'Succession,' Or When Chapter 1 Is Better After You Read Chapter 3

Plus: The 1619 Project, 'Bernadette' and what's making us happy by Linda Holmes Welcome! It was the week when we all apparently needed a [Christmas movie trailer](. Oh! And [a Little Women trailer](. It was also the week we learned that the books of J.D. Salinger were going to [come out as e-books](. Let's get to it. Opening Argument There’s been an interesting conversation going on about HBO’s Succession, which we [covered on the show this week](. I’ve talked to a lot of people who didn’t really connect with it in the first couple of episodes, but who stuck with it and came to really love it. It raises the question: Did the show get better, or did we just come to understand it better? [scene from 'Succession'] Peter Kramer/HBO This is particularly curious with Succession, because for a lot of these folks, a second viewing made the first episodes seem just as good as the later ones. In other words, once the rest of the story had begun to unfold, the first chapters seemed better. But it’s not unfair to ask: If a show requires two viewings, is it doing its job as television, which most people don’t intend to watch over and over? People are often shocked when I tell them this is essentially how I reacted to Friday Night Lights, which had a pilot I found too fidgety, too fussy, too full of half-formed football players and too focused on a final moment that felt much too neat. Skip ahead, and not only did FNL go on to become one of my favorite shows, but I still consider Season 1 among the most perfect seasons of television ever made, and I now include the pilot in that calculation. How is that possible? On the one hand, what I now see there was always there; nothing has been added, and it’s not a case of having needed information that I didn’t have. It’s all context: knowing who the people are, knowing what the show’s style is, knowing how it’s put together episode after episode. And it’s knowing how that chapter fits into a larger story that isn’t just about triumph for Saracen or for the team. If you think about it like reading, it’s not uncommon for people to say that they didn’t get into a book until a few chapters had gone by. Does that mean the book improved? Or only that it’s meant to be consumed as a whole? Part of figuring that out, of course, is deciding what the unit of evaluation is. Plenty of showrunners have argued that you cannot really evaluate a show based on an individual episode — or even that you can’t judge the show until the season is over. Or maybe until the show is over. But that’s not how television works. Television is made of episodes; it’s not a 10-hour film or whatever they try to tell you. It’s episodes. Knowing how to structure episodes as well as whole seasons is often the difference between OK shows and really great ones. That’s maybe even more true with something like Succession, that’s dropped week to week on HBO, as opposed to something like Stranger Things, a season of which comes out as a big chunk on Netflix all at the same time. I can certainly say that as a critic, it’s hard to convince people with so much to choose from that they should watch, say, three or four episodes that seem kind of slow in order to get to the good part. But I still do it. I do it all the time. In fact, part of my job as a critic has become the careful task of differentiating between a show like Succession, where I honestly believe if you find it slow after two episodes it might still grab you, and a show like, say, Glee, where it’s pretty easy to tell whether it’s for you once you’ve seen a couple of chapters. It sometimes breaks my heart when something is, to me, weird and wonderful, and somebody asks, “I didn’t like it after the first two; should I keep going?” Because sometimes, the answer is no. We Recommend As I have for years, I’ll be heading out to the Toronto International Film Festival in a few weeks, where I’ll be with NPR film critic Bob Mondello and PCHH’s own Glen Weldon. The lineup this year is fascinating and varied; [take a peek](. I’ve only begun to dive into The 1619 Project, a New York Times undertaking that examines [the history of slavery in the United States](. But I couldn’t be more confident that this collection of work, headed up by Nikole Hannah-Jones, will be worth all the time that I, and you, can spend with it. I did only one thing last weekend, culture-wise: I caught up obsessively on TV Land’s very light comedy Younger. Starring Sutton Foster as a woman who originally landed a publishing job by pretending to be 26 when she was actually 40, the show has mostly outgrown that labored premise and is now just a soapy workplace comedy whose bite-sized episodes are perfect for binge-watching. This week brought the premiere of David Makes Man to OWN. Created by Tarell Alvin McCraney, the playwright behind Moonlight, it’s a coming-of-age story about a kid navigating the worlds of poverty at home and opportunity at school. It’s gorgeous and visually ambitious, but with a rich story at the center as well. Highly recommended, and available on-demand. What We Did This Week [scene from 'Where'd You Go, Bernadette?'] Wilson Webb/Annapurna Pictures [On our Wednesday show]( we were joined by our great pals Barrie Hardymon and Gene Demby for a rollicking chat about HBO’s addictive Succession, perhaps the most gripping show I’ve ever seen about exclusively terrible people. I also [wrote a review of the show]( up through the Season 2 premiere, which aired last Sunday night. Glen [wrote about the trippy ending]( to the trippy Legion, which ended up a show much different than the one it first appeared to be. I wrote about [the thing making me happy this week]( which is the Netflix medical mystery series Diagnosis. [Our Friday show]( covers the Richard Linklater adaptation of the Maria Semple novel Where’d You Go, Bernadette, which stars Cate Blanchett as an agoraphobic woman who really doesn’t want to go on a long trip, until she does. What's Making Us Happy Every week on the show, we talk about some other things out in the world that have been giving us joy lately. Here they are: - Lyndsey: Fish tube memes! Like [DuckTales]( or [“Shallow.”]( - Glen: [The Three Questions with Andy Richter]( podcast - Katie: [High Magick]( by Damien Echols - Linda: [Diagnosis]( on Netflix What do you think of today's email? We'd love to hear your thoughts, questions and feedback: [pchh@npr.org](mailto:pchh@npr.org?subject=Newsletter%20Feedback) Enjoying this newsletter? Forward to a friend! They can [sign up here](. Looking for more great content? [Check out all of our newsletter offerings]( — including Music, Books, Daily News and more! 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