Do you agree this article makes Jeremy Strong look like a d!ck?

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Bob Jersey

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Dec 14, 2021, 9:45:23 AM12/14/21
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Lots of social snotting over it, leading the "Succession" costar's buds to defend him.


B

PGage

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Dec 14, 2021, 10:29:56 AM12/14/21
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It is interesting how quickly so many bug names rushed to his defense, which smacks of people who were primary or background sources not wanting to be on the bad side if an actor on the rise.

Matthew Belloni wrote about this a few days ago in his newsletter:

“No disrespect to Sorkin, but who is he kidding? It seems that Aaron (and Adam McKay, Anne Hathaway and other “defenders”) are responding more to Twitter snark than Michael Shulman’s actual profile, which details Strong’s odd process and occasional obsequiousness with objective facts and on-the-record interviews. Have celebrity profiles become so flaccid and publicist-approved that when a writer reveals something not 100 percent flattering, the whole town freaks out? Let’s calm down. Nobody is refusing to work with Jeremy Strong, and this New Yorker piece probably secured him a second Emmy.”   

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PGage

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Dec 14, 2021, 10:40:50 AM12/14/21
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Meanwhile, while I am a huge fan of Adam McKay’s semi serious films, I am not really on board with Succession. The last two episodes of season 3 were mildly entertaining, but the series overall to me is only slightly above average. It reads like an SNL “Satire” sketch which simply has an actor in make up and repeat almost verbatim some of the more absurd things a real public figure (Chris Cuomo, Brett Kavanaugh, Sean Spicer, etc). It can be entertaining (I really liked Matt Damon) but it is hardly deep or cutting satire. 

The people in Succession are so horrible that I find it difficult to care even a little about what happens to any of them.

On Tue, 14 Dec 2021 at 6:45 AM 'Bob Jersey' via TVorNotTV <tvor...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
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David Bruggeman

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Dec 14, 2021, 11:13:25 AM12/14/21
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Meanwhile, Brian Cox is on the record (well, on Late Night with Seth, H/T THR - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCuQ5btB8wc), about his concerns that Strong may suffer for all his method acting.

David



Bob Jersey

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Dec 14, 2021, 11:24:30 AM12/14/21
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They didn't thrill me much when they appeared en masse on Colbert...     B

PGage, to moi, in part, Dec 14th:

Adam Bowie

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Dec 14, 2021, 11:35:01 AM12/14/21
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I'm not entirely sure that this is the worst profile in the world. Is Jeremy Strong a "Method" actor - so it seems. But then so are people like Daniel Day Lewis and Al Pacino - both heavily referenced in the piece. If I were an actor, would I find him difficult to work with? Undoubtedly. But, you know, actors...

I suspect that from Strong's perspective, and Aaron Sorkin's, it's really about whether he conveys a "difficult to work with" vibe that prevents him from getting things. I suspect that won't be the case, and he'll be in plenty of projects with awards considerations in the future.

As for this season of Succession? I've got to say that I thought it was a triumph. I don't think that there's better writing anywhere in television, and the performances - even the outlandish ones from the likes of Kieren Culkin (Roman) and Nicholas Braun (cousin Greg) - are actually quite nuanced. The family feels very real, with the entitled kids falling over one another to backstab each other at various points. The story is very contemporary, and while there are odd episodes that veer close to farce (the AGM episode or the 40th birthday party), there's a direction that feels right all the way through. The characters are now so well embedded in our minds that we know if they're behaving as we would expect them to: Kendall spiraling out of control through his addictions; Roman's self-destructive elements that appear every time he does something "right"; Connor's utter lack of any kind of self-realisation; Shiv's failure to truly understand her father and her indifference to her unloved husband - that has viciously come back to bite her.

These are all truly awful people, yet I love spending time with them. I have to return to the writing again and again - Lady Caroline directly using a line that the entitled former British MP Alan Clarke once introduced us to in his diaries when he spoke of a colleague who had made his money more recently as having had to "buy his own furniture." In other words, he was 'new money,' and 'old money' looks down on 'new money.'

It's easily my favourite TV series of 2021. 


Adam

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Kevin M.

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Dec 14, 2021, 12:18:19 PM12/14/21
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I don’t know enough about the actor in question to have an opinion, but having been around “method” actors, every single one of them is an amplified level of annoying. I concede the end result can be stellar work, but there are other roads to get to that destination. 

