🏆BONUS: After the reading of this letter 🔼, I have included the Red Room Podcast conversation between myself, Author John Thorne, and Andrew Grevas (Owner and Chief Editor of 25YLater Site).

Every aircraft Pilot has to prepare to make an emergency landing in a critical situation, where every decision could mean the difference between the life or death of dozens of people. There are laws strictly regulating how much sleep, time off, and travel that pilots can endure before their skills and abilities are considered unsafe to operate commercial aircraft. These measures are for our public safety.

Like Commercial Airline Pilots, Fiction Writers also deliver lives from one place to another, though seldom safely. These fictional creations on the page are deliberately manipulated into situations of extreme tension and (when it’s done right) this is followed by a release. Music is also about consciously creating tension followed by release through the language of sound. Films do this with sight, sound, and story.

Our lives are overflowing with tension, and too often, our poor souls have such minor releases. Art can help us bring some of that release. Meditation can also bring the experience of letting go, and so can physical exercise. And finally, our relationships with human beings around us, our family, friends, neighbors, and strangers, can also bring us either spiritual freedom or emotional bondage. Finding release in this life requires an incredibly intricate and focused act of balancing emotional and physical forces into a high wire walk across a razor’s edge. As David Gilmour sang, “One slip and down a hole we fall.”

Personally, I like to keep my drama in the Art I consume. I have made some painful cuts from my garden of friends and family over the past three years, for multiple reasons. I’ve had a few friends and family cut me off as well, and it still hurts, though I mostly understand where they’re coming from. Sometimes you just can’t agree to agree, as Dylan sang in Caribbean Wind. And so it goes with these emotional blockages in our lives, but nowhere does it say we have to live every day filled with soap-opera-level drama that never ends. And so, in working to keep the dramas of my life confined to the Art that I consume, I try to think deeply about the characters in these fictions and what I would do in their situations.

Today, I want to explore the first two episodes of And Just Like That… (the Sex And The City reboot on HBOMax) and seasons 1 through 3 of Succession (also on HBOMax). I tried to limit the big spoiler to their own sections, clearly marked with small bold font. Don’t read those if you want to avoid knowing the twists. The rest are light positioning spoilers, nothing major.

On Episodes 1-2 of And Just Like That…

In my opinion, by the end of Sex And The City (six seasons and two films), Carrie Bradshaw was an awful, superficial, and petty person who destroyed other peoples’ lives in her blind ambition to possess a man whose superpower and proof of life was that he could not be possessed, that even in marriage he would be his own man. He was Mr. Big, after all. But Carrie wanted John Preston to define himself through the lens of her love; nothing short of that was going to stop her trail of tears in that emotional war. Their love was as much about power as it was about sex.

During season 3 of SATC, Carrie has found a good man (Aidan) and for a few episodes, actually strikes a healthy balance of happiness and physical intimacy without the typical conflicts she escalated if not outright instigated. Unfortunately, Carrie betrayed and emotionally decimated Aidan, while causing the breakup of Big’s marriage to a much more suitable spouse and partner (Natasha). As people in the real world, the wisest among us understand that emotional affection and physical attraction only get us so far in long-term relationships that may even become marriages and parenthood. It takes a lot to make those relationships work.

It’s not sex but friendship that was always the infinity crystals of Sex And The City, and those friendships held for all six seasons and two films.

A month ago, I was not interested in a reboot of Sex And The City. It just wasn’t a group of characters I wanted to visit with again. We had our memories and those were good enough. But, of course, I still clicked play on the first episode of And Just Like That… because when I no longer had to wait for it in some far-off timescale, I discovered that I did want to see these people again.

So Carrie and John Preston have been married for years now, living in a beautiful high-rise apartment (probably on Fifth Avenue). Carrie Preston (Bradshaw) finally got the man she wanted and it didn’t cost her any of her friends, except Samantha, but that’s a whole other thing. Samantha was Carrie’s publicist from the beginning; through all the s**t with Big, and Samantha ultimately saw her girl Carrie done right by life and love. Personally, I think Samantha Jones was one of the most intelligent and empowered female characters in any show I can think of from that time. This show does suffer from Samantha’s absence, explained below.

