putting down words as it is about learning to see, reteaching yourself to look at the world, your own life, and find the shapes and patterns.” This story is about working hard to make something out of nothing, about naming things you don’t yet understand, about doing the work and paying deep attention in an attempt to find meaning and perhaps even earn a kind of peace. These are universal truths so bold, you know you can’t let go. —KS

Dril Is Everyone. More Specifically, He’s a Guy Named Paul

Nate Rogers | The Ringer | April 12, 2023 | 5,170 words

When you ask people to name the profiles that have stuck with them, they nearly always point to pieces that hinge on proximity. That’s for good reason. Spending hours or days in deep conversation with a subject (or simply fishing) generally works to break down the walls of image maintenance, creating enough unvarnished moments for a good writer to plumb. But there are many other ways to write a meaningful profile, as Nate Rogers’ piece about Paul Dochney proves. Dochney is known by a large swath of the internet simply as Dril, a Twitter persona who for 15 years has polished satirical shitposting to a high sheen and in the process helped architect online culture’s dominant comic voice. It was a nearly uninterrupted piece of performance art, which makes the profile’s quotidian backdrop—an anonymous old-school L.A. greasy spoon—all the more delightful. Like any profile, Rogers gives you the broad beats of Dochney’s upbringing and CV, dutifully threading in secondary interviews for texture and context, but the profile’s real value lies in how he contends with the idea of art in the age of social media. Dochney/Dril isn’t a provocateur; he’s a guy who likes making stuff. It’s just that in a twist of fate, Twitter became the place where that stuff first connected with people. And with that platform teetering ever closer to obsolescence, Dochney’s next steps become even less certain. Amid a sea of stories that seek to examine the role of the “creator,” Rogers’ profile instead sets out to examine the creative urge—and is stronger for it. —PR

Casual Luke Rides the Big Wave

Gabriella Paiella | GQ Sports | June 13, 2023 | 5,175 words

Everyone loves a good underdog story, and this one is particularly delightful. The Eddie Aikay Big Wave Invitational is a surf contest that relies on the whims of nature—the waves in Waimea Bay must reach a butt-clenching height of a minimum of 40 feet for it to go ahead. When conditions are right, competitors race across the world to get there. For North Shore local Luke Shepardson, the commute was less of an ordeal (although he still got caught in traffic, leaving his wife in the car and running down the road). It also happened to be his commute to work. That’s right: Luke worked as a lifeguard at the event, taking his turn to ride the waves between patching up other competitors. He won the competition after riding a wave the size of a four-story building, beating the world’s greatest surfers without even being a professional on the circuit. After the win, Luke finished his shift and headed home to watch The Lion King with his kids. As Gabriella Paiella explains in her enchanting profile, this was all very Luke, who “is known as ‘Casual Luke.’ In Hawaii. Which is like being called ‘Neurotic Matt’ on the island of Manhattan.” Luke’s down-to-earth nature pervades this piece, with Paiella clearly coming to respect an attitude so different from other sports stars. Luke got some money from the Eddie, but not enough for his life to be easy. Living with his wife and two kids in a one-bedroom apartment—in an ever more expensive area—he dreams of “descending back into obscurity” and buying his own home in this little slice of paradise. Nothing more. You can see why, with Paiella painting a lovely picture of family life in this beautiful surf town. Sure, it’s expensive, but the height of elegance is a flip-flop, and everyone knows everyone. (“As Luke’s mom put it after the Eddie: I changed first- and second-place’s diapers.”) This profile oozes sun, sand, salt, and joy. Everyone loves an underdog story, and everyone loves Casual Luke—after all, he has all the big stuff figured out.  —CW

Speakerboxxx/The Love Below was released on September 23, 2003, and tempting as it may be to frame it as the end of one era—in Outkast’s career, of course, but also an era of hip-hop, and of the CD-sales economy—it could be more accurately understood as the beginning of their long, drawn-out separation. A conscious uncoupling. The delicate balance that made the first four Outkast LPs so tantalizing had been upset and could never be recovered; in the years since this bizarre quasi-climax, each half of the group has come to sound more like the focus-grouped idea of himself than the frequently conflicted young man who appeared from Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik through Stankonia. Some of this can be ascribed to aging, some to the shifting economic incentives of music in the streaming era, and some to the way nearly all artists hit a point of diminishing invention. But for a group so frequently misread, it’s fitting that the irreparable fissure was mistaken for a crowning success.

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A push for slavery reparations. The dilemma of wild cows. A complicated racial heritage. How bees require a balanced diet. And the joys of swimming in the slow lane.

