Trying To Remember Succession

I remember loving Succession and back in 2019 was looking very much forward to a third season (finally back on a shooting schedule after a prolonged hiatus), but so much has happened since then, so much lost and jumbled and rearranged, that all I have is a vague sense of attachment to a few hazy archetypes, like entering Valhalla without your glasses on. I dimly remember the introductory theme song involving some jarring chords, but now all I can hear when I attempt to recall it to mind is the theme from Requiem for a Dream, which can’t possibly be right. It was a show about an angry family that had won a very special episode of Supermarket Sweep where they managed to fit half of the skyscrapers in Manhattan into their shopping cart, I believe, and in their spare time reenacted King Lear and the baseball scenes from Twilight in their fleet of helicopters. Here is everyone I can remember:

I do remember his name is Cousin Greg. He’s the string cheese Incident, or the boy from Witness all grown up. He is also, somehow, the scene from My Girl where Macauley Culkin dies after getting stung by a bee. A wet Band-Aid found on the beach draped attractively over driftwood and brought home on an inexplicably curious whim. Like Dionysus, he was added hastily and overlate to Olympus, and it’s obvious that he sits in borrowed trousers.

The girl in the Anthropologie pantsuit. Ooh, she’s a dreamer, this one, with her Business Spanx. I think she is Mallory from the Babysitters Club all grown up in the beginning of a romantic comedy where she works too hard, balancing coffee cups with magazine layouts. She is a Persian cat who is dreaming of the possibility of someday opening her eyes inside the New York Society Library. A slightly-deflated soufflé named Sweater Set, but she’s also the grandmother from Anastasia as a young woman in the Paris flashbacks. She is married to a turtle trapped on its back.

Also there is Dido Queen of Carthage, who is simultaneously the Angry Princess from Thir13en Ghosts and Jennifer Tilly from Bride of Chucky. It’s her job to say “I don’t know…” while taking her glasses off, recite lists, feed Ratboy his pellets, look up in the car, I’ve got those files, are you lawyer about this?, I’m getting too old for this shit, white Murtaugh.

The Bad Dad from Mad Max: Fury Road with the gas-mask accoutrements. He’s also the tornado from Twister, the main one that killed Helen Hunt’s family.

The Anthropologie Turtle is that little dog from 101 Dalmations who keeps saying “I’m hungry, Mother. I really am. Mother, I’m hungry,” and if everyone in Lord of the Flies were played by the kid with the glasses from Jerry Maguire. Great stuff, terrific stuff. He’s always saying something, I definitely remember that. Sucks to your assmar, Piggy.

And of course, who could forget dear Ratboy? Dear Ratboy. I think they keep him in a cage, or under the subway tunnels, or something. Too crazy for Boystown…too much of a boy for Crazytown. The only humane thing to do is chain him up and bring him a bucket of fish heads every once in a while. He is also married to Jennifer Tilly, and they are T4T.

There is one more brother, I think! He is Master Splinter from TMNT if Master Splinter had never gotten his final ninja certification and had to work off-books. Everyone in the family has had that special sweat-gland removal surgery except for him, so he has to sweat for everybody. He might be me, or he might be the AI avatar of that one company UNTUCKit that only advertises in Skymall. He is the worst assassin in the world because you can always smell him coming. It’s a humid smell. I know a surgeon who can do something about that.