As I watched the latest episode of “Succession,” I found myself asking a question that had nagged at me before: Was I crazy, or was this show kind of obsessed with urine? Allow me to backtrack and set the scene. In “Retired Janitors of Idaho,” the fifth episode of Season 3, which aired this past Sunday on HBO, we saw the Roy family in crisis mode, attempting to maintain control of their media conglomerate, Waystar Royco, in the face of a potential shareholder vote. And yet, alongside the Roys’ race to strike a last-minute deal with Sandy and Stewy, a pair of alliteratively named corporate raiders, in order to avert the vote and save the company, another stressful drama was playing out—in Logan Roy’s urinary tract. “I think I might need to piss,” the octogenarian C.E.O. announces, to his assistant, at the beginning of the episode; and, although everyone knows that a bladder that threatens to give way in the first act will do so in the third, Logan’s makes for an exception to prove the rule. His desire to relieve himself and his painful inability to do so, owing to what turns out to be a U.T.I., is not just a plot point but a motif that can help us understand the show more broadly. In the world of “Succession,” pee is a symbol of power, and one can track the waning or surging of a character’s authority by keeping a close eye on the state of his urethra.
“Succession” is a show that is gleeful about breaking taboos, and since its première, in 2019, it’s flung around not just urine but a whole gross slew of bodily secretions. We’ve had references to excrement, both metaphorical (“He particularly loved the guys who ate the shit for him, and he never even knew it,” Kendall Roy says, of his father, to his slavish brother-in-law, Tom Wambsgans, in Season 2) and literal (that same season, Kendall wakes up after a hard night of partying to discover that he has soiled his own bed). There has also been ejaculate (who could forget that iconic moment, in Season 1, in which Roman Roy jerks off triumphantly onto his own office window, high above the city?) and, more recently, spit (in the third episode of Season 3, Shiv Roy hocked an impressive loogie right into the pages of her brother Kendall’s notebook).
Sourse: newyorker.com
