TV Quote of the Day (‘Succession,’ on the Future and the Past)

Logan Roy [played by Brian Cox]: “The future is real. The past is all made up.”—Succession, Season 2, Episode 8, “Dundee,” original air date Sept/ 29, 2019, teleplay by Jesse Armstrong, Mary Laws, and Alice Birch, directed by Kevin Bray

TV Quote of the Day (‘Succession,’ on the Law, Politics, and People)

Logan Roy [played by Brian Cox]: “The law? The law is people. And people is politics. And I can handle the people.”—Succession, Season 3, Episode 3, “The Disruption,” original air date Oct. 31, 2021, teleplay by Ted Cohen and Georgia Pritchett, directed by Cathy Yan

TV Quote of the Day (‘Succession,’ on Why Its Very Rich Family Is Different From You and Me)

Shiv Roy [played by Sarah Snook] [to a threatening ATN anchor Mark Ravenhead]: “The thing about us [is] we don't get embarrassed.” —Succession, Season 3, Episode 4, “Lion in the Meadow,” original air date Nov 7, 2021, teleplay by Jesse Armstrong, Jon Brown, and Jamie Carragher, directed by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini

That is the key to the oligarchy, folks. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote of their "vast carelessness," but he might just as well have added, "and shamelessness."

TV Quote of the Day (‘Succession,’ on How Information Is ‘Like a Bottle of Fine Wine’)

Tom Wambsgans [played by Matthew Macfadyen] [to protégé “Cousin Greg”]: “Information, Greg. It's like a bottle of fine wine. You store it, you hoard it, you save it for a special occasion and then you smash someone's face with it.” —Succession, Season 4, Episode 8, “America Decides,” original air date May 14, 2023, teleplay by Jesse Armstrong, directed by Andrij Parekh

Both the Trump and Harris camps are hoping that the opposition research they’ve compiled will be uncorked for tomorrow night’s Presidential debate in the—ahem—vigorous way that Tom Wambsgans describes.

Quote of the Day (Roger Ailes, on ‘Wet Noodle’ Patriarch Rupert Murdoch)

“He’s walking into walls. He doesn’t know what time it is. It’s old man time. Rupert is an odd bird. A cold fish, but a f-----g wet noodle — it's pathetic — around those kids. They're always stomping off and giving the poor guy the finger.”—The late Fox News CEO Roger Ailes, on Australian-born media baron Rupert Murdoch, quoted by Michael Wolff, The Fall: The End of Fox News and the Murdoch Dynasty (2023)

As a youngster listening to the original “Eyewitness News” broadcast in the New York area, I would smile and lean forward whenever I heard short, dour reporter Milton Lewis tell the audience, “Now listen to this,” in a confiding, “you’re not going to believe what I’m about to tell you” tone.

I experienced the same sensation when I read Jim Rutenberg and Jonathan Mahler’s New York Times report this week that three of Rupert Murdoch’s children have united against their father. They are arguing in court against him changing the family’s “irrevocable trust” to ensure that his anointed successor, eldest son Lachlan, will stay in charge of the conservative multinational media empire.

Lewis’ “this” happens, in 1924, to be a plot twist right out Succession. There’s little that the creators much-honored comedy-drama did not imagine. Maybe they dismissed this idea in the belief that their audience would never accept this kind of switcheroo coming from a nonagenarian.

Murdoch is a nightmare spin on Dylan Thomas’ notion that old age should burn and rave at close of day. Having assisted at the birth of Trumpism, he finds himself unable either to embrace or evade his handiwork. 

However much he may carp about the former President, his attempts to promote an alternative GOP candidate have foundered. He’s even been dissed by Don Jr.: “There was a time where if you wanted to survive in the Republican Party, you had to bend the knee to him or to others. I don’t think that’s the case anymore.”

And now, this mess.

The discovery process in the litigation can only reveal more embarrassing secrets, the kind he sought to avoid after reaching a $787 million settlement in Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit against Fox.