1. Inside Barbados’ Historic Push for Slave Reparations

Janell Ross| TIME |July 6, 2023 | 4,309 words

It’s been nine years since Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote his seminal essay “The Case for Reparations” in The Atlantic. Today, the idea of compensating Black Americans for the horrors of slavery and institutionalized racism remains fringe at best. The same goes in other countries that were once complicit in human bondage. But in the island nation of Barbados, where slaves made sugar plantations wildly lucrative, support for reparations is very real—and growing stronger. This year, under the leadership of President Mia Mottley, the country is asking European countries for a “Marshall Plan-like public investment,” as opposed to the individual payments we usually associate with reparations. Mottley, though, isn’t at the heart of this feature about Barbados’ groundbreaking efforts. Instead, writer Jannell Ross showcases Esther Phillips, the country’s poet laureate, who went from believing reparations were radical, to viewing them as unlikely, to arguing passionately for them. Phillips hopes that other people, particularly in Europe, will undergo transformations of their own. “If something of such horror is revealed,” she tells Ross, “and you’re still benefiting from the proceeds, you cannot turn you head and say, ‘Well, what has to do with me?’”—SD

2. The Republic of Cows

Jude Isabella | Hakai | August 15, 2023 | 5,525 words

Last year, our sister publication, The Atavist, published one of my favorite features in recent memory: a story about feral cows who were washed away in a storm surge, only to resurface miles away, perfectly fine. I don’t think I’d thought about feral cows before that point. In my mind, conditioned as it was by cheese companies and weird college mascots, “bovine” was synonymous with “domesticated.” Even after reading it, my image of feral cows remained indistinguishable from the archetype of the placid ruminant. But as Jude Isabella points out in her visit to Alaska’s uninhabited Chirikof Island, the truth is udderly different. “Trappers on Chirikof have witnessed up to a dozen bulls at a time pursuing and mounting cows, causing injury, exhaustion, and death, especially to heifers,” she writes. Troublesome rutting is only one of the issues plaguing Chirikof; the 2,000 cattle there are federally protected, but everyone else is torn about whether that’s a boon or a bane for the island’s ecosystem. One wildlife biologist Isabella talks to points out that Chirikof’s shape—either a T-bone steak or a teardrop, depending on who’s describing it—neatly embodies the tension at hand. At its heart, this is a nature piece, one that transports you (by seaplane) to a land of wind-rippled meadows and majestic untamed beasts. But it’s also a challenge to our very conceptions of cows. Yes, we can imagine Chirikof as a utopia for its massive herd—but what of the many other species that call Chirikof home? —PR

3. My Time Machine

Arthur Asseraf | Granta | July 25, 2023 | 3,029  words

Arthur Asseraf became a historian in part to overcome the confusion of his ancestry: his paternal grandmother was born in Morocco and eventually returned to France, for reasons undiscernible to Asseraf as a child. As he gains context and knowledge, Asseraf carefully confronts his grandmother’s distaste for Arabs and her unwillingness to see them as equal to her as an Algerian Jew. The more he learns about her past, the more distant he becomes to her. “I never told my colleagues the truth: that I knew colonialism not only through reading books, but also because its representative served me fish fingers after school,” he writes. Things change as Assaraf’s grandmother develops dementia and she reveals the anti-semitism she encountered as a Jew after the Second World War. This piece is a beautiful read about a grandson’s desire to understand a heritage mired in racist colonialism, coupled with the discovery that his grandmother, over the course of her life, was both oppressor and victim. —KS

4. America’s Bee Problem Is an Us Problem

Lex Pryor | The Ringer | August 3, 2023 | 6,482 words

Nearly 6,500 words on the state of bees in America? Yes, please. Lex Pryor’s piece is the bee’s knees—one part education, one part entertainment, and replete with fascinating characters—a piece that just might inspire you to do what you can for your local pollinators. It is well known that bees help produce many of the foods we eat, and keepers Andrew Coté and Bill Crawford are among those who tote hives to farms across the US to ensure that there are enough pollinators buzzing around for crops to thrive. But, did you know that monoculture farming is partly to blame for dwindling bee colonies in America? “It used to be that I could put down my bees somewhere and they’ll get a nice diversity of nectar and they’ll be healthy,” says Coté. “But now if I put them down in almonds, it’d be like if you or I ate kale. Kale is good, kale is healthy…But if we eat kale only for six weeks, like the bees have almond nectar only for six weeks, at the end of it, we won’t be dead—we may wish we were—but we’ll just be unhealthy and then susceptible to other health problems.” It turns out that a balanced diet isn’t just good for you, it’s good for the bees, too. —KS

