Villainy Is Always More Interesting

HBO’s Succession, a binge-worthy cast of deplorables. Art composite by The Ringer.

Tony Soprano, Walter White, Iago–Satan himself–and now the Roy Family. Stories about devilish characters and reprehensible behavior always seem so hard to resist. HBO’s Succession is the latest version of a cringe-worthy but binge-worthy show, full of wealthy rogues backstabbing each other as they scramble to the top of a multimedia empire. I’m embarrassed to love it. Why is such villainy fascinating?

Lifestyles of the Spoon-Fed and Conniving

Succession debuted as a drama in 2019, sliding in under the radar between the ignominious end of Game of Thrones and the rise of The Crown. It won a slew of Emmys, though I’d never heard of it when I was flipping channels at my brother’s house last month on vacation, when I had extra time on my hands. The story circles around 83-year-old Logan Roy (Brian Cox), head of the Waystar media conglomerate, who ought to be aging out of his role and passing the torch on to one of his children. But he refuses to go, even though the shareholders clamor for a succession plan and he experiences episodes of physical and mental frailty. Logan is vicious, duplicitous, domineering, and as vulgar as a recent ex-President, full of quips like: “Would you like to hear my favorite passage from Shakespeare? Take the fucking money.”

Logan’s favorite word is money, but his second favorite word is family, which is the problem. He’s one of those people who constantly espouses family values while in the next breath belittling, snarling, and smacking down–literally–his adult children. He’s raised them in his image, so none of them has the right combination of intelligence, courage, or work ethic (never mind integrity) to run an $18 billion dollar enterprise. Waystar is a unique entity: think Fox plus Disney, Republican-leaning jingoistic news combined with theme parks and cruises. Someone has even created a real twitter account for the fake theme park with bizarre but hilarious tweets:

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Logo-philia

Def: Noun
1. a love of words

Large open book with magnifying glass
My 25 lb OED requires a magnifying glass to see the citations. Photo by kajmeister.

I was trying to understand the roots of the words gymnastics, which came from the Greek gymnasium. Was it a word about activity? A place where you do activity, or with the body, perhaps? I was given another word gymnanthous which was defined further as achlamydeous, and I vented that this was the problem with dictionaries. You look up a word, and it hyper-links to another word you don’t know and so on. (Achlamydeous=having neither calyx nor corolla). Like googling websites, you link and link, and suddenly it was a rabbit hole that ate up a half hour of your day.

Yet, it was glorious, wasn’t it?

Apparently, I’m not alone. When I put this on social media, I found that I know many people who get starry-eyed at the thought of dictionaries, many who used to thumb through them at leisure, and some who own them. My People! (They also are quite fond of buttered toast, but who isn’t?)

dictionary close-up
Through the magnifying glass of my OED. Photo by kajmeister.
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Alphabetically Exhausting

Design by CNN.

I didn’t want to write today’s post because there’s no letter involved.

Amateur! hissed the little voice inside me. Best you just abandon your website! Can’t even toss off a self-centered little entry about writing? Don’t you have any self-respect at all? Even the little voice was unpersuasive. Fatigue ran through my body. Guts burned. Hackles raised.

I redoubled my efforts, reminding myself that I’d done it before and could do it again. Just when I felt my creative engine restarting, however, despair loomed again. Keep going, I told myself. Little efforts will make a difference. Mountains of ideas seemed to float just out of reach, though. None seemed to land where I wanted. One tantalized me, just up there…. Possibly in my grasp, but no. Quite out of reach.

Ridiculous, this notion of automatic writing. Suppose I did come up with an idea? Then, how do I sustain it? Unless there’s some sort of core backbone, I don’t know how to move from the beginning to the middle. Voids open up in the plot. Where does it end, and how do I keep from repeating myself? Xerox copies of previous sentences seem to be the best I can muster. Yet, I soldier on. Zombies are banging at the door, but…. wait how did zombies get in here?

See how easy that is?

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