Or maybe Murdoch is beyond mortification at this point in his life. After all, who else would marry for the fifth time at age 93 and dare to risk comparisons with billionaire oil tycoon J. Howard Marshall, who was a mere 89 when he wed Anna Nicole Smith?

Fox News and Murdoch’s New York print mainstays, The New York Post and The Wall Street Journal, have been making great sport of President Biden’s age-related difficulties. But Ailes came up with that “old man time” phrase about his former boss eight years ago. What could that line possibly entail now?

TV Quote of the Day (‘Succession,’ on Selling One’s Soul)

Tom Wambsgans [played by Matthew Macfadyen]: “Do you want a deal with the devil?”

“Cousin Greg” Hirsch [played by Nicholas Braun]: “What am I gonna do with a soul anyways? Souls are boring! Boo, souls! Of course!” —Succession, Season 3, Episode 9, “All the Bells Say,” original air date Dec 12, 2021, teleplay by Jesse Armstrong and Jamie Carragher, directed by Mark Mylod

These days, Cousin Greg is not the only one to make a Faustian bargain.

TV Quote of the Day (‘Succession,’ As Cousin Greg Worries About Prison)

“Cousin Greg” Hirsch [played by Nicholas Braun]: “Yeah, I, uh... I'm worried about prison... I-I-I-I just feel because of my physical length, I could be a target for all kinds of misadventures.”—Succession, Season 3, Episode 6, “What It Takes,” original air date Nov 21, 2021, teleplay by Jesse Armstrong, Will Tracy, and Jamie Carragher, directed by Andrij Parekh

Oh, Cousin Greg, you’re not the only one worried about prison these days! There’s someone else who fears that “physical length” might make him a tempting target.

Oh, because of that, and the extra pounds that seemingly endless rounds of golf don’t seem to have trimmed…that puffy orange hair that begs for a good yank to test its strength and authenticity…and his former status as the most powerful man in the world.

Some might say that concern for his office’s dignity—a quality he daily had tried to corrode—might prevent jail time, or at least a significant amount of it.

There’s also the near-certainty that, though he’s been yelling so much about how he wants to testify at his trials, his lawyers won’t let him anywhere near the witness stand. 

After all, Cousin Greg only came off like a nervous doofus in front of Congress, whereas this guy might be ruthlessly exposed as the vengeful liar he is (as he has been in civil cases).

But he sure seems fearful every day as he engages in the kind of intimidation of judge, prosecutor, and anyone associated with the case that would never be permitted of…well, of a mafia don.

As the story arc of Succession demonstrated, “Cousin Greg” would serve as a great apprentice to anyone scheming for power. Only the guy in recent news who dreads prison might refuse to have his picture taken with him, loathing anyone who makes him look smaller.

TV Quote of the Day (‘Succession,’ on a Date Who’s the Talk of the Town)

Tom Wambsgans [played by Matthew Macfadyen]: “So I hear you've made an enormous faux pas and everyone's laughing up their sleeves about your date.”

“Cousin Greg” Hirsch [played by Nicholas Braun]: “What? Why?”

Tom: “Why? Because she brought a ludicrously capacious bag.”

Greg: “What's...”

Tom: “What's even in there, huh? Flat shoes for the subway? Her lunch pail? I mean, Greg, it's monstrous. it's gargantuan. You could take it camping. You could slide it across the floor after a bank job.”

Greg: “Well, whatever.”

Tom: “She's used all the display towels in the bathroom and now they're sopping wet. She's gabbling about herself and posting on social media, she's asking people personal questions, and she's wolfing all the canapés like a famished warthog.”— Succession, Season 4, Episode 1, “The Munsters,” original air date Mar. 26, 2023, teleplay by Jesse Armstrong, directed by Mark Mylod

This Day in Business History (Birth of Sumner Redstone, ‘Relentless' Media Empire-Builder)

May 27, 1923— Sumner Redstone, who used his brilliant intellect and self-described “passion to win” to become an envied, feared, often toxic media-entertainment mogul, was born in humble origins in Boston.

