This month, Joe Manchin will appear at an event in New Hampshire sponsored by No Labels, a bipartisan organization who aim to nominate and run a centrist presidential candidate next year provided they get nationwide ballot access. Manchin has not explicitly stated whether he will run for President next year…

“I am the eldest boy.” In five words, Jesse Armstrong and Jeremy Strong articulate the impulse behind Kendall Roy’s quest for power in a finale that brings all the themes of this extraordinary show full circle. Kendall Roy is not a visionary. He has no great ideas for what he’d…

“Church & State,” the penultimate episode of Succession, opens with the Roy siblings getting ready for their father’s funeral. Roman walks through his apartment, practicing his eulogy; Shiv talks to Matsson on the phone in her apartment; and Kendall sits in the back of his car talking first with Roman…

Note: I originally wrote this piece in June 2018 for The Daily Banter upon the publication of Seymour Hersh’s memoir, Reporter. In the wake of his unacceptable reporting about Ukraine, I am republishing it here with some slight revisions. Throughout his career, Seymour Hersh has been a crusading investigative reporter…

One of the most extraordinary sleight-of-hands a dramatist can pull is when they remind us that the antihero we’ve been following is in fact, the villain. Shakespeare was a master of this: in Macbeth, we are willing to go along with Macbeth for the first two-thirds of the play because…

So let’s talk about Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? In an interview, Mike Nichols once said of Edward Albee’s masterpiece that it’s the only play he knew of “in which every single thing that happens is in the present. Even the beautiful reminiscences of the past are traps being set…

Kendall Roy has had a lot of terrible ideas. He wrote and performed a rap for his dad that made “Angela Bassett did the thing” look like “Lose Yourself.” He told his kids they could feed their rabbit bagels. He threw a birthday party for himself with an entryway designed…

OK, so remember when I spent all of last week’s recap doing a “Kendall is Prince Hal” seminar? I was an idiot to do that because if “Kill List” is any indication, Kendall’s leadership skills are so deficient that if he were delivering the St. Crispin’s Day speech it would…

Last week I compared Kendall Roy to Shakespeare’s Prince Hal. When we first meet Hal in Henry IV Part I, he’s a drunken layabout who hangs out all day at the Boards Head Tavern with Sir John Falstaff, and doesn’t seem to have the stuff great leaders are made of…