Last week, Barstool Sports founder David Portnoy threatened to fire “on the spot” any Barstool employee who sought information on unionizing, which, as our sister site Splinter points out, would be a direct violation of labor law. Coinciding with Portnoy’s rant was the successful unionization of sports and culture site The Ringer, who, like G/O Media’s editorial staff, linked up with Writers Guild of America, East. Suffice to say, the tenuous state of modern media and the need for writers to unionize is in the air, which is partly why last night’s episode of Succession hit as hard as it did.
In it, Kendall (Jeremy Strong) is ordered by his father to dissect the business practices of Vaulter, a multi-pronged culture site acquired last season. Though Kendall believes in the site and how it could shape the future of his dad’s conglomerate, Waystar Royco, he also has a combative relationship with its founder, Lawrence (Rob Yang). Still, he stands in front of the massive staff of writers, editors, and artists, praising the company while simultaneously telling them, “It would be a mistake for you to unionize.”
“We will get you a really fucking punchy independent arbitration panel. We’ll get you a pay bump,” he promises. “I know a lot of you are flirting with the Guild, and I’m just asking you to consider putting that on ice. Let’s try and figure this out inside. Let’s keep it in the Waystar family.”
Those are familiar words that no shortage of hopeful unionizers have heard from the suits up top. What follows, however, is perhaps even more familiar. Kendall’s brother, Roman (Kieran Culkin), wants to “shutter the fucker” and his dad, Logan (Brian Cox), agrees. And it’s not long before Kendall tells the 476 employees who he called the future of the company that they’re all fired. He hires an editor and five interns to handle “food and weed,” the only two verticals driving revenue. The rest of the content will be user-generated. Vaulter is toast.
As editorial staffers who recently unionized, this storyline hit us hard. As such, we figured it’d be worth it to discuss what it’s like to see your worst career fears play out onscreen.
Randall Colburn
Obviously, there’s much to unpack here, but what I can’t shake is Roman’s own disbelief at having had a hand in gutting a company. “They’re actually doing the thing I said,” he tells his girlfriend. Her response: “You did a thing. Mazel tov.”
“You did a thing.” I shivered at that line.
Erik, Danette: What are your takeaways from the episode?
Erik Adams
Congratulations to the members of The Ringer’s bargaining unit, who were not only recognized in a timely fashion (that’s how you do it, Jonah Peretti) but who also received that recognition just as one of their favorite shows (and ours!) of 2018 was about to address the topic of labor organization in digital media.
And it’s that thought, and that thought alone, that prevented me from watching “Vautler” in anything but a seasick haze. I was a latecomer to Succession, partially because I wasn’t all that impressed by the handful of episodes HBO sent out prior to the series premiere, and partially because even its most acridly comedic moments only serve to remind me of things I spend most of my days trying not to think about. (I’ve been trying to get the sound of Connor telling little Isla that “someday water’s going to be more precious than gold” out of my head for months.) The characterizations and performances eventually develop enough gravity to ground stuff like that, but that old queasiness came flooding back right around the moment Roman—strapped for ideas and time—lobbed this weak-ass pitch at Gerri: “One idea? Pivot to video?”
I’ve watched “Vaulter” twice now, and all the Cousin Greg punchlines in the world couldn’t make it feel any less like an exercise in masochism—and Nicholas Braun does an excellent, stammering, physical job of keeping things light in this episode. In some ways, it’s flattering that an Emmy-nominated HBO drama thinks a website’s tug-of-war against its well-insulated benefactors is worth an hour of Sunday-night primetime. (And that feels like a good place to note that Will Tracy, the former editor in chief of The Onion, is a writer and producer on season two of Succession.) But Jesus fucking Christ was it gutting to watch Kendall channel his off-the-wagon numbness into his dismissal of the entire Vaulter staff. It’s difficult, anxious viewing because of the way Strong delivers Kendall’s boilerplate farewell and how the editors cut from him to the confused, angry, incredulous staffers. (One of whom bears a striking resemblance to our departed colleague Clayton Purdom.) But it’s doubly so stacked up against the memory of a recent afternoon I spent hunkered down in the A.V. Club conference room, as I and the rest of the staff nervously waited to hear if G/O Media still had jobs for us. To put it in the context of the last HBO show we watched this closely, there were plenty of times a Game Of Thrones character stood stridently before someone (or a group of someones) they’d just stabbed in the back, but there’s no episode where it felt like Littlefinger was staring into my eyes and saying, “Food and weed can stay—nobody reads about TV anymore.”
