Connor's Wedding

Just another Succession Wedding, with cake, champagne and canapes. Something happens that effects the stock price of Waystar. There's the usual amount of confusion, drama and difficulties communicating.

Once again with Succession, we have an episode where 90% of the scenes are just people talking. The inciting incident happens off camera, and the confusion and mounting tension in this episode is expressed entirely through dialog.

And it's exquisite. It was the best episode thus far, in a show that has consistently been excellent.

The acting is absolutely remarkable, with impeccable performances from the entire cast. Every single person on screen is pitch perfect; and the ensemble elevates one another.

A masterpiece. I'm still shaken & processing what I've just seen 24 hours after watching it & I'm going to have to watch it again to fully take it all in. It was THAT good, and that 27 minute single take scene! How? I mean, just how? I'm gobsmacked.

Phenomenal acting, the best writing, and superb directing to get those performances from the entire cast. Kudos to Jeremy Strong, Sarah Snook & Keiran Culkin as they give lifetime best & award winning performances but let's not forget that every single supporting character in this episode was superb. I don't think this hour of television will ever be bettered.

I don't even know where to begin. This episode was a masterfully crafted gut punch of conflicting emotions, ranging from celebration to sorrow and everything in between. The entire cast, specifically Jeremy Strong, Sarah Snook, Kieran Culkin, Matthew Macfadyen and especially Alan Ruck deserve every award under the sun for this absolute masterclass in acting. Mark Mylod as usual directs to perfection, Nicholas Brittell as usual knocks the score out of the park, and most importantly Jesse Armstrong, as usual, deserves the highest praise possible for his brilliant, poignant, and emotionally riveting storytelling. This is perhaps the best episode of the best show to air since The Sopranos, and there are still seven episodes to go.

Simply put, this episode is a masterpiece.

Now I can say with confidence that it's the best hour of television to air in 2023 so far and one of the best ever .

It's the definition of a masterpiece .

Brilliantly written by Jesse Armstrong and wonderfully directed by Mark Mylod who deserves all the praise he'll get as this episode should secure him an Emmy as that nearly 30 minutes long take was a work of art.

Every cast member was on the top of his game especially Kieran Culkin and Sarah Snook.

The way this is going , Succession will be remembered as the greatest show ever by the time we get the finale.

This show is reinventing television .

I won't spoil it for you , I hope you enjoy .

I think we tend to set too much store by Series Finales. Admittedly, where any story finally lands is very important, and, accordingly, the finale will effect the final flavour that any series, in its totality, leaves on the palate. That's inescapable. However, in the same sense that the last page of a novel is less important than its last 25% (usually the bit of the book that contains the meaty climax), generally, the last season of a series matters far more than its eventual conclusion.

If we think back to Breaking Bad we can see a good example of this. Breaking Bad was probably the finest example of a narrative driven drama series ever made (The Sopranos is more of an anthology of thematically related episodes than it is an ongoing series telling a single story, and The Wire doesn't have one overall arc, but rather 5 separate arcs - one per season). If you forget what happens in the last episode of Breaking Bad and, instead, think of its final 8 episodes as one long novelistic style climax, its overall shape feels very different. Its single greatest episode (and undoubtedly the climactic one) is not the finale (not even close) - It's the one three episodes from the end: "Ozymandias". The reason "Ozymandias" remains the best episode of TV ever made is because it just feels "right" as the main conclusion to the events set up way way back in the pilot. It is the episode the whole series was working towards from the beginning far more than the finale ever was/will be. There's a sense of inevitability to it, and even if we couldn't have guessed exactly how things would go down when when we did finally reach the place we come to in "Ozymandias", we knew those dominos had to fall, one way or another.

I think the same can be said for "Connor's Wedding". It's the one episode we've been waiting for since the beginning, and it will, I imagine, go down as the singular episode most fundamental to the Succession viewing experience. It was the series climax (even if it came sooner than expected). It's the one that blows the whole series wide open and which alters it beyond repair. Everything that comes after will now be composed of beautiful falling action; the bomb has already been dropped, the rest is fallout.

Given that it carries this hefty weight, it is just as well that it is so bloody good. It's a close to perfect hour. Very few series have got their main climax so right: Breaking Bad did it with "Ozymandias" (by far the greatest example), The Leftovers did it with "Certified", the final season of The Shield did it, Better Call Saul did it, Six Feet Under did it, and that's probably about it. That was the exhaustive list until today...