Rob joins me to wrap up Succession (spoilers below).

We both sort of predicted Tom’s triumph, as did many other people. The ultimate lapdog ends up with the company, his marriage, and a pregnant wife. I bring up how Tom’s career and personal life remind me of the male cuttlefish that disguises itself as a female, and therefore non-threatening, in order to find mating opportunities. There’s an equivalent in humans among beta males, and in this case the strategy worked for Tom.

While I had been expecting a feminist ending, we actually got the opposite. Shiv has lived her life in the shadow of one man, and went and married a guy who she thought she could walk all over, but he now has the upper hand in the relationship. I say that this is in part because she’s now pregnant, but Rob argues that it’s actually Tom who may be trapped by the baby. There’s a lot here about gender dynamics and how pregnancy influences the balance of power between the sexes.

I was so glad to see that we finally got an answer on Kendall’s kids. As you may remember from previous discussions, this has been a constant obsession of mine, and the truth came out in the most satisfying way possible.

Rob and I wonder the extent to which the Roy children were the authors of their own misery. People like to blame parents for how kids turn out, due to a bias toward blank slatism, but in the end Logan was right that they weren’t serious people, and one can’t just assume he made them that way. My suspicion is that he would’ve liked to find a suitable heir, but he simply didn’t have one. Rob puts forth the possibility that perhaps, as Bryan Cox said, Logan’s problem was that he loved his kids too much.

We close by discussing Succession’s legacy and how it compares to other classic shows. To me, it’s really hard to do something this timely this well, and I suspect people will be watching this show generations from now for insights into our crazy political era — everything from violence in the streets, to disputed elections, right-wing populism, and what social media and the 24-hour news cycle have done to our brains.

You can listen to the show here, or watch on YouTube.

Links

Rob’s Substack essay on the finale

Me and Rob on Succession: S1-S3, S4:E1, S4: Ep 2-4, and S4: Ep 5-9

On cuttlefish

Interview with Bryan Cox

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Rob joins me to talk about Succession, through the penultimate episode of the series.

There are spoilers below, and throughout our conversation.

We discuss Ross Douthat’s recent piece on the series, and where I agree and disagree with him. We almost have inverse views on the lessons of the show, where Douthat says public opinion has been written out of it, while I think that the trend has been for mass sentiment and larger forces to intrude more on the personal struggles of the Roy family. Perhaps the point is that elites are in control as long as they’re strong and competent, like Logan clearly was, but not when they’re weak and divided, as are his children?

In the end, I think Shiv taking over makes the most sense. She was always brushed aside by her father due to his sexism, and it would be appropriate for the show to end with the triumph of the girlboss, while she’s pregnant and with the entirety of her womanhood on display, no less. Rob and I also discuss the possibility of Tom ending up running the empire with Shiv as the power behind the throne.

We’re both fascinated by the Jeryd Mencken character. Rob and I agree that a guy like that couldn’t be a plausible presidential candidate in real life. We spend a lot of time talking about what branch of the “dissident right” he represents. Is he supposed to be a Catholic traditionalist, a Nietzschean, a white nationalist, or some combination thereof? This leads me to talk about my idea of there being deep and overlooked contradictions within the American far right.

Speaking of Nietzsche, we both loved Kendall’s speech, which was an unapologetic defense of the man of action. While the two big eulogies were framed as giving “both sides” regarding the life of Logan, they can be seen as giving both sides of a debate that goes to fundamental questions of our political divide. How should we understand the past? Do we dwell on its flaws, and those of individuals and institutions that build great things, or do we celebrate what humanity has been able to accomplish despite the costs?

Listen here, or watch us on YouTube.

Links

Me and Rob on Succession: S1-S3, S4:E1, and S4: Ep 2-4

Marc Andreessen on the Breaking Bad universe, the end of Better Call Saul (with Chris Nicholson), and The Shield (with Rob)

Douthat on Succession

Me on The Biomechanics of Trumpism

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****NOTE: SPOILERS BELOW****

Rob Henderson joins me once again to talk about Succession, S4: Ep 2-4.

Of course, our conversation revolves around the shocking death of Logan. I really appreciated how the episode gave us a realistic perspective on what happens when someone dies. It’s not always dramatic, or foreshadowed all that much. We usually don’t get to see the moment they grab their chest and keel over or hear their final words. Rather, we learn about the event from people who happened to be around the individual the moment they passed away. Others end up unsure of what really happened or what tricks of memory might have distorted their perceptions.

Succession could have given us a glimpse into what Logan’s final moments actually looked and sounded like, as most shows do in a situation like this. But we are not owed it. So much of the event is wrapped in mystery. Was he really fishing his phone out of the toilet when it happened? What was his mood like just before he died? Did he listen to Roman’s final voicemail? And of course, did he want Kendall to be his successor, or not? We’ll probably never know the answer to most of these questions, and I’m fine with that.

