Up this month: TV shows Succession, Killing Eve and Black Mirror, and the movie Next Door.

Succession (2018-2023)

Type of show: High drama. Takes itself seriously and is cleverly enough written that you can take it seriously, too.

Risk of depressing the viewer: Moderate. Even though all of the characters in the show are essentially competing to be the czar of loserdom--and it does get disgusting and demoralising along the way--there isn’t much in the way of honest pathos.

Culkin counter: One. One relative of Macaulay Culkin stars in the show.

“Characters you revile but can’t stop watching!” That’s a paraphrase of my mom’s recommendation of Succession. The first clause came as no surprise, since I’d already had an impression of the show’s subject matter: something--metanarratively--evocative of Trump and Fox News and that whole mess of rightwing pseudopoliticking going on north of Mexico. Indeed, for Americans (like me), “characters you revile” might as well sum up the plot of the New York Times, particularly a few years ago, when a certain president singlehandedly polarised every public figure on the revulsion/adulation spectrum.

Well, I watched it. And my impression proved accurate: nothing else I’ve seen attempts to unpack Trumpism so diligently and yet, having already debuted halfway through his term, with so little perspective. In this, there’s a kind of bewitching vertigo effect that, admittedly, only pays off in retrospect. But it’s the second clause of my mom’s review--about the characters’ watchability--that hits on the show’s success.

Because, truly, it is a writerly accomplishment to take a bunch of characters, sink them neck-first in the cold waters of hatability, but somehow manage not to kill them--because, indeed, these people aren’t boring to watch. But why not? That’s the absorbing thing. They’re incapable (intentionally) of growth; pathetic; self-serving; disgusting. Nine shows in ten fail to make such a character compelling, because being hatable estranges them from the viewer. And here it’s not even one character… it’s all of them.

Wherefore the success, then? The answer: an alternative source of tension. Succession pointedly avoids the conventional source of tension in drama, character growth (after Character X undergoes Experience Y, will they see the world differently?), which should cause a problem of stasis, aka boringness, but it avoids that by maintaining a perpetual uncertainty of relationship. I would compare it to the three-body problem, an unsolvable mathematical problem whereby the motion of three celestial bodies, powered by no force but gravity, will never, ever, ever resolve into a predictable and fluid orbit. In the show, the three bodies are the three children of Logan Roy, a Murdochian media mogul, who all want to succeed (hey!) their father as CEO of the family megacorp. Their power dynamics are indeed chaotic: as soon as one breaks ahead, the other two cut them down; when two gang up on the third, their alliance fragments; when one recommends another, there’s an ulterior motive; on and on, forever and forever.

The result is a kind of hypnotic effect that, while enjoyable, doesn’t grant a huge or long-term viewing payoff, at least in the traditional sense of being able to see yourself (however marginally) in a character that inevitably does something interesting on screen. For my money, the show lasts a season too long, because once you catch wind that the chaotic state is the point, you don’t really need to see more. (Or, as some might reason: once you accept that Trump and his ilk will never change, you don’t really need to pay attention to them.) Ahead of the finale, you can tell that the show is planning to deliver on its title, which promises resolution at last--but if that’s what you think you’re getting…

Don’t get me wrong, though: Succession is absolutely worth the time, not only for its unique-if-exhausting narrative approach but also in its can’t-look-awayism: it attempts to digest the USA’s post-Trump social despair in such a sophisticated way, perhaps a pointlessly sophisticated way, that it becomes itself a bizarre piece of primary evidence of the story of that culture’s recent implosion.

Killing Eve (2018-2022)

Type of show: Spy drama. Camp enough--if only just--to elude the wrath of an intellectual analysis. Tons of murder but not the kind that makes you sad about the world.

Watchable under conditions of fatigue? Yes: the show’s complexity allows for your brain to be blurred by up to 25%.

Reason to watch: Plot. Watch it for the plot. The plot is fun, even if it makes less and less sense as the seasons go on.

At the burning core of Killing Eve is the relationship between two people: an untrained yet danger-happy undercover MI6 agent and a psychopathic assassin employed by a secret and cryptically named (“The Twelve”) world-dominating organisation. The agent has a strong normcore vibe (if James Bond and Liz Lemon had a baby?) while the assassin is played by a Liverpudlian actress doing--what else?--a Russian accent. Even if everything else were to flop, you can already tell that we’re having fun.

This two-character setup presents the umpteenth instantiation of the old cat-and-mouse formula, complete with its usual exploitable tension: it’s cop versus criminal, but how will their personal and psychological intersection confuse their roles? Will they betray their organisations, will they betray each other? Will they fall in love?

Broadly speaking, those tensions are exploited correctly and you can watch the show while shovelling pasta into your mouth and making, really, a nice evening of it. Having said that, the relationship itself doesn’t quite gel enough to stave off frustration, even if both actors give good, likeable performances.

For one thing, emotional growth (or even emotional competence) in the assassin is forestalled by her paralysing psychopathic condition, here taken in the conventionally Hollywooded diagnostic of I-can’t-feel-emotion-therefore-I-can’t-stop-killing. As such, the more crucial it becomes that she prove her ability to love, the more the showmakers need to stop her from being able to, which is the character arc equivalent of banging your head against the wall.

The agent, meanwhile, is supposed to have jumped into a rabbit hole of dark-and-dirty disenchantment with government and society and life, at least enough for her to entertain an obsession with (and attraction to) her counterpart’s supercriminality. Yet, while the show wants me to believe that boredom and grit have fuelled this jump, the character is too damn relatable (normcore, remember) to really pull this off. Where is her horrific backstory? To be fair, it might be somewhere after episode three of season four, the point at which I stopped watching.

Don’t let that alarm you, though. Make some pasta. Give it a go.

