"Succession" Recap: 2016 Revisited
Democracy goes out the window in "America Decides"—an election episode in which America does not, in fact, decide.
In 2016, during the lead-up to the presidential election, I was bitterly convinced that Donald Trump was going to win the election, so much so that I began taking bets. If you believed that Clinton would take the presidency, I would propose a wager, willing to stake my money on the victory of a proto-fascist business clown. To be clear, itt wasn’t out of love for the man—I find Trump to be a vile creature. It was instead out of a contempt for U.S. politics; I was utter convinced (and in utter despair) that the American populace would rather elect a firebrand businessman than a status quo politician. So I went about making bets with anyone willing. This eventually came to be too much: I came to feel that my actions were immoral, that profiting off the back of a toxic figure was itself toxic. Just before the election took place, I took back all the bets. I wanted to believe that America could be better.
For me, watching “America Decides,” was an act of reliving all the cynicism, despair, and latent optimism that pervaded my experience of 2016. It is a distressing and revelatory hour of television, one that leans into the otherworldly emotions of watching Trump’s election. Yet the episode is never a parody of that time, and one need only look at the episode’s two presidential candidates to see that this is the case. Daniel Jiménez (Elliot Villar), a bland, status-quo Democrat, feels like the kind of Texan-Latino liberal who could emerge as a presidential frontrunner in years to come. Jeryd Mencken (Justin Kirk), on the other hand, is a handsome demagogue with an insidious smile, and seems like the kind of outright fascist dwelling in the fringes of the Republican party. Neither character invokes any specific politician, yet they still feel palpably real.
The election begins with Tom and Greg, ATN’s own Disgusting Brothers, nervously preparing the network for their big night—what Roman will later dub “a night of good TV.” Tom is a trainwreck, freaking out at the prospect of election night coverage and screaming at ATN employees when a newscaster’s touchscreen breaks down. Greg finds himself “busted back down to Greg” for the night, i.e. becoming Tom’s coffee-and-cocaine delivery boy. The siblings, meanwhile, are secluded upstairs away from the newsroom battlefield—an old Logan policy prohibits brass on the floor. It doesn’t really make any difference: They bully Tom over the phone, and eventually make their way onto the floor to bully him in person.
Everything about the night is insanity, so when news of a fire at a Milwaukee voting center enters the discourse, you can feel the narrative snap into focus. The source of the fire is unknown (Nazis? Antifa? Electrical failure?), but one thing is clear: 100,000 ballots have been lost in the chaos—enough lost votes to make the state lean Mencken. Although one could easily surmise that the absentee ballots would lean Democrat. ATN’s election expert “Decision Desk” Darwin (played by the great Adam Godley) surmises as much, and is quite discomfited at the thought of calling Wisconsin in Mencken’s favor.
But who’s counting? Roman in particular is giddy at the anti-democracy of it all, and not just because he’s a born fascist. Roman had already established a rapport with Mencken in last season’s “What It Takes,” and he here receives a new promise: help elect Mencken as president, and he’ll help in their plan to block the GoJo sale. Naturally, Shiv is incensed at Roman’s behavior. Part of this is because she’s a good liberal, but part of it is also self-interest. She’s still a Matsson spy, and a laissez-faire Jiménez presidency would greatly serve these interests—he’d waive the GoJo deal right on through. With Roman and Shiv on opposite ends of the political spectrum, everything comes down to Kendall, who remains tragically non-committal. He well understands the consequences of electing a demagogue to power (he’s already having his family tailed by private security after his daughter was harassed by Ravenhead racists), but he also knows that Mencken is good for business. The prospect of a president who could shortcut their Matsson problem is a tantalizing one, even if it means putting millions of Americans at risk.
