How Succession set the scene for that epic marriage brawl in a fish bowl
An epic fight between married couple Shiv and Tom in their Manhattan apartment required carefully staged choreography. This article contains spoilers about Succession.
Succession loves to party. Be it birthdays, weddings or a European retreat, group gatherings are a signature of the show. These scenes put a big ensemble of characters on the boil by unleashing all their posturing, ulterior motives and insecurities in one space.
In Tailgate Party, the final season’s seventh episode streaming on Binge, the title event builds to one of the show’s most lacerating volleys yet. It’s a five-minute scene on a balcony where spouses Shiv Roy and Tom Wambsgans air all their relationship grievances in granular detail – and in view of guests and family members inside.
“We were excited to put Tom and Shiv in a fishbowl in front of the entire party,” says Shari Springer Berman, who directed the episode with her filmmaking partner (and husband) Robert Pulcini. “That fight, more than any other that I can remember (between the couple), really went there.”
The setting: a VIP kickoff for the presidential election and its coverage by Waystar Royco’s conservative news network, ATN. The party dynamics make a luxe Manhattan triplex feel claustrophobic.
In the hallway and coatroom, Kendall Roy makes backchannel power plays. At the bar, Roman absorbs the repercussions of firing his former ally. In the rec room, Connor weighs his presidential pipe dream against a possible ambassadorship in Oman. And party-crasher Lukas Matsson, Waystar Royco’s prospective buyer, is all over the place, schmoozing and trashing people. “With this cast and these characters, it’s magic when they’re trapped together,” Pulcini says.
Tailgate Party is the third episode of Succession he and Springer Berman have directed, following season three’s Lion in the Meadow and season two’s Safe Room, in which a shooting scare sent characters into hiding spots.
The directing duo are best known for their Oscar-nominated feature, American Splendor, a 2003 portrait of the late comic book writer Harvey Pekar, played by Paul Giamatti. Their recent work includes episodes of the FX series Fleishman is in Trouble and Things Heard and Seen, a psychological horror movie driven by a faltering marriage.
Most of the Tailgate Party scenes were shot over the course of a week in the same apartment that has served as Tom and Shiv’s home in previous episodes. It’s a multilevel luxury apartment in lower Manhattan, on Broadway near City Hall.
The densely layered script, credited to writer Will Tracy, didn’t always specify where party scenes would play out.
The directors annotated floor plans of the apartment with arrows and lines of dialogue to map out the characters’ movements and interactions.
Cameras could catch a cross-section of background actors and main characters in a shot, or follow them as they crossed paths or clustered in different corners, such as the sunken level Matsson dubs “the kids’ table”. “The geography of that place was a wealth of riches,” Pulcini says.
Because the apartment was lined with windows, cast and crew had to shoot the party scenes at night, which added to the sense of physical fatigue that Tom keeps complaining about.
Even when he’s not at the centre of the screen, actor Matthew Macfadyen’s character becomes a focus of the party for viewers, the directors say, simply because the host is having such a miserable time in his own home.
“It was great because whatever direction he looked, there was something triggering for him to see through the whole party,” Springer Berman says.
Tom struggles to pass off the funky wine from his vineyard as a “light, fruity red”. He foists a glass on Shiv’s former lover, Nate Sofrelli, the enemy he once forced to pour back some wine at their wedding. When Kendall offers a friendly shout out to Nate during a toast, “the camera lands on Tom as he goes to his dark place”, Pulcini says.
After getting called out by Matsson for blatantly sucking up to the new boss, Tom endures rumours of his imminent firing, which his wife has fanned “as a tactical kind of joke” while she plays both sides. No wonder Tom wants to go to bed.
“I’m just a little tired because all the fun gossip that I’ve been hearing from everywhere at this party in my house is that I’m going to be shitcanned,” Tom says to Shiv.
A night of humiliation for Tom and frayed nerves for Shiv leads to a poisonous confrontation and a call back to the beginning of the episode: the scorpion paperweight Tom gifted his wife then struggled to explain, saying: “It’s like, you know, you love me but you kill me and I kill you.”
The directors chose to stage this so-called clearing of the air on the apartment’s balcony because it was a private place that would still put the characters on display.
“As a couple, if you fight in front of people, especially important people, that takes the fight to a whole epic level,” Springer Berman says.
The long, narrow dimensions of the balcony made it a challenge to position cameras, but heightened the feeling of a standoff, Pulcini says: “There was only one way to shoot it, with direct confrontation.”
The scene’s bitter exchanges reminded the directors of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and they tried to shoot it like a play.
“We got out of their way and let them go, allowing the camera to take what it could get,” Springer Berman says.
Actor Sarah Snook talked about if and when Shiv would come to tears. “At what line does that make sense that she can come back from it?” Pulcini says, recalling the discussion. “Does it undermine her power in the scene?” After the ostensibly pregnant Shiv hears her husband say she’s not fit to be a mother, her eyes dampen and she sniffles when Tom describes her as broken.
When the balcony scene was shot, people on set discussed whether it was possible for a married couple’s relationship to survive such a fight.
“Everybody,” Springer Berman says, “had a different answer.”
The Wall Street Journal