Carrie was a newspaper column writer at a time when newspapers were dying. Samantha helped her transition to writing books and that worked for a few years, but the tectonic shifts in how readers consume writing for free online through platforms where writers control so little of how their content is presented was too much for Carrie Bradshaw. Her writing faded in priority behind her marriage. She was still writing, of course (Carrie couldn’t turn that self-therapy spigot off), but she also couldn’t afford a publicist any longer, no matter how close a friend. So like she did with Aidan and Natasha, Carrie had to cut Samantha loose, but only in a business sense. For Samantha, however, there was no separation between business and personal business and she felt devastated and betrayed. Samantha ended up cutting off ties with all three of her best friends. She moved to London and stopped returning their calls and texts from Manhattan. And that’s where things lie in the pilot episode of And Just Like That…

Cutting people from our lives is something we’ve all likely experienced over the past few awful years. In America, we’ve been dealing with the pandemic combined with a Christian fascist uprising that has highly polarized our neighborhoods into small political cold war battles, where neighbors are walling themselves off from each other mentally based on their social media profiles and attributions, based on the cars we drive, the signs we hang, the places we go and whether we wear masks for the protection of others as well as ourselves. Because cutting people off has become a common experience in our lives, so it must also be an experience explored through the tensions and releases in our fiction.

Cutting off others is important for self-protection in some cases. I had an old friend that I recently had to cut off and block because every time I engaged with this person, I came away feeling drained and down. It was no longer a relationship where I was gaining anything, not joy or memories to enjoy later, and so cutting them off was a defense mechanism. A good gardener’s highest skill is knowing where and when to prune dead leaves from the branch.

⚠️SPOILER ⚠️

Mr. Big dies in the pilot episode of this reboot. Mercifully, the writers gave him a heart attack after a Peloton ride, and he sat down in that beautiful Park Avenue shower and waited for Carrie to come home so that he could die in her arms. F*****g heartbreaking, honestly. Writing about that scene right now is making me sad all over again. I loved John Preston’s character in Sex and the City.

What happens to Carrie felt something like justice, like Carrie being punished for her past sins. The writers gifted Carrie Preston with years of fictional happiness. She and John were outstanding together in this first episode. They found their balance and built a life of happiness, joy, affection, and, of course, sex. They had it all, but it had to crumble to have a story to tell. After all, there is a difference between a reboot and a reunion.

I loved almost all the male characters in Sex And The City. The show was revolutionary in how it presented males during the time. The turn of the century in TV was when female characters with money and prestige were all the rage, as something odd and interesting. But the main characters, these white women in SATC, were interesting because they acted like stereotypical white men at the time. They also ended up getting the results that those stereotypical ambitious white men got on TV shows, which was money and power. But the show rarely explored the cost of material happiness and emotional fulfillment at the expense of trauma inflicted on other human beings. SATC was never that brave to go beyond the safety fence of the emotional needs of its main characters.

But the men on Sex and the City were essentially good people, imbued with stereotypes that typical women characters had at the time on TV. Charlie, Steve, and Aidan were all sensitive partners, though they had rough spots. Each of them was composed to bring tension and release to the emotional needs of these empowered women running loose in Manhattan. And by the end of that journey, I was ready to say goodbye to these people, and likely never see them again.

As this reboot show starts, I’m looking back at my anger over what happened with Aidan and Natasha but also seeing Big and Carrie’s happiness now. And so, I shrug my shoulders in forgiveness. “There but by the grace of God go I,” right? I believe that everyone should be allowed to pursue their own version of happiness, provided they do not harm another person while seeking that happiness. It’s the part after the comma of the previous sentence that is troublesome for Carrie Preston in her modern time of trouble. She had to get wrecked so that she could recover; it’s the only story worth telling for this character in this time and place.

There is also a ray of hope. Samantha breaks her silence and sends a gorgeous funeral wreath for John’s casket (we can stop calling him Mr. Big now), and as one door closes, another opens back up in the wind of forgiveness and the possibility of a reforged friendship. That’s wonderful storytelling there, friends. It will be a joy to watch these rich white women in their fifties stumble around Manhattan and fall on their faces into this new world’s barriers and challenges.

"Someone's quick with their pronouns!"

This story has depth and I think it wants to be told. So I’m going to give And Just Like That… a shot this season. I’d like to see these friends fight against Manhattan and the world, but win one for us all this time.

On Seasons 1-3 of Succession

Succession is one of the top three best shows on television right now, maybe ever made. It takes the best of The West Wing and burns off the fat, the cruelty of Game Of Thrones but carves out the fantastic distractions. And it takes the tragedy of Shakespeare’s plays and potently injects that into one of the most important stories being told in dramatic fiction today, how we lost our souls as people and are about to lose our social stability to the global forces of organized crime and corruption.

In thirty hours of drama so far, Succession has shown us why power and wealth have deserted We The People and become concentrated in the hands of the cruel and largely useless few. Like these characters in Succession, we each now live in this phase of human civilization where religion now means the worship of wealth and power instead of becoming morally aligned in spiritual values that dictate kindness and compassion towards the poor.

In the wealth and the power-soaked world of the Roys in Succession, there is no such thing as charity. Logan Roy has built a media empire of print and cable journalism along with many companies across many industries; one of them is even a vacation cruise line. Logan Roy is arguably the most powerful man on Earth; he’s undoubtedly one of the most religious men on the planet as defined above.

