Off Book: NBA Playoffs and a TV Trailer
In this reoccurring segment we don’t talk about books
You may have noticed that the subtitle of Dear Head of Mine is “a weekly newsletter about books and other things.” Today is a day for those other things. The NBA playoffs are coming fast and furious these past couple of weeks, and if you’re a basketball fan it has been a dream, with grudge matches galore, great basketball, and the feeling that almost any team could win the championship.
But we’re not here to talk about basketball. Most of the first round of the NBA playoffs are aired on TNT, a network that has decided, sadistically, to sell all streaming ad slots to approximately ten companies…for every single game. If you watch two games in a row, that can mean six-to-seven straight hours of the same exact commercial breaks. Thus, I can now conjure up every ad aired during the 1st round of the 2023 NBA playoffs by memory. A guy with a mustache does a dance in a bowling alley after throwing a gutter ball for a sports betting site. An uplifting montage of TV shows for HBO’s one hundredth streaming service rebrand—MAX. A zombie video game, McDonald’s labor-positive propaganda, a forgettable finance commercial, Bill Maher, John Oliver and a beer commercial, naturally.
But there’s one commercial that I’ve spent more time obsessing about this week than anything books related—including editing an entire book, reading a half dozen submissions, a chapter a day of Moby-Dick, and about a third of another book for fun. The commercial in question is the 30-second spot for HBO’s TV show Succession.
It is not the official trailer so it took a while to unearth, but this is the 30 seconds in question:
If you know nothing about Succession you are entirely forgiven if you believe after watching this commercial that it is a C+-level business drama that reruns on TNT constantly. If your intro to the show is this commercial, with its military-infused corporate cliché like “excited to get into this knife fight” and shouts of things like “we are pirates!”, I wouldn’t blame you if you never wanted to fire up HBO, or HBO Go, or HBO Max, or MAX, or Maximum HBO to try out an episode (that last one is coming soon, don’t worry). What’s fascinating is that such a bland trailer represents one of the consistently best—if not the best—show on television for the past five years.
Set in the world of a billionaire’s family and his corporation, Succession is the definition of Shakespearean. Its plot is in fact Shakespeare’s King Lear: an aging king divides his kingdom among his three kids, mixed with a little classic Greek, unavoidably-making-the-same-mistakes-over-and-over tragedy. But there’s also the accompanying sense of Shakespearean comedy and absurdity, played straight as to be equal parts horrifying and funny. This is one of many scenes I’ll never get out of my head, when the manager of the cable network vets a suspected far right-wing anchor:
If you can’t tell from the clip, despite using a pretty classic plot (a plot that Shakespeare also borrowed coincidentally) Succession is, like Shakespeare, exceedingly original. As a book lover it’s a show that’s easy to love; despite what the trailer might mislead you to believe, its brilliance comes from the fact that the writing is sublime—plus the writers are British so they’ve decided to end it on a high note with four seasons (opposed to their American counterparts British shows have a history of ending the story rather than exhausting their audience and grinding them down until the show’s popularity dwindles. A few popular UK shows for example are Fleabag, two seasons, Luther, five seasons, Sherlock, four seasons).
What watching the terrible trailer for this great show over, and over, and over, and over again has revealed is that Succession, like a great novel, is all about context. What holds gravitas and absurdity and anguish in scene is more than a little silly when cut apart to emphasize the melodrama and seemingly plot-driven nature of double-crossing business deals. Another piece of seemingly simple dialog in the trailer “you are not serious people” comes off as a minor moment when clipped, but is a devastating Freudian atomic bomb when delivered with the weight of all of the show’s history behind it and the very plausible setting that underscores the point. Every time I see this truncated version of the show—between spectacular dunks, vicious blocks, and inspired flops to get offensive fouls called—I am left pondering how something so good could possibly look, even to someone who already loves it, so terrible. It’s like reading a truly great line in a book and then saying it out loud to someone else in the room only to realize how flat it must sound without the 150 pages that proceeded it. Part of the answer is context, but maybe this enigma will become clearer after several thousand more viewings.
Should this be a book? Succession
The Question Every Editor is Doomed to Repeat
As we’ve covered, this already has been a book, many, many times over. But would I love a contemporary and brilliant take on Shakespeare that takes the rich down a peg in literature? Absolutely. However, the case that this is simply perfect as a television show is that, like with any great piece of art, each element displays that this story is in its perfect medium: from the stellar acting performances (after all Shakespeare was meant to be read out loud), incredible locations and cinematography, down to the costume design, and an original score that is peerless.