TV Room: Succession Space

Discussed: Succession, 30 Rock, Loki

It’s October, the best month to live in New York, and I, too, have recently rewatched Succession ahead of Season 3. I moved to LA from Brooklyn more than two years ago; Succession happens to be one of just two New York–based shows that I can safely watch without triggering my autumnal homesickness, a kind of bizarre-o SAD that can strike former East Coasters here, where it is currently 96 degrees.

Admittedly, Succession’s New York isn’t the city I miss. And the show often takes place outside New York, anyway, like in Europe. Still, its spatial center, its moral and aesthetic palette, is, like Waystar-Royco’s, inside a climate-controlled high rise office building in the Financial District. It shares this Fancy Office texture with the other New York show I can still watch when I’m homesick: 30 Rock, which mostly occupies two floors of one building in Midtown. Few if any New Yorkers want to go to there.

The weird thing about space in Succession is that it’s extravagantly geographically varied, yet it feels less varied than space in 30 Rock, which again, takes place mostly inside 30 Rockfeller. Succession feels interior to me even when it’s taking place outside—that’s the claustrophobic quality of being a Roy. The country mansions and castles, even Vaulter, these are, for the Roys and their employees, all the same: satellites for work. Despite all the sumptuous locations, the yachts, the promise of the next cove, the show’s psychological space is compressed between sheets of office glass.