This article contains spoilers through Succession season 4 episode 7.
The folks behind Succession are an intelligent, well-educated bunch. For evidence look no further than the scripts’ crackling dialogue, star Jeremy Strong’s correct use of the word “dramaturgically,” and creator Jesse Armstrong’s frequent invocation of Shakespeare.
The best evidence of the show’s literary bona fides, however, comes in the form of an Easter egg embedded in some of its episode titles. The names of each of the show’s four season finales are all lines from the same classic poem. Season 1’s “Nobody Is Ever Missing,” season 2’s “This Is Not for Tears,” season 3’s “All the Bells Say,” and the just-announced season 4’s “With Open Eyes” all come from John Berryman’s “Dream Song 29.”
This is something the internet picked up on quite a long time ago with several publications, forums, and social media users pointing to the episode titles’ artful origins.
The folks behind Succession are an intelligent, well-educated bunch. For evidence look no further than the scripts’ crackling dialogue, star Jeremy Strong’s correct use of the word “dramaturgically,” and creator Jesse Armstrong’s frequent invocation of Shakespeare.
The best evidence of the show’s literary bona fides, however, comes in the form of an Easter egg embedded in some of its episode titles. The names of each of the show’s four season finales are all lines from the same classic poem. Season 1’s “Nobody Is Ever Missing,” season 2’s “This Is Not for Tears,” season 3’s “All the Bells Say,” and the just-announced season 4’s “With Open Eyes” all come from John Berryman’s “Dream Song 29.”
This is something the internet picked up on quite a long time ago with several publications, forums, and social media users pointing to the episode titles’ artful origins.
- 5/9/2023
- by Alec Bojalad
- Den of Geek
“Succession” has experienced a long journey from under-the-radar HBO drama to buzzy 13-time Emmy winner. And now that the upcoming fourth season (launching Sunday on HBO and HBO Max) has been announced as the last, there’s only 10 more episodes left to wrap up everything that the show has been building toward. With such a large ensemble and abundant supporting players, there are a lot of ways it might all come to an end. But I think I’ve got things figured out. So ahead of tonight’s Season 4 premiere, I offer some obvious developments that could unfold along with some less predictable ones plot twists.
What old characters might return? Who will make it to the final episode? And will Kendall (Jeremy Strong) actually catch a break for once? Here is what my crystal ball says:
Amir Returns
Remember Amir (Darius Homayoun)? He’s Marcia’s (Hiam Abbass) son...
What old characters might return? Who will make it to the final episode? And will Kendall (Jeremy Strong) actually catch a break for once? Here is what my crystal ball says:
Amir Returns
Remember Amir (Darius Homayoun)? He’s Marcia’s (Hiam Abbass) son...
- 3/26/2023
- by Leila Jordan
- Gold Derby
Save us from shotguns & fathers' suicides. This pleading scrap of verse, from John Berryman's elegy for Ernest Hemingway, "Dream Song 235," appears in HBO's "Olive Kitteridge" scrawled on a cocktail napkin, yet another of the miniseries' many reminders that in the midst of life we are in death. Adapted by Jane Anderson from Elizabeth Strout's 2008 novel and directed by Lisa Cholodenko ("The Kids Are All Right"), "Olive Kitteridge" abounds with death -- sudden, slow, natural, accidental, suicidal -- much as this summer's "The Leftovers" (HBO) bristles with absence, and both thoroughly earn the adjective "bleak." But the latter succeeds in traversing such rough terrain while the former falls short, a difference that comes down, I think, to their uses of disenchantment. Read More: "Lisa Cholodenko & Frances McDormand's 'Olive Kitteridge' Impresses in Venice" As "Olive Kitteridge" opens, the...
- 10/28/2014
- by Matt Brennan
- Thompson on Hollywood
Second #2679, 44:39
The full and furious roar of Frank. The camera has just completed a somehow menacing lateral tracking shot passing very close behind Dorothy’s back. Frank, having deeply inhaled from the mask (as if to prepare himself for the performance that he—Dennis Hopper, not Frank—is about to deliver) is now contorted with fury and sorrow. And something else: terror. Terror, perhaps, for something he has summoned.
Poem #259, stanzas two and three, from The Dream Songs, by John Berryman, goes like this:
When worst it got, you went away I charge you
and we will wonder over this in Hell
if the circles communicate.
I stayed here. It’s changing from blue to blue
but you would be rapt with the gold hues, well,
you went like Pier to another fate,
I never changed. My desire for death was strong
but not strong enough. I thought: this is my chance,...
The full and furious roar of Frank. The camera has just completed a somehow menacing lateral tracking shot passing very close behind Dorothy’s back. Frank, having deeply inhaled from the mask (as if to prepare himself for the performance that he—Dennis Hopper, not Frank—is about to deliver) is now contorted with fury and sorrow. And something else: terror. Terror, perhaps, for something he has summoned.
Poem #259, stanzas two and three, from The Dream Songs, by John Berryman, goes like this:
When worst it got, you went away I charge you
and we will wonder over this in Hell
if the circles communicate.
I stayed here. It’s changing from blue to blue
but you would be rapt with the gold hues, well,
you went like Pier to another fate,
I never changed. My desire for death was strong
but not strong enough. I thought: this is my chance,...
- 12/21/2011
- by Nicholas Rombes
- Filmmaker Magazine - Blog
"Death disports with writers more cruelly than with the rest of humankind," Cynthia Ozick wrote in a recent issue of The New Republic.
"The grave can hardly make more mute those who were voiceless when alive--dust to dust, muteness to muteness. But the silence that dogs the established writer's noisy obituary, with its boisterous shock and busy regret, is more profound than any other.
"Oblivion comes more cuttingly to the writer whose presence has been felt, argued over, championed, disparaged--the writer who is seen to be what Lionel Trilling calls a Figure. Lionel Trilling?
"Consider: who at this hour (apart from some professorial specialist currying his "field") is reading Mary McCarthy, James T. Farrell, John Berryman, Allan Bloom, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, Edmund Wilson, Anne Sexton, Alice Adams, Robert Lowell, Grace Paley, Owen Barfield, Stanley Elkin, Robert Penn Warren, Norman Mailer, Leslie Fiedler, R.P. Blackmur, Paul Goodman, Susan Sontag,...
"The grave can hardly make more mute those who were voiceless when alive--dust to dust, muteness to muteness. But the silence that dogs the established writer's noisy obituary, with its boisterous shock and busy regret, is more profound than any other.
"Oblivion comes more cuttingly to the writer whose presence has been felt, argued over, championed, disparaged--the writer who is seen to be what Lionel Trilling calls a Figure. Lionel Trilling?
"Consider: who at this hour (apart from some professorial specialist currying his "field") is reading Mary McCarthy, James T. Farrell, John Berryman, Allan Bloom, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, Edmund Wilson, Anne Sexton, Alice Adams, Robert Lowell, Grace Paley, Owen Barfield, Stanley Elkin, Robert Penn Warren, Norman Mailer, Leslie Fiedler, R.P. Blackmur, Paul Goodman, Susan Sontag,...
- 4/24/2011
- by Roger Ebert
- blogs.suntimes.com/ebert
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