5. Epiphany at the Y

Diane Mehta | Virginia Quarterly Review | June 12, 2023 | 4,236 words

I love to swim. Put me in front of a body of water and I will want to jump in it—temperature be damned. The feeling of a new silky texture rushing to envelop your skin. The silence of submerging. The sudden weightlessness of heavy limbs. However, not all swimming has equal majesty. Give me endless wild splashing in a sea or a lake, never the confusing etiquette of public pool lane-swimming. As I read this beautiful essay, I nodded to Diane Mehta’s frustration at swimming in the slow lane of her local YMCA pool. Why was a woman touching her foot? Why was another woman performing cartwheels and ballet steps? But Mehta keeps on going. Every. Single. Day. You will root for her as she learns to swim freestyle for the first time, and feel for her as she comes to grips with middle age and her new, less cooperative body. She swims until she “fell in love with the woman who cartwheeled down the lane, the stalwart silver-haired man who strode in with deliberation, [and] the older lady who gravitated forward like a Galapagos turtle.” And she swims until she also loves her own body again. I think I need to give lane-swimming another chance. —CW

Audience Award

Here’s the piece that stood out for our audience this week.

There is a bee twiddling its legs on the moonlit dashboard of Bill Crawford’s pickup. I tell him we’ve got a straggler before it crawls under a stack of stained papers. There are roughly 4 million more in the back. He is not even slightly concerned.

“There’s probably bees all over. Inside the truck, outside the truck,” he says, eyes scanning the dim country road ahead. “You’re just as liable to get stung in here as you are outside.”

Crawford is a bee man. More than once, he refers to what we’re doing—driving a load of 80 honeybee colonies from western Massachusetts to a wild blueberry farm in central New Hampshire—as “haulin’ bees.” He is active behind the wheel, but he is not gung-ho. When the road bends, he slows down. On the highway he drives the speed limit.

Unsurprisingly, though, not all A-listers are comfortable making even the occasional foray into sleaze. That’s usually left to character actors who spend years skillfully pretending to be slimy. It’s not an easy job. Because once you get that reputation, it can be hard to shake—whether you like it or not. Seann William Scott played the (ultimately) good-hearted meathead lax bro Steve Stifler in four American Pie movies. He lost count of the times he met fratty young men who thought he was his character in real life. “They would realize that I was nothing like that and it was kind of fucking up their universe,” Scott told me for a 2019 interview. “I’d always see confusion. Their circuits firing off and then there was always a little bit of sadness. It was kind of breaking their heart because they had this idea of how I’d be. Sometimes I was like, ‘I don’t want to break their heart.’ So I would say something outlandish. And they were like, ‘Oh yeah, OK.’ And then I’d just walk away. These guys have given me a career. I can’t crush their spirit.”

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In this week’s installment:

• How Canada is failing its most vulnerable citizens.
• Teju Cole considers the Vermeer exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.
• The toxic workplace culture behind the hit TV show Lost.
• A piece highlighting Succession‘s excellent writing.
• The enduring popularity of Guinness World Records.

1. Have Assisted Dying Laws Gone Too Far?

Meagan Gillmore | The Walrus | May 30, 2023 | 5,422 words

What does it say about a country where it’s easier to request medically assisted death than it is to get support for a disability? Tarra Carlson lives with autism and ADHD. Her provincial disability benefits ceased because her husband earns too much money. She receives about $800 CDN per month from the Canada Pension Plan. “If her husband dies before her, she may have no way to access financial support,” writes Meagan Gillmore for The Walrus. “She’ll lose her biggest advocate and support system—and her home.” We already know that Canada has explored expanding the Medical Assistance in Death (MAiD) program to include those with disabilities, angering disability advocates. Gillmore’s terrifying piece reveals that some with disabilities facing poverty from the margins of Canadian society may choose MAiD, failed by a crumbling and byzantine Canadian health care system. For the government of Canada, what started as a program to allow the terminally ill to die on their own terms is starting to become a way for the government to legally rid itself of those they have failed: their most vulnerable citizens. —KS