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PGage

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Dec 14, 2021, 5:11:49 PM12/14/21
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 Don’t thin the piece is that negative at all, but I suspect Strong thought it was, and let his friends know to push back.

Can you at all out into words what it is you like about spending time with them? I keep wondering if I am just looking at it the wrong way. I just detest the people, and am not charmed by the snappy dialogue- and particularly do not find Roman funny or endearing.


Adam Bowie

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Dec 14, 2021, 7:00:34 PM12/14/21
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On Tue, Dec 14, 2021 at 10:11 PM PGage <pga...@gmail.com> wrote:

Can you at all out into words what it is you like about spending time with them? I keep wondering if I am just looking at it the wrong way. I just detest the people, and am not charmed by the snappy dialogue- and particularly do not find Roman funny or endearing.


Objectively, they are all awful people. But that's not what I'm always looking for from a show. You're not supposed to like these characters. But you are supposed to believe in them. And they're drawn richly enough that I do. Indeed what this show is brilliant at is making me interested in these otherwise terrible people. That's hard to do. Sure, we've had anti-heroes forever. It's even become a bit of a TV cliché - from Tony Soprano to Vic Mackey in The Shield to Walter White in Breaking Bad. But those shows are about us kinda liking the bad boys. This is something different. 

Strangely, these feel as real a bunch of TV characters that I can think of in any show ever. That comes through in the writing and the top-notch performances. There are awkward silences; there are bits of dialogue that are incoherent and don't feel as though a writer has written them (although for the most part, they very much have). Literally every character feels properly fleshed out, and not just a means to an end. And the show repeatedly leaves massive gaps in telling us exactly what's going on. We have to work to keep up - it doesn't hold our hands. and you just don't get exposition dialogue lazily dumped on us. We're treated like adults. It's a show that you absolutely cannot be scrolling through your phone while you watch it - not if you want to fully appreciate it anyway.

Part of my love of Succession is certainly the sphere they operate in. Media has become so dominant in recent years, and I have always been obsessed with it. Here's a fictional company that has at its heart a Fox News-alike channel that from their perspective is just a means to an end to make money. And the characters know it intrinsically, but just don't care. On this week's episode, one of the throwaway lines spoke of turning on the "bigot spigot" when referencing their news channel, and their happiness in getting into bed with extreme right wingers. Sadly, it's vastly more authentic than, say, ACN in Aaron Sorkin's The Newsroom - a show that itself could have been designed perfectly for me. Literally just this week, Fox News has lost Chris Wallace, coming just a couple of weeks after their streaming sibling turned up the "bigot spigot" to the max with Tucker Carlson's "documentary."

Another reason for me loving the show is that you can follow a pretty clear through narrative from the British show, The Thick of It (from which the movie In the Loop, was a spin-off), through Veep and then finally to Succession. Jesse Armstrong, who created Succession, worked as a writer on the previous two shows, both created by the peerless Armando Ianucci. While the former two are easily classifiable as comedies, I'm not sure exactly where I'd place Succession, and it's probably reductive to attempt to define it clearly as a  "drama" or a "comedy." It's definitely not a "comedy-drama" either. But it does have much more humour - and frankly, more laugh out loud moments, for me anyway, than most "comedies" I watch on TV. But Malcolm Tucker on The Thick of It and Selena Myers in Veep were pretty obnoxious too. I lapped them up.

I suppose I can sit at arm's length from these characters and be enormously superior about their incestuous behaviours, and yet there's the dawning realisation that this really isn't that far removed from reality. It's going to be interesting to see Adam McKay's new movie, Don't Look Up, which from reviews, seems to be covering related ground, in perhaps a more slapstick manner.

On another level entirely, one of my favourite film genres is the screwball comedy - especially those of the 30s and 40s. Howard Hawks' Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday are comfortably inside my top ten films of all time. Now what Succession doesn't have, which are essential ingredients in a screwball is a love story at the heart of them. Characters have relationships in Succession, but there's little in the way of love. However, both have lines delivered at 100 miles an hour, with lines that pass by so fast that you almost have to re-watch them to catch them.