Logan Roy is proof that when media combines with politics and business, the corruption of the human race inevitably follows. In a fair and just world, there would be clear lines of demarcation defended between these institutions in the same manner that the American Bicameral Legislature was built to push against an impartial Judiciary, while both of them collide with a dedicated Executive branch. Unstoppable Forces meeting Immovable Objects is the fire that moves fiction and government. When these tectonic shifts break down is when chaos looms.

Fiction falls apart and governments get bought out by dark money criminals who will use whole governments as weapons against the poor and unwanted. Like Charles Foster Kane, the hopeless ambition of becoming immortal while still alive and engaged in sin is all that Logan Roy is, even though he has four children and the world in his pocket. He’s still going to die and, to him, that means he’s going to lose. Logan hates to lose. He’s at his best when defending his power from every angle and every predator known to man and nature. Logan was built for war, but at his age and health, it’s become a great burden. Protecting his children is particularly difficult because each of them is uniquely challenged and none of them are prepared to take over this empire.

The first two and a half seasons of Succession explore the process that Logan goes through to determine which of his children he might be able to pass his empire on to and be sure that the family’s legacy of strangling the poor to turn their suffering into money continues to grow over the next generation. Logan’s children ultimately come up short, and some come up far shorter than others.

The Roy children each have an element of what it will take to lead Waystar RoyCo (and the world it drags behind on a golden leash) into the new wars to come. But his children can’t stop taking bites out of each other’s throat when they’re gathered at the trough to gorge on the fat of the land. They can’t figure out how to work together and fill each other’s emotional gaps to become the unified team of leaders that their father and his empire need before he can let go of it all and die with some possible satisfaction, to maybe lessen the misery of knowing he ultimately lost to death before he could achieve immortality.

Logan does finally choose the right person to hand his moral monstrosity over to protect and keep. Lukas Mattson will become the next Gollum for a new generation. He has a clear and dispassionate view of how to wield unlimited power in the bitter economic culture wars for profit that are already in motion. But to hand over power and control to this perfectly heartless man means that Logan Roy may have to cut each of his children off from his legacy entirely. Of course, they may end up still working for Waystar RoyCo or GoJo or whatever name they put to the abomination that will inevitably result from combining them. Each child could end up with an important but toothless executive title and lifetime payout. But none of them will be running battleships into cruisers out where the action is happening. After looking into his eyes and heart, Logan now knows that Lukas Mattson will do what needs to be done in order to get what needs to be gotten. Mattson will order people to the gas chambers if necessary, and in the world that Logan Roy has built to pass over during this succession, there will always be working gas chambers without benches or comfort (in his eyes, what’s the point of even pretending that comfort matters in slaughter?).

As the Psalm says and Bob Marley sang, “The stone that the builder refuses, becomes the head cornerstone.” Shiv’s husband Tom has always seemed a goofy, mildly cruel, but a generally harmless fool. With the Cruise Line scandal, he walked blindly into a sewer of corruption, banality, and actual crime. Tom was willing to go to prison for the family, for Logan, and for Shiv if she’d had gotten pregnant with his child, given him a sign that their love was real. Tom was clear that having a child and building their own legacy was his price for sacrificing his freedom for Waystar Royco. And his willingness to sacrifice his freedom was taken as a genuine gesture of loyalty to Logan, as it is for all crime bosses. Going to jail for the family is just behind taking a bullet for the Don in the actions that speak loyalty from the heart to the corrupted soul.

His wife, Shiv (Logan's only daughter), doesn’t care about Tom's needs. She’s not interested in building a family legacy with him. So Shiv uses Tom like every other man in her life, all useful idiots in her eyes. And so, of course, Tom betrays his wife and his brothers-in-law by revealing their plans to Logan and giving him a vital few minutes to prepare to nullify their threat like an autonomic judo move. At the end of Season 3, Tom has the last laugh on these spoiled and rotten human beings, and he’s bringing Greg along with him. Those on the bottom will be on top for a bit, but I’m sure Tom will find some way to s**t the bed in Season 4.

Connor Roy, the eldest and single child of Logan’s first wife, is seeking his way out with his fiancee (who used to be his prostitute), and he should work to leave this family in his past where they belong. If the others were smart and kinder, they would realize this is the only path for their salvation and happiness.

And Kendall, poor obliterated Kendall, who, like Don Quixote, went swinging at dragons but ended up actually hitting one, realizing only too late that it’s hard to put out dragon fire once it starts; it burns the whole world down around you. He comes undone in the finale during a scene that will haunt me forever. Kendall breaks down and admits that he murdered another human being out of apathy, elitism, and whatever else you want to throw in there. That man’s life didn’t matter to Kendall Roy, and that is a moral mark on the soul that, like Lady Macbeth's curse, can’t be wiped away with any solvent found in nature.