2. Seeing Beyond the Beauty of a Vermeer

Teju Cole | The New York Times Magazine | May 25, 2023 | 3,212 words

I’ve wrestled with what to emphasize about Teju Cole’s excellent essay on Dutch master Johannes Vermeer, the subject of a museum exhibition so popular that Vogue compared the clamor for tickets to Beyoncé fans reacting to news of the Renaissance tour. I could talk about Cole’s evocative language. (“Vermeer tightens his cord of suggestion around us.”) Or his argument for why it’s imperative to “look for trouble”—meaning, the influence of brutality—in classic European paintings. (“It opens them up, and what used to be mere surface becomes a portal.”) Or his ability to capture the feeling of looking at Vermeer’s quotidian scenes. (“Our breath as viewers is collectively held because we don’t want to interrupt whatever this is.”) But no—my favorite part of Cole’s essay is his quiet indictment of mass appreciation and art-world dogma. He considers both the marketing of and response to the Vermeer exhibition. “That it represented a ‘once in a lifetime’ experience was taken as gospel,” he writes. “(And yet, how many of our best encounters with art have happened in a minor museum on a quiet day? What moment, fully inhabited, isn’t ‘once in a lifetime’?)” In Cole’s telling, interfacing with art is a singular act, defined by the quiddities of context and a viewer’s existence, and to suggest otherwise is to miss the point of what art can do to us, and for us. It’s fitting that he ends the piece by describing a Vermeer painting in which the subject looks out of the frame, seeming to single out each individual who passes before it. “This gaze has held yours for centuries,” Cole writes, “suspending time on your behalf.” —SD

3. Lost Illusions: The Untold Story of the Hit Show’s Poisonous Culture

Maureen Ryan | Vanity Fair | May 30, 2023 | 8,682 words

Characters of color sidelined to secondary storylines. Writers punished for standout scripts. Casual racism. Bullying. In Maureen Ryan’s piece for Vanity Fair—which is an excerpt from Burn It Down, her new book about power and complicity in Hollywood—she digs into what went wrong behind the scenes of Lost, particularly in the writers room. Onscreen, the hit TV show had a diverse set of characters, but its workplace culture was extremely toxic. Drawing on years of conversations with some of the show’s actors and writers—including Harold Perrineau, the Black actor who played Michael—Ryan paints an ugly picture of a show loved by many, me included. While reading this, it’s hard not to recall the things that didn’t sit quite right when I first watched the show: What happened to Michael? Why, despite the international cast, did the show never fully feel inclusive? How, after such a promising start, did the show eventually devolve into a battle between two white dudes? Lost changed TV as we knew it, placing brilliant writing and showrunners in the spotlight. But these “genius” minds—Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof—enabled this toxic environment, while their responses to these allegations today are disappointing yet sadly unsurprising. —CLR

4. The True Power of ‘Succession’ Comes From Writing Inside the Box

Katie Baker | The Ringer | May 31, 2023 | 2,415 words

Yes, Succession has run its course. Yes, you might be tired of talking or thinking about the beloved HBO drama. You might even wonder why, having edited a whole reading list about the show that we ran last week, I’m including yet another piece about it. The answer is because it’s exactly the kind of writing TV criticism deserves. It’s not yet another recap, not another piece about the show’s #iykyk costuming choices or grandiose real-estate porn. Instead, it takes on the show’s fundamental substrate: the writing. Much has already been made of Succession‘s Veep-level profanity, but Katie Baker dives past the f-bombs (and the deceptively circular plotting) to praise how creator Jesse Armstrong and the rest of the show’s writers capture the inconsistent cadences of actual human communication, hyperarticulate one moment, elliptical the next. Even the stage directions, she points out, breathe life into the show: “Alongside all the unforgettable quips that viewers have heard and chuckled at and turned into fancams or memes, there are also lots of lasting turns of phrase—ones written between the lines—that represent conversations not between the show’s characters, but between the show’s writers and its actors. And some of that language might be the most illuminating of all.” So sure, you might only enjoy this piece if you watched the show. But even if you didn’t, the fact that you’re reading this shows you care about good writing—and good writing about good writing is some of the best good writing of all. —PR

5. The Strange Survival of Guinness World Records

Imogen West-Knights | The Guardian | May 25, 2023 | 5,775 words

I grew up watching people break world records. Not because I am from a family whose skillset includes spinning basketballs on toothbrushes or sticking spoons to their chest (actual records), but because I watched a show called Record Breakers. It was all very wholesome: Enthusiastic presenters oversaw members of the public trying to earn a place in the book of Guinness World Records. The upbeat theme song confidently declared that Dedication is all you need. Perhaps it is. In this piece, Imogen West-Knights writes that her failure to beat the record for the longest time standing on one leg blindfolded “was not because I was incapable of doing it. It was because I didn’t want it enough.” She meets plenty of people who do want it (and want it a lot), her delightful account peppered with humans who have caught the most marshmallows fired from a homemade catapult in one minute or jumped the most consecutive cars on a pogo stick. But in recent years, things at Guinness World Records have become a little less joyful and a little more corporate. West-Knights explains how GWR Consultancy now helps brands to find a way to break a record—for a fee. (Perhaps unsurprising in the TikTok age.) But even if record-breaking is not what it once was, it is lovely to know that diehard record-breakers are still out there on their pogo sticks “celebrating achievement in the abstract.” —CW

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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