For four seasons now, HBO Succession it gave people something to tweet about on a Sunday night. Everyone, it seems, is obsessed with the Roys. With the finale airing on Sunday, it would appear that the big tent party is about to end. That’s not entirely the case. On line, Succession screengrabs, quotes, and references dominate the discourse in a way that isn’t likely to fade anytime soon. Through the memes of him, Succession he is already tiptoeing into eternity.
Evidence of the show’s memeization is everywhere, from the pickets from the Writers Guild of America hits your Twitter timeline every time a rich person does something stupid. It’s a testament to the quality of the writing and the show’s specific style that nearly every episode delivers an all-time joke, the perfect kind for a GIF or picture macro. Creator Jesse Armstrong previously made the sweaty, deranged British comedy Peep Showand clearly still hungry for the kind of singularly flawed jokes that are ideal meme fodder.
The Simpsons’ online domination can be attributed to its bizarre and random predictive powers and the fact that it’s always nice to see Homer sink into a shrub. When The Sopranos gained new relevance during the pandemic, THE New York Times Magazine discussed that it had been the show’s capture of America’s national decline—”a humiliating slow-motion slide down a hill into a puddle of dirt”—that had given it online resonance. Successionalso , it seems destined to live in our hearts online. But what story will the memes of him tell?
Maris Kreizman is a writer and podcaster who sums up the show on Twitter encouraging people to “tagged in tonight’s episode.” She traces the adoration of him to a season 2 episode about Vaulter, a fictional Gawker/Vice-like entity whom the Roys whimsically destroy. “Kendall fires the entire staff, and then goes into a cellar, steals a pack of batteries, and then throws the batteries in the trash,” summarizes Kreizman. “Having dealt with multiple media companies who treat their employees like trash, I had never identified with an inanimate object like I did with that pack of batteries.” She tagged herself as the batteries and then continued tagging.
Interestingly, Kreizman isn’t the only one Succession meme maker to say the destruction of Vaulter was the moment they fell in love. Perhaps counterintuitively, SuccessionThe portrayal of how the digital media industry works as cutthroat and mindless has actually motivated real digital media workers to actively engage with the online show.
Writing for Polygon, Gita Jackson described the show’s online fan community as “fiercely dedicated” to the fates of these fictional lives and credited that dedication to an important line: “On platforms like Twitter and Tumblr, fans of the show go over the trailers frame by frame and discuss their hopes and dreams for the characters. Despite being a show about ruthless capitalists, some of whom supported a fascist presidential candidate, the way all of the characters were so hurt by their abusive father makes it easy for the audience to empathize with them.
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