Another big piece of news is Shiv’s pregnancy. Rob and I do the math and calculate whether Tom is likely to be the father. According to this, it probably works out. We speculate on how interesting it would be if Shiv went and got knocked up by another guy immediately after they broke up, given how badly Tom wanted to have kids.

Shiv seemed like she was never taken seriously as Logan’s successor, and Rob and I wonder if her fate is to remain in the shadows of her brothers or eventually find a way to triumph, pregnant and all.

I previously predicted that politics might start intruding more on the universe of the main characters, given that we were told in S4:Ep 1 that the election was weeks away. The last episode supports this view, as Republican presidential candidate Jeryd Mencken arrives at Logan’s old apartment to pay his respects. Will the passing of Logan, an icon of American life, be seen as the watershed that ushered in a new, more dangerous era?

Rob and I note how overwhelmingly white the decisionmakers are in this show. I know they get away with it in part because the main characters are supposed to be conservatives and therefore bad people, but still, it’s quite striking and an unusual artistic choice. A bunch of white people in a room making big decisions is still a very normal thing in real life, but not on TV. I find that artificial diversity is often a distraction, as I imagine producers always navigating their way through a minefield or trying to make an ideological point. Here, you can simply sit back and enjoy the characters and situations for what they are. I don’t necessarily want artificial homogeneity in art either, but artificial diversity is the norm and it unquestionably subtracts from most shows and movies. Succession should be given credit for accurately representing what an elite conservative institution actually looks like.

Then again, what is up with Kendall’s daughter? How is she so much darker than her parents and why am I apparently the only person in the world who has noticed this? Please share your thoughts. The best Rob and I can come up with is that the show will end with Stewie having cucked everyone. This is our White Lotus conversation all over again. For context surrounding our discussion about whether one’s sexual perversions can be separated from a person’s regular life, see here and here.

We close by reflecting on why we dislike Kendall, while perhaps having a bit more sympathy for Roman.

Listen to the episode here, or watch on YouTube.

Links:

Me and Rob on the first three seasons of Succession

Me and Rob on Season 4, Episode 1

Michelle Goldberg on Succession (New York Times)

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Rob joins me to discuss Succession, Season 4: Episode 1.

Click here for our previous conversation about the first three seasons of the show.

One thing I like about the show is how it straddles differences in class, aesthetics, and politics. The producers are really walking a tightrope, and it’s very easy to make a show like this too preachy and on-the-nose, or what the kids call “cringe.” The series fails in a few places, but overall it does a good job of navigating what are clearly some very treacherous waters.

Topics we discuss include

* Greg as the “everyman” and the corruption of his character

* How business leaders interact with more ideological actors, and the masses

* Conservative and liberal differences, following up on our previous conversation

* Logan Roy’s synthesis of nostalgia politics and Nietzsche

* Whether liberals or conservatives are more likely to watch the show

I explain my prediction that, by the end of the series, reality will intrude upon the Roy family and ATN in ways that it hadn’t before. Up until now, it has been mainly a show about characters, with social commentary thrown in, but the latter will become more prominent as the series reaches its end. Another possibility is that we get a complete victory for Logan, in a result that would bring joy to Marc Andreessen’s heart.

Listen here, or watch the video on YouTube.

Links

Me and Rob on Succession, Seasons 1-3

Marc Andreessen on the role of the Nietzschean superman in art, in discussions of The Shield, the Breaking Bad universe, Better Call Saul, and Deadwood

Richard Hanania, “Why is Everything Liberal?” and “Liberals Read, Conservatives Watch TV”

Sophie Gilbert, “The Real Succession Endgame” (The Atlantic)

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Rob Henderson and Marc Andreessen join me to discuss the Deadwood: The Movie (2019), along with our thoughts about the series more generally. We converge on the idea that the main protagonists of the show, that is, Swearengen, Bullock, and Hearst, represent three eras of civilization, with each of the first two leading to the next one. Marc sees the Hearst character, who apparently has little in common with his real-life namesake, as the hero of this universe. My view leans more towards the idea that he should be the hero, but the show and the movie reflect the liberalism of their respective eras.

Hear why Marc calls Deadwood “the closest thing we have to modern Shakespeare.” Also, what he learned about the Gilded Age from taking a walk around Stanford campus.

By contrasting the politics of the movie and the show, we get a time capsule of the priorities of liberalism in the mid-2000s relative to a decade later. I present my theory about each of the Cars movies similarly being representative of a particular era in art and entertainment. It’s truly fascinating how the hivemind works, with individual artists and producers fully believing that they’re making original work while they all rely on the same motifs and moral themes of their contemporaries. Rob points out that just by watching the Deadwood series or the movie, you could guess the time around which each was made.

