Succession, with ‘Connor’s Wedding’ HBO makes history again
With episode 3 of the fourth and final season of Succession, titled “Connor’s Wedding,” the HBO network marks another page in the history books of the small screen by airing one of the most beautiful television episodes ever.
As ‘Ozymandias’ from Breaking Bad, as ‘International Assassin’ from The Leftovers and how the ending of Better Call Saul, ‘Connor’s Wedding’ – ingenious, totally misleading title that forever curses HBO’s web weddings after the episode ‘The Rains of Castamere’ of Game of Thrones, an episode commonly known as the ‘The Red Wedding’ episode – disorients and stuns the viewer by merely, on a narrative level, presenting a bill for what the TV series one has tuned in to has promised from the beginning. Thank God there are still episodes like this one, which seem designed to mock the frenzy surrounding the concept of spoilers.
After all, if Walter White’s denouement is clear from the first frame of the first episode of the first season, how should a series titled ‘Succession’ ever resolve itself?
Connor’s Wedding is a perfect hour of television.
Some sixteen years later, HBO seems to want to remake the finale of The Sopranos, reversing its implications and transforming it.
‘Connor’s Wedding,’ which in fact is not an ending at all (in fact if anything, it is the real beginning of the series, or at least the turning point toward which Succession has always headed, so much so that it reaches only the third episode of a final season that will consist of ten episodes) is the perfect counterpoint to the cryptic closing minutes of Tony Soprano’s story: In the series created by Jesse Armstrong and produced by Will Ferrell and Adam McKay, mystery does not exist because everything is in the spotlight, everything is public, everything is live, everything is fed to the press, and to the viewer’s eye nothing is concealed.
As if James Gandolfini ‘s last supper at the end of “Made in America” were turned into a morbid and obsessive minute-by-minute chronicle, and for that reason total, objective, that admits of no repetition: just the inexorable flow of life, in an avalanche and without warning.
Through what seemed to the writer to be the best use of a cell phone ever along with those of Personal Shopper by Olivier Assayas and Decision to Leave by Park Chan-wook, the whole episode is played out on two spatial planes in constant connection with each other (precisely the feeling of ‘live life’ that the show has always tried to impart to its narrative pacing) and the aggressive and unscrupulous decision to always leave the protagonist of the series off-screen, the mythical Logan Roy played by Brian Cox, whose mythological aura seems to transcend at the exact moment when his physicality disappears from the screen.
As always in Succession, then, the human side of the characters serves to bring out their monstrous flaws: in this case, personal tragedy becomes, as the episode progresses, another public relations problem to be solved, and Jesse Armstrong’s writing and Mike Mylod’s directing (the one from The Menu on Disney+, which we recommended to you some time ago in the podcast), along with the performances of the cast, have the miraculous in the way they manage to frame the reactions of the protagonists in the face of the cataclysmic event destined to affect any family. Even the most powerful in the world, even the Roy.
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