Torn between morality and soullessness, Kendall punts the decision off to Darwin, who quickly fall prey to Roman’s charms. Roman convinces him to call Wisconsin with the promise that he can “explain” the decision live on the air—and that’s that. He gets to be on live TV! Who wouldn’t accept a bit of unethical journalism! These bribery tactics work just as well with Connor. Understanding that his nonexistent chances for Kentucky have gone down the drain, he decides to throw in his lot with Mencken (to “concede in Mencken’s direction”) in exchange for a Slovenian ambassadorship. The concession speech that results from this—featuring crazed references to unnamed running mates, the Conheads, and a “corrupt bipartisan system zombie”—is a glorious culmination of Connor Roy’s farcical four-season character arc.
The presidency boils down to a competition for Arizona—and the votes are going red. With Wisconsin already called (“pending call” reads the title card), ATN is essentially boxed in on calling the whole thing for Mencken. This decision would effectively solidify Mencken’s win, but rather than take that thought with the weight it deserves, the CE-bros are bickering like five-year-olds. Roman wants to call it and get it over with; Kendall wants to pump the brakes. Roman accuses Kendall of pulling a big brother: “Like, when you want roast chicken, and I wanted steak, we always had chicken.” Kendall’s response puts the childishness of this accusation in context: “So because we had so much chicken when we were kids, I have to elect a fascist?” Roman, an utter nihilist, doesn’t care: “Nothing fucking matters. Dad’s dead, and the country’s just a big pussy waiting to get fucked.” It’s one of the few times that Roman has ever truly opened himself up, yet all it does is reveal a black pit where his heart should be.
It rightly terrifies Kendall, and even with his dedication to blocking the GoJo sale, he can’t help but turn to his sister as last-ditch moral support. He makes his own honest confessions: He tells her about his interest in running the company by himself, the threat he feels from the relationship between Roman and Mencken, his fears over being a bad father by electing a demagogue. This last bit is a particular sticking point: he believes that his father’s poison has bled into him. It’s a shockingly intimate moment for Kendall, and Shiv responds with a sister’s comforting words: “You’ve tried, and that’s all you can do.”
All those words are for naught, however, as Shiv makes one final betrayal. She promises Kendall she’ll make one last call to Nate in the hopes that Jiménez might bend on the GoJo deal. That call that never gets through, and instead of owning up to that, she comes back with blustering lies. She tells him that Jiménez is “willing to think about it”—Kendall immediately smells the bullshit. He calls up Nate himself, and upon learning the truth pushes it further, interrogating Greg, who informs him about Shiv’s little business dalliance with Matsson. Kendall is furious, not least because of her fake words of comfort: “I fucking asked you some real questions, Shiv—I wondered why you looked like a goose trying to shit a house brick, you piece of dirt!” And with this fury, Kendall joins Roman on his Menckenist crusade. Shiv stammers some words of protest about the future of the United States, but Roman brushes her aside. Her betrayal seals the deal, and a fascist becomes president.
It’s difficult to describe the terror that episode director Andrij Parekh delivers in the scene where Mencken arrives onstage to announce his presidency. It doesn’t feel realistic, exactly—it’s hard to imagine a president-elect ever calling the responsibility of the oval office “awesome.” But then again, it was impossible to imagine Trump’s presidency until it actually happened, and so too does it feel like the world is ending when Mencken’s demonic smile lights up the screen. His acceptance speech is downright villainous, with remarks about welfare queens, a scorched marketplace, and, scariest of all, purity: “Don’t we long sometimes for something clean once in this polluted land? That’s what I hope to bring. Not something grubby with compromise. Something clean and true and refreshing. Something proud and pure.” It’s the most explicit right-wing nationalism that Succession has ever seen—and it is chilled me to the bone.
Everyone has their own method of coping. Tom wants to get a historian to come up on ATN news to reassure everyone that “this sort of thing has happened in the past, and it’ll all be fine.” Roman is proudly nihilistic, smiling at the arrival of a fellow power-grubber in the oval office. Shiv is aghast, teaming with Matsson to plot violent retribution against her fascist-anointed brothers. Kendall, towering above them all, delivers a line that would make his father proud: “He’s a guy we can do business with.” In each of them I felt a twinge of recognition: a reminder of the cynicism, guilt, and denial in watching Trump’s election; a reminder of my desperate need to believe in a system that I knew was failing. The intensity of these emotions—the sort that I thought I had left behind six years ago—is what makes “America Decides” a masterpiece of satirical television.
