To answer the headline, they are all shows I am watching right now and they are so tense that I, at times, couldn’t take it.
Spoilers for a lot of this, including a major spoiler for Succession as we get going.
In the third episode of the fourth and final season Succession played the Ace showrunner Jesse Armstrong has been holding up his sleeve since the premiere. Logan Roy, the head of a right-leaning media empire died. His children, all broken by his monstrous behavior (but also all extravagantly wealthy) must now navigate a new world and determine how or if they will take over his company.
Given that his ailing health has been a constant part of the show Roy’s death should not be a surprise. But it hit me at least as hard as the infamous Game of Thrones episode The Red Wedding. I’m confident that this episode of Succession being called Conor’s Wedding is no coincidence.
My explanation of this episode would be somewhere between The Red Wedding and The Body from Buffy The Vampire Slayer.
All of them deal with a shocking death and the immediate ramifications for the characters. They also happen to be exceptional single episodes of television.
Everything here is a masterclass, the acting is up in the seventh Heaven but the directing work by Mark Mylod maximized the tension.
One example of the great choices: You see a stewardess doing chest compressions on someone but you only actually see Roy very late in the process. As a viewer, you still think, “Is this really happening?”
Another: We see Tom’s phone calls to his estranged wife Shiv but she and the audience don’t know why he keeps calling. And she naturally, ignores them.
And then, she’s the last one to maybe speak to her father who was most likely already gone.
How can I as an audience member, be going through the five stages of grief (especially denial) alongside a fictional man’s fictional kids? I don’t know. But I was. Even now I’m hearing from fans and others who are still in the denial stage.
It’s Logan trying to get one over on the kids! It’s a trick of some sort! We never saw the body! (Narrator: We did.)
The actors, writers, and director put their own audience into one of the stages of grief. How great is that!
Anyway, next comes bargaining guys. It’s part of life.
In the second episode of this season, I started writing down lines that made me cackle because I wanted to be able to recall them when talking about the show in the office. Basically, everything everyone says in the first two episodes is impressive and has hilarious dialogue.
But this episode wasn’t that kind of thing, because everyone was dealing with an actual distressing fact instead of the usual fun and games nonsense people this wealthy mostly (theoretically) face.
And then it was Succession again as the kids started to deal with the fallout.
We’ll get a funeral off the rack. We’ll do Reagan with tweaks.
Kendall Roy
I don’t want to just do quotes but this one after Logan’s girlfriend moves through the plane in obvious shock is another home run in a show full of them.
Judging by her grin it looks like she caught a foul ball at Yankee Stadium
Tom Wambsgans
There was another moment where Keiran Culkin just sneered at one of the minions when they offered their condolences that absolutely killed. Culkin has the best sneer in the majors.
In the first episode of this season, Logan Roy compared himself to his fellow humans in the only way that matters to people like him: his wealth.
“What are people? They’re economic units,” he said. “I’m a hundred feet tall. These people are pygmies.”
Write that bit of philosophy on his gravestone. It will be as much use to him now as all that money.
This weekend I started Beef on Netflix and the first season of Yellowjackets on Showtime.
Hoo boy.
I watch plenty of stuff as it comes out and while I certainly binge, I tend to watch an episode and then go do something else. Over a weekend, when I’m keeping an eye on a kid and watching tv on my iPad, I’ll try and pick a few things to break up the time.
And if you have watched these shows you might be laughing at me right now. Yellowjackets is a thriller that is occasionally so tense that it can almost be too much. Beef is ostensibly a comedy but it is occasionally so tense and so connected to the suppressed anger of its two main characters that it can almost be too much.
It was a heck of a weekend.
I only made it through three episodes of each and will probably slowly work my way through the first seasons of Beef and Yellowjackets over the next week or two. But I won’t be able to use one as a sort of relief valve for the other. A new, good, 30-minute sitcom is great for this. Shrinking was filling that role for me for a while. But I’ve finished it. And Ted Lasso remains great but
A. I’m watching it as it comes out.
B. It’s hasn’t really been a comedy since the first season. It’s a funnyish drama now.
Tension, of course, can be great fun in the film and tv world. I loved Uncut Gems, but it was a heart attack and not a movie. There is a decent chance I will never watch it again even though I thought it was great.
Alan Sepinwall, Rolling Stone’s TV critic, has related more than once that he could not initially get through The Bear because it was, “the most stressful thing on TV.”
Anyway, the tension was set to boiling for me this weekend and the black comedy that is normally Succession offered no relief. A new episode of Abbott Elementary cannot come soon enough.
Dark Highways 
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