One final note on the Jeremy Strong thing - I thought this piece by The Guardian's Hadley Freeman, who herself interviewed Strong ahead of the start of this season, was very fair, and on the money - https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/dec/10/madness-in-their-method-have-we-fallen-out-of-love-with-actorly-excess


Adam

PGage

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Dec 14, 2021, 8:42:59 PM12/14/21
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Thanks so much Adam for taking the time to provide me with such a thoughtful and articulate response. I have asked the same question in several other places on the internet, and have only gotten some form of “if you don’t like this show your an idiot!” I guess that’s why, in a nutshell, I have enjoyed this group for so long.

It’s interesting that many of the things you identified about your context I would second. I loved The Thick of It, and Veep of course, and can’t get enough of Carey Grant or Katharine Hepburn rapid firing delicious wise crack filled dialogue. While the Roys and the real life people they represent are horrible, they are somewhat less horrible than the killers, psychopaths and human traffickers in the Sopranos. I guess I just don’t hear the high quality dialog in Succession - instead I hear dialogue that wants to be classic and smart, but, for me, isn’t terribly. 

It’s not that I have to like the characters in a show, but I do have to care what happens to them, and I find I just don’t give a damn whether Ivanka or Eric or Don Jr wins this weeks power struggle, and I don’t care about their spouses or their cousins or the horse they rode in on. I am interested in media as well, but I don’t count what Murdoch does as actual media.

I don’t hate the show; I’ve seen every episode, and enjoyed some significantly, and most at least a little. But not only would I not nominate it as one of the best shows of the year, I would not put it on my list of the top 25 of the 21st century.

It is odd for me though, because it feels like a show that is being aimed at me. A lot of my friends and family members, who have similar tastes in popular entertainment as I do, LOVE the show, and want to do long water cooler deep dives into it with me in chats and tweets the next day, and mostly I can’t be bothered to do much more than grouse about how much I dislike having to be around those people for another hour.

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Doug Eastick

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Dec 14, 2021, 10:04:24 PM12/14/21
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Well... now you guys are gonna make me try and watch this show.   Adam, kudos to you on that answer.

I think I have all the episodes of that series stored on my Betamax, but have failed to ever make the time to start watching it.



Dave Sikula

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Dec 15, 2021, 4:39:23 AM12/15/21
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I've watched every episode, but am out after this season's finale, since I just don't care enough about the characters or their travails. It's not dissimilar to "Billions" for me, and not in the sense that the characters are stupid-rich. It's that the showrunners have a limited number of plots and each episode and season boils down to mixing them up in different combinations as this one and that one try to screw over someone else.

Rinse and repeat.

My wife finds the show hilarious and actually gets mad at me for not liking it, but I don't see the appeal at all.

As for Strong (who, interestingly -- and not surprisingly, given this article (of which I don't doubt a word, even if it is in The New Yorker) -- was the only actor not to do that Colbert show) anyone who is relying on dubious "talents" like Sorkin (who knows as much about acting as he does about writing) and Chastain (who, from my observations, is batshit crazy) is in deep, deep trouble.

I even had to wonder if, in order to really feel what Kendall went through, he got himself sky-high and killed someone just to be able to play it.

--Dave Sikula

PGage

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Dec 15, 2021, 7:54:41 AM12/15/21
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Which reminds me, as illustrated in the piece, few things are funnier than British actors ridiculing American method actors,

On Wed, 15 Dec 2021 at 1:39 AM 'Dave Sikula' via TVorNotTV <tvor...@googlegroups.com> wrote: (SNIP)
As for Strong….I even had to wonder if, in order to really feel what Kendall went through, he got himself sky-high and killed someone just to be able to play it.

--Dave Sikula

On Tuesday, December 14, 2021 at 4:00:34 PM UTC-8 Adam Bowie wrote:
On Tue, Dec 14, 2021 at 10:11 PM PGage <pga...@gmail.com> wrote:

Can you at all out into words what it is you like about spending time with them? I keep wondering if I am just looking at it the wrong way. I just detest the people, and am not charmed by the snappy dialogue- and particularly do not find Roman funny or endearing.


Objectively, they are all awful people. But that's not what I'm always looking for from a show. You're not supposed to like these characters. But you are supposed to believe in them. And they're drawn richly enough that I do. Indeed what this show is brilliant at is making me interested in these otherwise terrible people. That's hard to do. Sure, we've had anti-heroes forever. It's even become a bit of a TV cliché - from Tony Soprano to Vic Mackey in The Shield to Walter White in Breaking Bad. But those shows are about us kinda liking the bad boys. This is something different. 


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