<em>Succession</em> Invents a Terrifying New Game
This post contains major spoilers for Season 2, Episode 3 of Succession.
The most recent episode of HBO’s Succession, “Hunting,” will be most remembered for one phrase: “boar on the floor.” That’s the catchy name of the “game” that the Waystar Royco mogul Logan Roy (played by Brian Cox) inflicts on his potentially traitorous underlings, forcing some of them to oink like piggies and scuffle for sausages. A hilarious and awful spectacle with no rules other than Logan’s whims, boar on the floor transforms a dining room full of polished executives into a fraternity hazing basement. “It’s fun!” Logan shouts, and to viewers, it is that—while also being disturbing.
But the key to understanding this particularly genius episode of this is in a more commonplace phrase than“boar on the floor.” It’s in the word . No show’s writers are better at capturing the fumbling, pseudo-jocular, not-all-that-witty way that real people actually talk. Most of Sunday’s episode amounted to a symphony of people saying “okay” to one another, which subtly underscored ’s big insights about fear and power.