Another theme of our discussion is how Deadwood presents a less romantic version of reality than what we are used to seeing. Echoing one of my previous conversations with Rob, Marc is particularly struck by the use of mud. I point out that the real life story of Swearengen’s Gem Theater was much more brutal to the women than how things were portrayed. Moreover, characters still had their teeth, and besides the mud getting at the bottom of their clothes, they often looked otherwise impeccable. That being said, some of the medical scenes in the series were absolutely brutal, and if it’s true that we can only take so much reality, then Deadwood pushes us to near our limit.

Before this conversation, I did a good bit of reading on the real life characters behind the show, and I discuss what I found throughout the discussion. See the links for more information.

Note that throughout this conversation we refer to the movie as having come out in 2018. It was actually 2019. We regret the error.

Listen to the podcast, or watch the episode on YouTube.

Links

Me on the Cars movies

Jerry L. Bryant and Barbara Fifer, Deadwood’s Al Swearingen (sic): Manifest Evil in the Gem Theater

Matthew Bernstein, George Hearst: Silver King of the Gilded Age

Ron Soodatler, “Who Was the Real George Hearst?”

Legends of America, “Al Swearengen & the Notorious Gem Theater”

David K. Whitlock, “HBO’s Deadwood — The Facts and the Fiction.”

Me and Rob on Deadwood, Season 1 through Season 2, Episode 2

Me and Rob on Deadwood, Season 2

Me and Rob on Deadwood, Season 3

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Rob Henderson joins me to talk about Season 3 of Deadwood.

Rob and I decided to not do any research on the real life story of Deadwood or the making of the series until we finished all three seasons and the movie. So here we debate whether the Season 3 finale was meant to be the end, or there were loose threads that were meant to be picked up in Season 4.

I bring up the question of whether we should care about the survival of the town of Deadwood from the outside looking in. Objectively speaking, it’s a place that is controlled by criminal elements, filled with drunk men who brawl with and shoot at each other, and where family life barely exists. Nonetheless, the viewer does care about the survival of Deadwood against outside forces, for fundamentally conservative reasons. We sympathize with the residents because we’ve come to know them.

Once again, the theme of the show this season reflects mid-2000s liberalism. Degrees of racism or sexism aren’t what separate the good characters from the bad ones. Rather, the message is that too much concentrated capital is the enemy, reflecting normie Hollywood values of the time.

The series does an excellent job of showing complex, flawed individuals. Unlike most period pieces we might see today, the characters are unapologetically products of their time, and their shortcoming are taken on their own terms, not used to lecture the modern viewer. The fact that Deadwood ended after just three seasons makes me already look back on the show like I would a friend who was taken before his time.

Listen here or watch the video on YouTube.

Links

Me and Rob on Deadwood, Season 1 and Season 2: E1 & E2 and Season 2

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Rob is back to talk about Deadwood, this time through the end of Season 2.

We discuss Al’s development, comparing it to that of Tolliver. We also spend a strange amount of time on whether white actors can still say the N-Word, a debate that we do not settle here.

Rob and I also discuss the show evolving from one about personalities to a political thriller.

One thing we both love about Deadwood is how it avoids sugarcoating life in an earlier era. Rob mentions that the women get their dresses dirty while walking about, something I hadn’t noticed before. The scenes of illness, death, and even Al pissing in his chamberpot serve as reminders of the hard realities of existence before modern amenities. We talk about ways that the show might even go further, and what we are looking forward to seeing in the final season and movie.

See our previous conversation here. Listen to our latest discussion here, or watch it on YouTube.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.richardhanania.com/subscribe

Rob Henderson joins me to talk about Deadwood. Our conversation covers all of Season 1, and Season 2, Episodes 1 and 2.

I enjoyed discussing what makes Al Swearengen an anti-hero and whether he or Bullock is the main character of the show. The golden age of TV was really the golden age of anti-heroes, each show centering around a charismatic figure, and both Rob and I agree that Deadwood is among the best from the era that we’ve seen.

Having recently read Henrich and interviewed him on the CSPI podcast, I’ve been conceiving of the Old West, despite its reputation for chaos and dysfunction, as demonstrating how deeply embedded WEIRD morality was in nineteenth century America. Here were communities coming together and forming under what were basically anarchic conditions, often threatened by Indians.

Nonetheless, out of nothing, and with no laws to rely on, Americans of the Old West built houses, communities, churches, saloons, and much else of what we consider hallmarks of a modern society. They created rudimentary political institutions that were relatively well-functioning and non-exploitative, before being incorporated into the US. This isn’t something that should be taken for granted.

