SUCCESSION PART 2: How To Write Subtext In Your Dialogue

In the last podcast we looked at the engine of Succession. We looked at the way each episode was put together, and the way that all these characters come together in each episode to create the season.
So today, rather than thinking globally, we’re going to think locally. Rather than looking at the big structure of the piece, we’re going to look at one little teeny-tiny scene from episode 7.
And the scene starts, if you want to watch it, around 27:07 and ends at 28:20. So we’re talking about a scene that’s a total of one-minute thirteen seconds.
What’s really cool about this scene is that it features all the secondary characters of Succession.
These are secondary characters who are not only secondary characters for the audience but are also secondary characters within the social circles of their own family.
These are the boyfriends and girlfriends, and wives and fiancées: Marcia, Willa and Tom.
Marcia is the wife of Logan Roy, the Brian Cox character in this piece, the King Lear, the Rupert Murdoch, the great patriarch.
And Marcia is a highly intelligent, complicated woman, and it’s pretty clear that she loves her husband. But it’s not entirely clear if she can be trusted or not. She seems to have her own agenda, and it isn’t clear how much of that agenda is about protecting the husband, and how much of that agenda is about solidifying her own power.
Willa is Connor Roy’s…well, let’s just call her a girlfriend.
Actually she’s his paid escort with whom he’s madly in love, and who is putting up with his affection and his desperate desire for her to play the role of his wife and move in with him in order to further her career as an actress and playwright.
Then you’ve got Tom, discussed in detail in last week’s podcast, who’s the trickster character, the fiancé and soon to be husband of Shiv Roy, the scheming and politically savvy daughter of Logan Roy.
And Tom isn’t the greatest person in the world. In fact, he’s the worst possible version of new money. He’s a person obsessed with the power and ridiculousness of being rich. He’s a guy who’s small in the family, so he throws around his power in places where he has it.
But Tom is also deeply in love with Shiv, and deeply unaware that she might not be a person he can trust.
And what’s happened in this episode is that the entire Roy family has convened for therapy.
This meeting has been called by Logan, who has basically realized that if he doesn’t do something his share prices are going to fall. He needs to do something to create some kind of positive photo-op that suggests the family is coming back together after a big falling out between himself and Kendall that was way too public.
So Logan has called for this reconciliation, and with the exception of Kendall, all the children have come willingly, a bit curious, surprised, and maybe even hopeful that dad actually wants therapy.
And of course that isn’t what’s really happening. What’s really happening is dad wants a photo op.
Even Kendall Roy shows up, and that’s a big deal because Logan just placed an article through his media sources suggesting that Kendall, who in the previous episode failed a vote of no confidence on his dad, was back on drugs. This article has not only cost Kendall his faith in his father, it has also cost him any chance of reconnecting with the one woman he loves, his ex-wife, who now thinks he’s back on drugs even though he isn’t.
But Kendall Roy decides to show up, even though his plan to reconcile with his family doesn’t actually turn out well. He ends up at a bar instead, where he’s soon drinking and getting high with some locals.
Regardless, everyone has descended on Connor Roy’s beautiful mansion in the desert for this big moment of reconciliation that isnR...