CN: I talk about the first three episodes of Succession, so there are some spoilers. Also, mentions of groping and parental sexual assault.

This last semester, I’ve been teaching a course on global Shakespeare adaptations. (If any of my students are reading this — hi! Well done on getting your essays in!) There’s one thing that I told my students that I, and they, and many others tend to do while watching any adaptation, remediation, or reworking of any Shakespeare play: we look for the beats.

We expect any Shakespeare adaptation to hit particular beats in the play(s) it seeks to respond to — this scene riffs off the ghost appearing to Hamlet. This is like when Old Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane. Did anyone catch the intertextual references there? We are constantly, always, subconsciously looking for the beats — looking for the remnants, the germ of the play in the adaptations we watch. We’re looking for how they are reimagined, juxtaposed, subverted, and presented to us as audience members. Aha! I see what you did there.

I have started watching Succession during this lockdown (to the ‘omg I can’t believe you haven’t watched it yet’ crowd, no one cares about your faux outrage). I’ve done my best to studiously avoid spoilers, but the one thing that I haven’t missed is how it supposedly echoes aspects of King Lear. Just google ‘succession king lear hbo’ and here’s what you get:

We’re watching for the beats, aren’t we? The template for any King Lear adaptation goes as follows: here is our head of the family. They are usually very powerful, or generally wield a lot of authority over their children if they’re not a multi-billionaire magnate. Said children also have a very complicated, unhealthy relationship with their father and with each other, to varying degrees. Some adaptations embellish this with a stand-in for Edmund, Edgar, Gloucester, etc — but the core family is usually our focus. This is something I find quite interesting, as I think King Lear as a play is really an ensemble piece despite the title.

I think Succession gets the ensemble focus, however — even down to its opening titles, where the actors are listed in alphabetical order and not in order of star power or screen time. I am three episodes in, and I am unconsciously watching for the beats — Logan Roy has four children, so that’s one more than Lear had. But then again, so did Anne Enright’s The Green Road, which Enright envisioned as an adaptation of Lear with an Irish family matriarch in place. (Logan also has a wife, Marcia — in comparison to Lear’s absent spouse.) The closest we have to a sort-of Cordelia (albeit with a much younger girlfriend in her early twenties) is Connor, who makes a show of not taking part in any power struggle, and gives his father some sourdough starter for his birthday. Giving your dad sourdough starter is Cordelia behaviour. Roman and Shiv certainly act like Regan and Goneril in some respects: physically fighting with each other in the hospital, using Cousin Greg as a pawn behind the other’s back. Roman is so despicable — masturbating in his office window! tearing up a cheque in a child’s face! — but so strangely magnetic as a character. Maybe he’s actually our Edmund, and Kendall is our forever-put-upon Goneril. Who knows! The templates aren’t fixed.

Or maybe Tom is our Edmund — maybe Tom is a strange hybrid of Edmund and Cornwall. He is all unnerving veneer and sycophantic praise; out of any of the characters in this show, he’s the most likely to burst out with ‘Sir, I love you more than words can wield the matter; | Dearer than eye-sight, space, and liberty’. Cousin Greg, I find, is unbearably gauche, prone to manipulation, and I wonder if he’s our Edgar, so easily duped, or perhaps our Fool, very much contented to be Logan’s shadow.

There’s one moment in episode three, ‘Lifeboats’, that directly recalls, for me, one particular moment in an recent adaptation of King Lear. Shiv manages to evade Marcia, who’s refused to let anyone see her husband for most of the episode, and heads up to see her father in his bed. Logan is drowsy, recovering from a brain haemorrhage. He tells Shiv that he loves her, and proceeds to grab her hand and attempts to place it on his genitals. We’re not sure if this is intentional on his part, or if he’s confused: it’s an upsetting moment all the same. I’m reminded of Nicholas Hytner’s 2018 Lear, of the scene where Lear and his friends take over Goneril’s (Emma Thompson) house. When Goneril protests, Lear gropes his daughter, humiliating her in front of everyone present. I often find myself questioning how extratextual sexual assault is deployed in productions and adaptations of early modern drama (I’ve written about how it’s used in Hamlet). In this case, it’s used to illustrate just how Mad, Bad, and Sad Lear is, or perhaps always has been, especially to his daughters. Whereas it’s a reductive and frankly tiring practice in the case of Lear, it’s too early to say in the case of Succession. I’m still very early into the story.

I’ll continue to write about this as I get further into the show, and until I start forgetting to do so/get bored. And I’ll probably find myself constantly looking for the beats.