Just as Orson Welles and co-screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz interspersed episodes in the lives of Samuel Insull and Joseph Pulitzer to augment their thinly veiled portrayal of William Randolph Hearst in Citizen Kane, so have the creators of Succession used tales surrounding Redstone and Donald Trump to bolster their Rupert Murdoch-based depiction of Logan Roy.

Unlike Murdoch or Trump, but like Logan Roy, Redstone not only grew up in a lower-class neighborhood but briefly lived in a house with no inside bathroom.

Like Murdoch and the fictional Roy, Redstone had seemingly groomed younger people (including his children) to take over from him, only, in his 70s and even 80s, to dismiss them with little to no warning.

Far more than Trump and even Murdoch, he left rivals alternately worried and fuming about his next negotiating gambit, leading Barry Reardon, a distribution executive at rival studio Warner Brothers, to moan to Premiere Magazine in 1994: "Being a competitor of Sumner Redstone’s is a fate worse than death. He never lets up. He’s relentless.”

Redstone's corporate buccaneering amassed a fortune that enabled him to control, at one time or another, CBS, the Paramount film and television studios, the publisher Simon & Schuster, the video retail giant Blockbuster and a host of cable channels, including MTV, Comedy Central and Nickelodeon.

And, in a way it has not yet become painfully obvious for Trump or Murdoch, debility at the end of his life exposed Redstone’s troubled relationship with a daughter he had teased with the prospect of succeeding him.

The driving force behind Succession might be the same joke used by Murdoch and Redstone as octogenarians: that they had no intention of ever dying. That disbelief in the iron law of mortality underlies the power struggle in both the series and the lives of Sumner and Shari Redstone.

In his appearance and conversation, Redstone worked overtime to counter any impression that the years had diminished his faculties. He dyed his hair red, bragged to talk-show host Larry King in 2009 that he had “the vital statistics of a 20-year-old,” and even lied about his age (lopping off 20 years).

Perhaps as much to persuade himself as King’s millions of viewers, Redstone continued: “Even 20-year-old men get older. Not me. My doctor says I’m the only man who’s reversed it. I eat and drink every antioxidant known to man. I exercise 50 minutes every day.”

At the time of the King interview, it was already apparent to Daily Beast editor at large Lloyd Grove, that Redstone was less like a 20-year-old than like King Lear: “With his empire crumbling, his family fractured, his legacy in doubt, and his grasp of the true nature of his predicament not immediately evident, Redstone resembles a modern-day version of Shakespeare’s tragic hero.”

By the middle of the next decade, charges that Redstone was no longer competent to run his affairs—let alone his company’s—had burst into public view, courtesy of litigation by Shari—though Sumner would hang on, a hideous husk of his former self, until he was 97.

At the time of Redstone’s death in August 2020, his story as a self-made man led many, even among the overwhelmingly liberal reading audience of The New York Times, to overlook the gamier aspects of his life.

And indeed, there is much to admire in a man who took the modest perch provided by his father (who himself rose from linoleum peddler to owner of a small chain of drive-in theaters) and graduated first in his class at Boston Latin, the city’s leading public school; went to Harvard on a scholarship; cracked Japanese military and diplomatic codes as part of a team of cryptographers in WWII; became partner in a leading DC law firm after the war; then abandoned all that to begin building a series of holdings that would eventually be valued at more than $80 billion.

But the window that began to open up in the last decade of Redstone’s life revealed after his death “an astonishing saga of sex, lies, and betrayal,” according to Unscripted: The Epic Battle for a Media Empire and the Redstone Family Legacy, by New York Times journalists James Stewart and Rachel Abrams.

