HBO’s ‘Succession’ will live forever in memes

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for four seasons now, HBO Succession it has given people something to tweet about on Sunday nights. Everyone, it seems, is obsessed with the Roys. With the finale airing on Sunday, it looks like the big top party is about to end. That is not entirely the case. Online, Succession screenshots, quotes, and references dominate the discourse in a way that probably won’t be dispelled any time soon. Through his memes, Succession already tiptoeing towards eternity.

Evidence of the show’s memeification is everywhere, from picket lines of the Writers Guild of America strike to his Twitter timeline every time some rich person does something dumb. It’s a testament to the quality of the writing and the specific style of the show that nearly every episode offers a single all-time line, the kind perfect for a GIF or picture macro. Creator Jesse Armstrong previously made the sweatily deranged British comedy peep showand clearly still hungry for the kind of uniquely damaged jokes that make ideal meme fodder.

The Simpsons’ Online dominance can be attributed to his quirky coincidental predictive powers and the fact that it’s always nice to watch Homer sink into a bush. When The sopranos acquired new relevance during the pandemic, He New York Times Magazine argument that it was the show’s way of capturing America’s national decline — “a humiliating slow-motion slide down a hill into a puddle of filth” — that gave it resonance online. Succession, also seems destined to live in our hearts online. But what story will their memes tell?

Maris Kreizman is a writer and podcast host who sums up the show on Twitter by encouraging people to “tag yourself in tonight’s episode.” She traces his adoration of her to a season two episode about the Vaulter, a fictional Gawker/Vice-like entity that the Roys capriciously destroy. “Kendall fires the entire staff and then goes into a warehouse, steals a battery pack, then throws the batteries in the trash,” Kreizman summarizes. “Having dealt with multiple media companies that treat her employees like trash, she has never identified me with an inanimate object like I did that battery pack.” She labeled herself the batteries and then continued labeling.

Interestingly, Kreizman is not the only one Succession meme creator to say that the destruction of Vaulter was the moment they fell in love. Perhaps counterintuitively SuccessionThe portrayal of how the digital media industry works as ruthless and stupid has motivated real digital media workers to actively engage with the show online.

Writing for Polygon, Gita Jackson described the show’s online fan community as “fiercely dedicated” to the fate of these fictional lives and credited that dedication to an important line: “On platforms like Twitter and Tumblr, fans of the show break down frame-by-frame trailers and discuss their hopes and dreams for the characters. Despite From being a show about ruthless capitalists, some of whom supported a fascist presidential candidate, the way all the characters have been so hurt by their abusive father makes it easy for the audience to sympathize with them.”