Rob points out something I’d missed, which is that thus far the pimps in the show are arguably monogamous, or monogam-ish. I push back a little bit on the point, but if Rob is right, it fits into WEIRD morality, although maybe we’re reading too much into this, even if it’s true.

One of the things that makes this show unique is its willingness to portray its main characters committing violence against women. Even anti-heroes like Tony Soprano and Don Draper tend not to do that. But Deadwood doesn’t flinch from showing what relations between the sexes were like in the distant past.

Other topics we discuss include:

* How the show addresses race, and why racist characters always tend to be the dumb ones.

* The show’s portrayal of euthanasia, and how it backs up what I said in my article on people’s moral intuitions regarding when to end human suffering.

* Mancur Olson’s idea of the Stationary Bandit and how it explains the behavior of characters in the show.

* The attitude taken towards religion and its relationship with science as a Bush-era relic.

You can listen here or watch the video on YouTube.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.richardhanania.com/subscribe

This Christmas Eve, I’m giving my readers the gift of a very special podcast. Marc Andreessen and Rob Henderson join me to talk about The Shield, which ran on FX from 2002 to 2008.

We debate whether we are supposed to root for the Strike Team or not, with Rob saying no, and Marc and me strongly disagreeing. Building on our discussions on Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, Marc gives his Nietzschean interpretation of the show.

To me, this was the most right-wing show I’ve ever seen. The lesson is basically that white cops who actually care about what happens on the streets are the only thing maintaining order, which they are able to do as long as they are not stopped by affirmative action, criminal defense lawyers, or the weakness and inertia of government. While the Strike Team does bad things, their actions are, for most of the series at least, directed towards protecting the innocent and ultimately the greater good. Sam Bankman-Fried would approve.

Marc discusses the show in the context of the history of policing in Los Angeles, and posits that places go through cycles in which crime increases, and there is then a demand for someone to keep order. I point out that some civil liberties that many Americans think are a deep part of our heritage were actually invented by the Supreme Court in the 1960s, including criminals having the right to a court-appointed attorney and being read their Miranda rights. I see The Shield as critiquing the pro-criminal jurisprudence of the Warren Court, and making clear its practical consequences. A lesson seems to be that the reason crime hasn’t been even worse is that certain cops are willing to disobey the letter and spirit of the law, at great personal risk, for the sake of protecting their community.

People have said the show is based on the Ramparts scandal. Having read the New Yorker piece that Marc suggests, I think that there’s no more than a superficial resemblance. Nonetheless, the article is worth reading, as it shows the interconnectedness between crime, the civil rights machines, and affirmative action in policing. The most corrupt cops were tied to gang bangers, and when one of them was killed by a fellow police officer in what is widely acknowledged to have been a justified shooting, the association of black officers demanded “an official police funeral with full honors, a ceremony reserved for policemen killed in the line of duty.” Civil rights law demanded more black cops, quotas were set, and when those hired turned out to be corrupt, that fact became the basis for civil rights lawsuits filed on behalf of criminals! There’s no part of the criminal justice system that isn’t touched by the cancer of identity politics.

Part of our discussion centers around Mara. I found her arc particularly touching. We of course talk about the ending, which hit me harder than any show I can remember watching.

As we all acknowledge, the Strike Team is far from morally blameless. But I still think that, as tragic as their story was or how many mistakes they made, they lived by a code, and were ultimately the defenders of a divided and ungrateful community.

Listen here or watch our conversation on YouTube.

Links

Me and Marc Andreessen discuss Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad

Me, Marc Andreessen, and Chris Nicholson on the series finale of Better Call Saul

Randall Sullivan, Labyrinth: Corruption & Vice in the L.A.P.D.

Peter Boyer, “Bad Cops.” (The New Yorker, May 13, 2001)

LAPD Blues (Frontline Documentary)

James Elroy, LA Confidential.

James Elroy, White Jazz.

Tim Golden, “The Cienfuegos Affair: Inside the Case that Upended the Drug War in Mexico.” (The New York Times, December 8, 2022)

Rob Henderson, “Good Cop and Bad Cop Left for the Day. I’m a Different Kind of Cop.”

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Rob is back to talk about the last episode of Season 2 of The White Lotus. We agree that one of the main lessons of the series has been a general pessimism towards monogamy. The question of whether healthy and fulfilling marriages are even possible is still an open question, perhaps to be taken up in Season 3.

Near the end, we agree that Cameron and Daphne are the most complex and interesting characters of this season. I analogize their personalities to that of Trump, in how they often combine extreme honesty and dishonesty in the same statement.

Listen to the discussion here or watch on YouTube.

Links

Me and Rob Henderson on The White Lotus, Season 1

Me and Rob on The White Lotus, Season 2, Episodes 1-4

Me and Rob on The White Lotus, Season 2, Episodes 5-6

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.richardhanania.com/subscribe