Succession’s medium-distance ensemble framing formally encodes social structure over empathy

Evidence

HBO’s Succession similarly spins a family business story, with even more possible heirs and side plots, and similarly blends scopic realism with cinematic camerawork. Impersonality lodges: not a single one of the characters stands as a point of identification; empathy is not the spectatorial mode. Indeed, “not a single one” is something of a formal principle for the show, which rarely shoots individuals in close-up, offers no protagonist, and most commonly stages scenes as large-group affairs—board meetings around desks, family gatherings around tables. The camera works to encompass so many centers of gravity, usually focusing on the spaces and even furniture of interrelation (couches, consoles, vehicles), with a prevalence of panning shots rather than cuts or reverse shots that would atomize the relations. The camera’s mainly medium distance undermines the fluidities we have seen to define stream aesthetics (all the more distinctive because the show’s creator, Jesse Armstong, made his career with front-facing extremity in Peep Show). Frequent handheld equipment palpates the visual scope with sweeping movement, but there is no immanentization here; a partially removed perspective surveys the group as subject, polymorphous and unsolicitous, keying the spectator to the social structure of the firm form and the unstable alliances among lonely jesters. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 358

Categorization

• XREF: Concrete formal feature set distinguishing right-realist TV from stream immediacy aesthetics mapped in earlier chapters; useful negative instance for the reader’s taxonomy.
• QUESTION: Is Succession’s anti-empathy stance genuinely a form of mediation, or just a different immediacy? The claim that refusing identification escapes stream aesthetics could be contested.