Swearing like Logan Roy, stammering like Ken and Rom: “Succession” is so brilliant because the characters talk the way they talk. A praise for the dialogue – for which a Brit is responsible in the US series.
“Words,” Kendall asks Roy in Succession, “are what?” And answers this rhetorical question himself: “Simply nothing. A complicated air flow.” This is how a billionaire heir exhausted by ambition, guilt and addiction outlines the unreliability of language. But of course language is not nothing, not even for Ken. He uses them himself constantly to cover up his own weaknesses, he uses them for tactics and sometimes as an outlet for suffering. Indeed unfolded in the world in which Succession plays, nothing makes such a big impact as language – and speechlessness.