According to this account, Redstone:

* spent $500,000 promoting the Electric Barbarellas, a talentless all-girl band;

* amended his trust more than 40 times to add or remove beneficiaries;

* dated women who became increasingly younger as he aged;

* sent a flight attendant he was pursuing a crystal‑encrusted handbag in the shape of a panther, along with the (surely redundant) note, “I’m a panther and I’m going to pounce”;

* reportedly tried to date grandson Brandon Korff’s girlfriends, annoying the 25-year-old so much that he sought out TV’s “Millionaire Matchmaker” Patti Stanger to find a companion for the lecherous old man—a move that backfired when that companion, Sydney Holland, and another Redstone girlfriend siphoned off $150 million from the increasingly senile businessman before being ushered out of his life at last;

* badmouthed Shari for so long that she was ignored when she warned about the perilous course set by Viacom CEO Phillipe Dauman, and wrestled with CBS CEO Leslie Moonves for control of National Amusements, the entity owned by Sumner and Shari.

If Sumner Redstone’s empire had been built by his personal tenacity (he survived a Boston hotel fire by hanging off a window ledge, leaving a hand maimed for the remaining 40 years of his life), it teetered at the end of his long life because of his toxicity. 

His wealth and position couldn’t disguise the fact that he had degenerated into a dirty old man, endangering the sprawling conglomerate he had built over a lifetime through his personal caprice and the maddeningly complex corporate structure that had allowed him to operate for so long without contradiction by those who worked for him.

(That structure was analyzed in 2018, at the height of the Redstone family litigation over CBS and Viacom, by Eduardo Gentil, on the Website of Cambridge Family Enterprise Group.)

The attached image of Sumner Redstone is from Kingkongphoto & www.celebrity-photos.com from Laurel Maryland, USA; © copyright John Mathew Smith 2001.

TV Quote of the Day (‘Succession,’ on a ‘Rotten Cabal’)

Roman Roy [played by Kieran Culkin]: “There's just something about betraying our father that just doesn't sit well with me.”

Kendall Roy [played by Jeremy Strong]: “He's a central player in a rotten cabal that has basically eaten the heart out of American democracy.”

Roman: “ ‘Rotten Cabal’ is a good name for a band.”— Succession, Season 3, Episode 2, "Mass In Time Of War," original air date Oct. 24, 2021, teleplay by Jesse Armstrong and Jamie Carragher, directed by Mark Mylod

So now the fourth and final season of Succession is at hand. Once the series ends, fans like me will not only miss its backstabbings and other assorted plot twists, but also wisecracks like the one above from Roman, as well as the unusual verb forms used by its characters and so many others in the business world (from this same episode, Kendall’s “You aren't Judasing, are you, Greg?”)

The media family that inspired this acclaimed satire, the Murdochs, are finding it harder these days to, as Kendall (again) put it, “clean-slate this.”

This week, Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric Davis not only expressed doubt that powerful patriarch Rupert Murdoch would have trouble traveling to testify in the trial arising from Dominion Voting Systems’ lawsuit against Fox News, but also found that the evidence in the case “demonstrates that is CRYSTAL clear that none of the Statements relating to Dominion about the 2020 election are true,” and that Fox’s behavior constituted defamation per se.

The speed with which mendacity can ricochet around the world has grown exponentially, disrupting the media, politics, and even everyday life increasingly damaged by falsehoods about public health and climate change.

The law, despite its agonizingly slow pace and manifest shortcomings, may be the only institution in American life that can still hold accountable “the rotten cable” represented by the Murdochs’ News Corp. and the political grifters so long in league with it.

TV Quote of the Day (‘Succession,’ on Rich People in Jail)

[On a Presidential campaign ad he’s paid for, Connor Roy, scion of a filthy-rich family, has just announced that he won’t pay taxes, even if it means going to jail—a prospect that horrifies half-sister Shiv.]

Siobhan (Shiv) Roy [played by Sarah Snook]: “Connor, you know what they do to rich people in jail.”

Connor Roy [played by Alan Ruck, pictured]: “Yes, they let them out early to mitigate the risk of litigation.”— Succession, Season 2, Episode 3, “Hunting,” original air date Aug. 25, 2019, teleplay by Jesse Armstrong and Tony Roche, directed by Andrij Parekh