Huge Succession fan but Mountainhead didn't really work for me. No one except Jeff felt real enough to be believable, which meant that the satire didn't really take hold. It felt like a loony left wing comic strip writer's caricature of billionaires brought to life rather than Succession where the characters' were awful and pathetic but also believably real and therefore tragic and moving as well as genuinely funny.
I think Jesse Armstrong had some leftover snappy dialogue pieces that he didn't use in Succession, and this was a vehicle for it. But they didn't come out right, because these characters had no depth, unlike the ones in Succession.
It may genuinely just come down to that the Roys, being a family, have some sort of thing tying them together beyond "here are some caricatures of wacky rich people" in a way that the Mountainhead bros don't.
There's an interesting parallel here with the Knives Out films -- there is absolutely zero depth to any of those characters or the type of people they all represent, but because the suspects in Knives Out 1 are all family the movie ends up being coherent and good. Whereas Glass Onion expects us to believe that not-Elon Musk, not-Sheryl Sandberg, not-Amy Klobuchar, and not-Andrew Tate were all just... friends from college I guess? Total nonsense.
Have to agree, I don't think the writing landed at all, basically for the reasons you mentioned. I would also argue that public figures playing themselves as characters isn't new, and is actually as old as the concept of public figures.
But it does raise the interesting question of why, with so much reference material to draw on, a writer would retreat into flat, unrealistic caricature. It almost feels like a deliberate attempt to create some emotional distance from the source material. Like the reality of oligarchic mayhem was too overwhelming to confront head-on, so the writers had to first flatten and reduce it to something simpler and less threatening in order to digest it.
It's either that, or the billionaires really do become two-dimensional in real life as they grow richer. Up there there's no struggle and combat anymore (unlike in Succession). Which makes them boring.
This resonated, especially from working in tech MNCs. I have a presently unpublished short story about AI surveillance and an awful CEO and how biology and analog tools are the only obstacles left. Nice to see someone else grappling with these same ideas.
under Biden, you couldn't mock him and you couldn't even question his decline. Maybe people just lost the ability to mock power because they hadn't used it for your years
Huge Succession fan but Mountainhead didn't really work for me. No one except Jeff felt real enough to be believable, which meant that the satire didn't really take hold. It felt like a loony left wing comic strip writer's caricature of billionaires brought to life rather than Succession where the characters' were awful and pathetic but also believably real and therefore tragic and moving as well as genuinely funny.
I think Jesse Armstrong had some leftover snappy dialogue pieces that he didn't use in Succession, and this was a vehicle for it. But they didn't come out right, because these characters had no depth, unlike the ones in Succession.
Yes - if it is to be said
I see what you did there Greg
It may genuinely just come down to that the Roys, being a family, have some sort of thing tying them together beyond "here are some caricatures of wacky rich people" in a way that the Mountainhead bros don't.
There's an interesting parallel here with the Knives Out films -- there is absolutely zero depth to any of those characters or the type of people they all represent, but because the suspects in Knives Out 1 are all family the movie ends up being coherent and good. Whereas Glass Onion expects us to believe that not-Elon Musk, not-Sheryl Sandberg, not-Amy Klobuchar, and not-Andrew Tate were all just... friends from college I guess? Total nonsense.
Have to agree, I don't think the writing landed at all, basically for the reasons you mentioned. I would also argue that public figures playing themselves as characters isn't new, and is actually as old as the concept of public figures.
But it does raise the interesting question of why, with so much reference material to draw on, a writer would retreat into flat, unrealistic caricature. It almost feels like a deliberate attempt to create some emotional distance from the source material. Like the reality of oligarchic mayhem was too overwhelming to confront head-on, so the writers had to first flatten and reduce it to something simpler and less threatening in order to digest it.
It's either that, or the billionaires really do become two-dimensional in real life as they grow richer. Up there there's no struggle and combat anymore (unlike in Succession). Which makes them boring.
This resonated, especially from working in tech MNCs. I have a presently unpublished short story about AI surveillance and an awful CEO and how biology and analog tools are the only obstacles left. Nice to see someone else grappling with these same ideas.
under Biden, you couldn't mock him and you couldn't even question his decline. Maybe people just lost the ability to mock power because they hadn't used it for your years