Behind the making of the Pierce family on Succession. hunteryharris reports
Holly Hunter as Rhea and Cherry Jones as Nan in Succession. Photo: HBO All throughout Succession this season, we’ve heard rumblings about the Pierce family and their mighty prestige media empire. Finally, in Sunday’s episode, the Roys meet “those blue-blooded fucks” face-to-face: matriarch Nan , her favorite niece Naomi , and a gaggle of Ph.D.-clad, Brookings Institute–endorsed cousins. But “Tern Haven” isn’t so much a showdown as a show-off.
From the start, the Pierces were written as a different kind of legacy-media family, just as powerful and monied as the Roys, but with maybe cleaner hands. “The Pierces are not based on any one family, but based on research into reputable, blue-blood, northeastern, legacy-media families like the Bancrofts, the Sulzbergers, the Graham family,” says Will Tracy, the episode’s writer.
Everything comes to a head in the lengthy dinner-party sequence, shot over two days on location at a Long Island mansion. Pulling it off was no small feat: The show’s production schedule demands quick shoots, which meant they couldn’t film each part in separate chunks. Instead, episode director Mark Mylod and his camera operators relied on a loose, “Altman-esque” style to capture each moment as it happened around all the others.
An especially rich moment bubbles up when Peter and Marcie ask Roman if he’s read any good novels recently. “In a way, it’s really a confrontational thing to do,” Tracy explains. “She doesn’t believe him, perhaps, but it’s all done in a way that keeps up a veneer of amiability, which the Pierces are very good at. There’s a lot of subtext in the way that they talk. They communicate in these pleasant ways that have a more cutting subtext underneath.
The fissure between Logan and Marcia that’s been growing all season also rears its head at dinner, after Nan asks about her life and Marcia bristles at Logan batting the question aside. Mylod said they tried the moment a lot of different ways: “There was a bigger discussion over how alcohol-fueled that was. In some takes, it was stone-cold sober — a coldly bold fuck-you to Logan in his connection to Rhea and the increasing intimacy of that relationship,” he says.
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