Notes and Quotes
So much greatness in this episode means I didn’t even get to mention that Shiv finally confesses her pregnancy to Tom! And he doesn’t even believe her! He is coked out of his mind, admittedly, and it comes after a pretty horrific argument in which Tom lightly accuses Shiv of “sort of” killing her father. And then, just when you thought that was the worst insult a husband could ever deliver, he doubts he when she tells him about their unborn child. “Is that even true?” he asks a thunderstruck Shiv, “or is that like a new position or a tactic?” (He does have his historical reasons for disbelieving her claims, but still.) It may very well be the single most devastating marital moment ever put on television—and we just got off last week’s balcony argument.
It’s notable that Kendall’s assistant Jess, a person of color who has been largely in the background of the series, gets her first real character moment in an episode where the Roys bring a fascist to power. When Greg is about to press the button on calling the election, she suggests that he stay away, and understandably so: the consequences of a Mencken election for her are much higher than for Roy billionaires.
Even Matsson, Swedish incel extraordinaire, knows how utterly catastrophic this election is. The emphasis he puts on the syllables in “crayyyy – zeeee” tell us all we need to know.
The scene in which Roman and Mencken plot a backstage insurrection is bone-chilling. It’s reminsicent of Trump’s insurrection plotting, but with significantly more intention. “If I lose, I want it correctly characterized as a huge victory,” Mencken demands of Roman, who is more than happy to abide. He offers up a headline: “Insurgent campaign unfairly maligned as extremist by the coastal masturbation factories.”
Mark Ravenhead finally gets to deliver his Tucker Carlson speech in this episode, allowing actor Zack Robidas the chance to really cook. It’s a furious right-wing rant, with Ravenhead bringing up “polls which undercount support for traditional values,” and “crazies who heard they were underperforming and decided to stop the counting and destroy the evidence.”
With the GoJo sale putting their careers in jeopardy, Frank, Karl, and Hugo are yakking it up for what could be the last time. They watch the presidential engagement with a detached cynicism. Hugo in particular gets a funny line against an eminently boring Jiménez: “Flop your dick out! Pop a nut! Do something!”
The scene in which Darwin gets wasabi in his eyes is only funny because of Nicholas Braun. Greg douses Darwin’s eyes with lemon La Croix, then loudly proclaims “It’s not that lemony!” to a shocked audience.
Another great Greg line comes when he recounts his weird night with Matsson: “I danced with an old man. He didn’t want to dance, but they made us dance—he was so confused. I drank things that aren’t normally drinks!”
Tom berating Greg for not getting him a coffee is truly a thing to behold: “If I get drowsy, and I miscall Colorado—instability! Then the U.S. loses credibility, China spots an opportunity and invades Taiwan. Tactical nukes. Fucking shit goes kablooey, and we’re back to amoeba! It’s a long way back from pond life, all because you failed to get me a double shot!”
Tom pressuring Greg to snort cocaine is equally magnificent: “It’s medically good for your brain—it is! What are you saying, all Aztecs are stupid? Don’t be a racist little bitch about it!”
I can’t stop with these Tom quotes. Here’s one where he forces Greg to get him a meal: “Tonight, my digestive system is basically part of the constitution! [Order me] microwaved milk and ginger shots, American bottled water, spaghetti and olive oil.” (Quite the meal, Tom.)
Connor returns from last week’s ambassadorship competition to drop some of the best rhymes of all time: “Organize a little coup, down in old Peru? Put me in a van to Tajikistan? Couldn’t I just be our fun guy in Uruguay?”
“It just makes an election so much more interesting when you’re in it!”
“I’m going to take a shit, in the bathroom. Want me to livestream it?”