The Trump Town Hall Made This Week's Succession A Little Too Real
This post contains spoilers for "Succession" season 4, episode 8.
At the end of the latest episode of "Succession," as a neo-Nazi president-elect gives a victory speech rife with terms like "proud and pure" and parts of the world quite literally burn around them, the Roy siblings sit together. They're alternately uneasy, devastated, and relaxed.
"We've just made a night of good TV," Roman (Kieran Culkin), the relaxed one, says. "That's what we've done. Nothing happens." Shiv responds with a voice that sounds like barely-dried tears and resignation. Though she only says one sentence, it's cutting, and some of Sarah Snook's finest work on the show to date: "Things do happen, Rome."
The "thing" in question here is the Roy family's clumsy yet horrifying election night sabotage, which starts with them calling a state for the (extremely far right) Republican nominee Mencken (Justin Kirk) despite the fact that an unknown number of ballots were destroyed in a politically motivated fire, and ends with them crowning him the next president against all evidence — in exchange for a business favor. Based on the parallels between this plotline and the real 2020 election, it's unclear whether Mencken's victory will be certified, or if it will result in an attempted coup or other bloodshed. Still, it's incredibly clear that the Roys did a whole lot more than "make a night of good TV."
A dangerous spotlight
This episode of "Succession," the third-to-last of the series, feels final in a way that so many before it didn't. It slam-dunks any shreds of empathy we might have had for these characters into a trash can, zooms out on the context of their myopic melodrama more fully than ever before, and finally gets the Roy family into a situation so sticky, they might not survive it. Due to a coincidence of timing, though, the episode also feels like cutting commentary on a real-world situation: Donald Trump's recent CNN town hall.
To be clear, I haven't seen Trump's town hall, and don't plan to watch it. The former president — who has been indicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, accused of varying levels of sexual misconduct by 26 women, and openly encouraged the behavior that led to the January 6th insurrection — is nowhere to be found on my list of must-see TV, and I'm not alone.
When CNN decided to air a live event featuring the man, the network received tremendous backlash for platforming someone who seems to only grow stronger with each new bit of obvious misinformation he's given a pedestal to talk about. After all, the road to Trump's initial election was paved with moments in which the candidate was clearly given airtime because, as Roman Roy might put it, he makes "good TV."
TV reports the news, but also shapes and makes it
Whether it was Jimmy Fallon tousling Trump's hair, "Saturday Night Live" putting him in skits about "Hotline Bling" and laser harps, or Dr. Oz leading a softball discussion of his health, plenty of mainstream entertainers have been happy to participate in the media circus surrounding the former president. While it's unclear how much the sanded-off, TV-friendly presentation of Trump (done after his most heinous views were already out in the open, it should be said) contributed to his election, the friendly publicity certainly didn't hurt his chances.
The same can be said for this week's event, which CNN claims was part of its ongoing mission "to get answers and hold the powerful to account." Pundits and fellow journalists argued otherwise, pointing out that it's a little weird to treat this guy like a valid presidential candidate after everything he's done — and after the media's legitimizing of his lies in the past led to a violent insurrection. The town hall and the discourse it inspired were bleakly exhausting: a retread of a problem with rampant misinformation that should've been solved two election cycles ago. It also, unsurprisingly, brought out people who were ready to defend CNN's choice.
The most high-profile (if carefully hedged) defense came from CNN broadcaster Anderson Cooper himself. "Do you think staying in your silo and only listening to people you agree with is gonna make that person go away?" the anchor said in a statement on CNN after acknowledging the lies Trump told. It's a question that can be debated, but it's one that this episode of "Succession" clearly has an answer for. News networks don't just report the news, as we see in ATN's case, but shape it and make it as well.
Succession has never felt more sickeningly real
If ATN declares Mencken president while failing to report on the Milwaukee fires, it means that for a fraction of the country, those fires didn't happen and that candidate is president. This is a fictional scenario, but it's clearly informed by our ever-more-malleable reality. When CNN treats someone like Trump the way it would treat any other presidential candidate, it lends his controversial campaign legitimacy. Media isn't just a mode of communicating; sometimes it's the message as well.
It's impossible to watch the latest episode of "Succession" without thinking about the 2020 election, and it's nearly as difficult to sit through it without looking towards 2024. Because the Roys' political and global impact has long-since remained around the fringes of the series, fans of the show have often been able to appreciate its eloquently scripted insults and darkly funny moments while considering it a sort of fantasy. This week, the illusion that this is an unrealistic, entertaining tragicomedy that happens to star the American elite was shattered, replaced by something more real, timely, and harrowing. For a moment, some of the Roys finally took their blinders off, and as our eyes adjusted to their full scope of vision, what we saw was awful.
'Things do happen, Rome'
It's a coincidence that the show chose to address the country-ruining implications of cable news ratings grabs the same week a real-life cable news provider made a decision that could drastically shape our next election, but it's a sobering one. This is the hardest episode of "Succession" to watch so far, because it feels uncannily like the dystopian reality Americans have been trying to accept and understand for years now.
I don't know how either the real U.S. or HBO's fictional version will get past their endemic problems with misinformation and corruption, but I do know one thing. Long after I've forgotten the best quips "Succession" has to offer, I'll still be haunted by Shiv's ignored assertion that at some point, the nation's slide towards fascism isn't just a joke on a screen or a headline you swipe away anymore. "Things do happen," she says, and the way the words fall from her mouth, it sounds like a curse. They sure do, Siobhan.
"Succession" airs on HBO and Max on Sundays at 9pm ET.