the fact that shakespeare was a playwright is sometimes so funny to me. just the concept of the "greatest writer of the English language" being a random 450-year-old entertainer, a 16th cent pop cultural sensation (thanks in large part to puns & dirty jokes & verbiage & a long-running appeal to commoners). and his work was made to be watched not read, but in the classroom teachers just hand us his scripts and say "that's literature"
just...imagine it's 2450 A.D. and English Lit students are regularly going into 100k debt writing postdoc theses on The Simpsons screenplays. the original animation hasn't even been preserved, it's literally just scripts and the occasional SDH subtitles.txt. they've been republished more times than the Bible
the fact that succession had an episode with a giant joke about fake family therapy where we ALSO learn that shiv and roman are in therapy for real and it’s literally not helping them at all and the only character who gains any kind of insight at all is kendall who does so by swandiving off the wagon into a giant pile of meth. Art
For me it’s the way Varian cannot and will not verbally express his feelings for Thomas but never makes Thomas feel wrong or ashamed for expressing his own. Varian does not believe their relationship could ever work in the real world but he never puts Thomas down for believing it could and responds to Thomas’ words and feelings with physical affection, kissing Thomas in front of the fire when Thomas says he’s proud of him and kissing him at the Chagalls’ farm when Thomas tells him happiness doesn’t feel complicated when they’re together. Varian sees Thomas’ love as his strength; his rebuff of Thomas’ advances in episode 2 was not to put Thomas down but rather his, at the time, inability to allow himself to maintain personal connections while remaining committed to his work. He just doesn’t believe he can have it all, or that he deserves it.
It’s also the way the way Thomas never forces Varian to say what he’s feeling and allows him to deal with and process his thoughts and emotions at his own pace, in his own way, and is always there to support him but call him out when he needs to.
It’s about the respect, the trust, the understanding, the love.
John Levene pops up as Gene Bradley's co-pilot on his private jet, called Tony, (John Levene's character, not the jet) in The Adventurer: I'll Get There Sometime (1.15, ITC, 1973)