Roman Roy, who favors his parents’ adoration above all, but can never seem to get it, has become a broken and almost hopelessly deranged human being. Unlike Kendall, he hasn’t killed anyone yet, but it’s probably just a few years away.

The kids do come together in the finale of season three, and they stand for themselves. They bet it all on black, and the spin comes up red. They are all still poisoned in their souls, but they are not irredeemable yet. Logan Roy lost his soul long ago, and Lukas Mattson is well on his way to the lowest depth of Hell, where power in the material world originates and seeps out like a poisoned fume.

Damn, this is such a great show! Make sure to listen to the podcast at the top of the page and you’ll hear my discussion about Succession with my friends Andrew Grevas (Owner of 25YLater Site) and John Thorne (Twin Peaks Author and Evangelist).

A Hard 🛬, Hot❤️‍🔥Landing

The purpose of tragedy and comedy in drama is to push characters and the audience uncomfortably forward toward revelations impossible without the fictional framework of narrative art performed in the modern-day public theater of our screens of many sizes. This kind of art helps us break through the barriers that are holding us all back.

To successfully bring back Carrie Bradshaw and give her a shot at redemption, the writers had to take away what matters to Carrie Preston, which was her perfect life with Mr. Big. To save his company, Logan Roy has to destroy his family. Power and Joy both come with enormous though very different costs. For the lucky among us, fictional characters should be the ones to pay those costs, instead of real people with real pain. Whether through art or trauma, the sins of the world get paid for through suffering and sacrifice. The best of us make sacrifices; we bear any burden and pay any cost for the happiness of the ones we love, and sometimes we even do it because it’s what’s right and good for the poor who have no choice. But, unfortunately, the worst of us pass suffering off to other people, and the evilest among us amplify the impact of that suffering to capitalize on the cancer of trauma that follows.

Logan Roy is the worst of the evil among us. Carrie Bradshaw was the best of the worst but could still become one of the best. What will she do with the wealth she is about to inherit? We already know what Logan is doing and it’s awful. They’re both just trying to land their planes on fire. One of them is sure to fail and it’s better them than us.

Outtakes

And Just Like That... this isn't just a Manhattan show anymore. By the end, I want to see these friends in the city doing battle in the Meth-Averse against the forces of cruelty. To remain relevant, And Just Like That… will have to move to the edge and beyond (like The Good Fight on Paramount+). No modern American drama or comedy created in the 2020s is going to be able to avoid addressing the Maga rebellion that now threatens our entire empire of commercialized consumption along with the hole in the center we’ve dumped our shared morality into; that hole is where our Common Good use to live.

See, you can always tell whether a “religious” person is full of s**t by how they talk about and treat the poor. There is no other litmus test of a person’s spiritual worth than how they treat poor strangers who can do nothing for them but ask the smallest charity from them. How we respond to the genuine ask of wealth from the absolute penitence of poverty is the only measure of our humanity that carries weight when we leave this world. Call it the weighing of the heart against a feather; it’s as good a metaphor as any other and better than most.

Ask me right now and I’ll tell you that Succession is one of the most important dramas ever made, but I like to speak in hyperbole about the art I love in all the right nows of my life. I’ve probably said that same statement about twenty shows over the past two decades. It drives my wife crazy. My Red Room Podcast co-creator Scott Ryan says the same thing. They think I love every show that comes along, and I do admit to a much broader spectrum of value than most critics are capable of maintaining. I adore it when someone s***s on something that I love because, when given the opportunity, I can typically bury their cynicism and apathy in the ground and set their frustration on fire when I apply my writing talent through the filter of my burning enthusiasm. Writers can be ruthless, too, when we’re landing planes on fire.

LINKS

* Just today (Dec. 16th, 2021) after this letter was sent out, Chris Noth, the actor who played John Preston in Sex And The City & And Just Like That…, was accused by two women of sexual assault after each reporting they were triggered by seeing him act in this reboot. My affinity for John Preston’s character in the show is not a defense of the actor’s behavior should these allegations prove to be true in a court of law. [LINK to Hollywood Report article]

* Andrew Grevas’s Succession Essays for Season 3

* S3E1: “Sets the Table For an Intense Season”

* S3E2: “War is Coming & It’s Going to be Ugly”

* S3E3: “‘The Disruption’ — A State of Nirvana”

* S3E4: “The Moment We’ve All Been Waiting For”

* S3E5: “The Generation That Just Won’t Die”

* S3E6: “The Dark Choices Made Behind Closed Doors”

* S3E7: “Self Destruction In Every Direction”

* S3E8: “No Calm Before The Storm”

* S3E9: “The Finale To End All Finales”

* Buy John Thorne’s book The Essential Wrapped In Plastic: Pathways To Twin Peaks [Amazon Affiliate Link] $21.99

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