Ear Candy: HBO’s Succession Podcast

Girls so magic; both Lorelei and Rory are fully fleshed out women characters. This shouldn’t be rare but, all too often, it is. These two are more than the sum of their parts, not just “a mother” or “a daughter”. They have individual hopes, dreams, loves and losses.

At times, each makes mistakes or does horribly unlikeable things. Sherman-Pallindo wasn’t afraid to allow the women she wrote to be real and learn the lessons of life the hard way. It makes Gilmore Girls both a refreshing show but also a comforting one. Life is messy, the show says. And that’s OK.

However, some of the joy also lies in the fact it stops short of full reality. The Gilmore Girls exist in a golden bubble: despite family tensions, there’s always a large pot of money on hand if needed to bail them out.

Lorelei and Rory live in Stars Hollow, a unbelievable little town, stuffed with zany characters, who make up a tightknit community that’s simply too good to be true. Viewers will also notice the dark side of this; a huge lack of nonwhite faces. It’s not the show for you if you’re watching for proper representation in 2020.

Frankly though, as a woman of colour, I’m not. Time and time again, I return to Gilmore Girls because of its pseudoreality, its slow-burn soap opera, its gentle guide to getting older and wiser.

It’s a programme from another era, before everything was on-demand and you could binge an entire season in a day. The plots reflect that: arcs that last several seasons, calm pacing (despite the fast talking) that allows the viewer to sit with the storylines and fall in love with the world that is being carefully created in front of their eyes.

Gilmore Girls is smart and savvy but also a cocoon of safety, one that, at its warm heart, shares a spirit with the likes of Anne of Green Gables or Little House on the Prairie. It’s a story of community and mutual support. That’s the quality that renders it timeless and why, when I’m in need of a bit of light and optimism, I’ll always head to Stars Hollow. n

Gilmore Girls is on Netflix and Amazon.

Succession

To provide succour to desperate Succession fans faced with a long wait for series 3, HBO has assembled the cast for a sequence of longform, one-on-one interviews. Loosely inspired, it is said, by the Murdochs, the Roy family of Succession boasts some of the most complex characters on the small screen. Series 2 saw the Roy siblings vying to ascend the Waystar Royco throne once the aging, raging patriarch Logan Roy (Brian Cox) finally steps down.

Sports journalist Roger Bennett hosts with infectious enthusiasm. His emphatic introductions to each actor have become something of a trademark. He breezily steers the conversation from their origins to the peaks and valleys of

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their Succession characters’ story arcs.

As the Roys are all in severe need of therapy, there is ample material for psychoanalysis. And Bennett does his best to unearth the roots of the relentless conflict and abuse by digging deep into their past traumas. No stone is left unturned, no trait unanalysed and no wardrobe uninspected.

Each actor’s devotion to the craft shines through, but none more so than Jeremy Strong, who plays Kendall Roy. He confesses to taking method acting to mentally detrimental extremes.

Sprinkled and bookended with memorable quotes from the character in question, HBO’s Succession Podcast will enlighten and leave you laughing. “If it is to be said,” as a wise Greg once said, “so it is.” Harry Bennett