Black Mirror (2011-2023)

Type of show: Each episode is a standalone dramatic filmlet that explores a “what if?” scenario, often a technology-related dystopia.

Potential to frustrate: Extremely, lethally high. The show’s engagement with human nature is so condescendingly simplistic that the main profit available to the viewer is a feeling of superiority to the show’s writer.

Much, much better sci-fi: Andor (Disney+), Foundation (Apple TV), Severance (Apple TV).

Disclaimer: this review pertains mostly to the first two-and-a-half episodes of Black Mirror’s sixth season, released this year. I’ve seen the older episodes but not recently, and, upon reaching the halfway point of the present episode three, I saw the chance for a better life and grabbed it by quitting the series altogether.

Science fiction hinges on speculation: you speculate what things would be like under x, y or z conditions, and then build a story within that imagined world. My problem with Black Mirror is that its imaginative powers are populist in the extreme and frankly lazy, tending towards a depiction of humanity that mistakes cynicism for sophistication while pitching its emotional engagement at a complexity level commensurate, roughly, with that of a pre-2017 tweet. (That’s the year they doubled the character limit to 280.)

Take “Joan Is Awful,” the first episode of the latest run, in which the eponymous Joan non-consentingly becomes the star of a TV series made in near-real time about her life. The series is AI-generated and operates by stealing (via her smartphone) her daily conversations and interactions and converting them into episodes that air soon--like, minutes--after they actually take place. The show is available on a platform called “Streamberry,” which is a replica of Netflix. Not a nod to Netflix or a Netflixesque station: I mean the font, the startup jingle, the on-screen layout are straight-up copy/pasted.

So far, so compelling (on paper). Topical, certainly. Coherent. But, sadly, that’s it.

We soon learn that Streamberry did, in fact, get Joan’s consent for the project, albeit by exploitative means, i.e. getting her to sign something that nobody expected her to actually read. That the plot is based on this loophole (I would elaborate but promised no spoilers) gives it a kids’ movie feel, exacerbated by the complicity of the supporting characters, who, in a frenzy of writing that cringe-dazzles with its necessary awkwardness, are made to collectively pretend that this situation is some wild yuckity-yuck novelty instead of a lung-punching breach of data privacy that, come on, wouldn’t be taken lightly even by people outside the remit of the GDPR.

If Black Mirror would acknowledge its own trashiness, then a redemptive layer of irony might become possible, but this is exactly what, enragingly, it refuses to do. Instead--and I’m speaking about the show generally--it goes hard the opposite way, fancying itself a serious commentator on technology and offering dire warnings of bleak futures. Yet the bleakness it portrays routinely comes from a misanthropic reading of humankind rather than from the technology itself (in one old episode hundreds of people willingly participate in the daily psychological torture of a convicted felon; in another, society has inexplicably embraced a world where the masses are enslaved and ride exercise bikes in exchange for currency; etc), further problematising its already-clumsy mission of criticising tech.

The ultimate deathblow of frustration comes when you realise that the show’s shock tactics actually function much better as spectacle than as commentary, which ultimately does nothing but reinforce the coolness of new technology by entertaining us with fanciful tales of its worst-case scenarios. With that, all pretence of actual engagement with modern issues is deleted on sight. Look no further than our present case study, “Joan Is Awful,” where the hellish perpetrator of dystopia is Streamberry, a streaming platform identical to Netflix. Obviously, the real Netflix is so unthreatened by the portrayal that it went ahead and licensed its own graphics and jingles for use in the show. Ugh.

Next Door (2021)

Type of movie: Bottle episode. Everyone is in a café the whole time. Also, it’s in German.

Artsiness index: Lower than you might fear. Granted, it takes place in one setting, so it unfolds like a play--but with a runtime of just 90 minutes I think you can handle it.

Blurb blunders: Two. The Netflix description refers to an “East German Spy” but they don’t mean “spy” in the secret agent sense. And Vicky Krieps is only in 0.0001% of the movie.

Every writer of a bottle episode has voluntarily short-tooled themselves by giving up the possibility for movement. Formwise, then, it’s hard not to engage with Next Door on the planes of this limitation, particularly because it’s self-imposed. Sonnet-writers (I assume) will understand.

How, then, does Next Door cope with locational containment? Well, the first act certainly squeezes a fair amount of tension out of movement-as-concept: the basic setup is that a hotshot A-list actor in Berlin has made a quick stopover at his local café before jetting off to London to audition for a big-budget superhero blockbuster. We meet, know and like the hotshot before any other character, which means that his Londonwards momentum provides the film’s energy early on. We think: he’ll escape this conversation by leaving for his plane; uh oh, soon he’ll be running late; okay, what could be worth missing his audition for? etc.

Try to find joy in the gradual wilting away of that momentum as it’s replaced with the yang to its yin: the story of the hotshot’s antagonist, a through-the-peephole-type neighbourhood creep who has begun his day with a beer and who seems, in all ways, to be going exactly nowhere.

That the story generally progresses backwards in time rather than forwards is conventional for the format: without the possibility to take the plot on the road to visit tour stops of antagonism, the natural thing is to, instead, complexify the backstory by lobbing info-bombs. Indeed, we learn quickly that there will be more to the creep than meets the eye, which poses a tension-sapping problem (yeah, yeah, we know the actor is on his way to London, but this creep is going to stop him in his tracks--again--any second now) that isn’t really sidestepped but which is, more or less, smoothed over by the subtlety of both actors’ performances.

The dynamism that emerges between these two characters’ clashing trajectories--the actor’s momentum against the creep’s lack of it--is a reason to watch, and, as one would hope, the energy created by that dynamism is eventually what enables the film’s climactic escalations. Weirdly, Vicky Krieps turns up momentarily as part of an ending so misjudged that, personally, I’m pretending it didn’t happen.