Which raises a bigger question about “Vaulter”: Is anybody outside of media circles going to care? Smarter people than I have pegged Succession as the new show that the press pays a disproportionate amount of attention to, relative to the size of its audience. (See also: Mad Men, Girls.) I can’t help but think that the level of “I feel seen” projected by this episode is going to change that. But I also suggested this roundtable to Randall in the first place, so who’s really guilty of navel-gazing?
Danette Chavez
By design, Succession’s skewering of the 1% mostly takes place in their boardrooms, bedrooms, and summer palaces. “Vaulter” is the rare look at the mere mortals who are often the collateral damage of the Roys’ temper tantrums, gambits, and fits of insecurity. And as you both have noted, Randall and Erik, this trip down from the Mt. Olympus of the Roys hits close to home. The beleaguered Vaulter employees trying to hold strong in a shifting digital media landscape by unionizing, the mixed messages from corporate interests, the Clayton Purdom doppelgänger—all elements that contributed to the sense of déjà vu I got from “Vaulter.”
I come from the world of alt-weeklies, though, which went through a similar “sink or swim” situation over a decade ago, so maybe this is an echo of the déjà vu I experienced a couple of years ago when the revolving door of ownership first started spinning on media outlets that embraced the internet earlier on. Perhaps it’s because all of this has happened before that the gutting of Vaulter seemed inevitable from the start, just like Kendall’s decision to give up on having any vision of his own in order to help his father enact his. The suggestion that users will generate any content that isn’t food- or weed-related recalls the direction that some local dailies tried to take five or six years ago with their decision to lay off photojournalists and rely on crowdsourced images for COVER STORIES. That doesn’t make things sting any less for the Vaulter employees, who were taken in by Kendall’s plea for a leap of faith, though I certainly hope that real-life analogues don’t work out that way. “Vaulter” resonates for reasons beyond that hellscape—Logan telling Shiv she’s ready but not ready ready to take over Waystar will sound familiar to any woman who’s been up for a promotion, only to get bogged down in corporate politics. If anyone can overcome those politics, though, it’s Shiv.
One question I would like to ask the two of you is if “you gotta burn to turn” is the new “can’t cut your way to growth”?
Randall Colburn
It would be nice, wouldn’t it, to consider the concept of long-term growth and investment in talent? But then I think about Roman’s twisted passion for firing people, or Tom getting stars in his eyes when Greg told him digitization could allow him to lose up to 50 “skulls.” And that’s, I think, where even those outside the digital-media bubble could relate to “Vaulter.” Ours is not a stable economy. Recession is looming. Firing people is easy. And the biggest company in the world is just as anti-union as someone like Portnoy.
I like Succession because it makes the mega-wealthy look ridiculous. I like it because it feels more timely than just about anything else on TV, representing economic imbalance and monopolization through a fresh lens that isn’t overly sentimental or pandering. You’d like to think the people making decisions that affect millions have clear plans and strategies, but then Roman starts talking. “I mean, I could be right,” he says. “I might not be, but I could be. Maybe I’m smart.” If there’s anything about Succession that keeps me up at night, it’s the simmering terror of realizing my livelihood could very well be in the hands of someone like that.
50 Comments
It really felt like Kendall turned a corner here instead of a zombie saying my father has a better plan at the end he really seems to start believing it in that he realized that he did get conned by the Vaulter guy and that gutting it was the right move.
“Facebook changed their algorithm” as an excuse for sucking probably did a lot to convince Kendall that his father was right.
Yea like I guess I see how this is idk “difficult” for the staff here but also Lawrence was just a different kind of capitalist fucking dickhead that was full of shit. The staff “hates” kendall and the Roy’s but also didn’t have issue working for and being paid by them. I feel like some reads on the episode missed out on that it’s not only the big boss that’s hypocritical and problematic but the industry itself. Like I don’t feel bad for the staff of Vaulter because through my lens it was a bunch of pampered yuppies that probably use yelp and go to sponsored parties that play spotify playlists and give out duclaw. I get that my view may not be liked much but it’s another perception of this episodes conflict.
Losing your job sucks for white-collar workers as much as it does for blue-collar factory workers or for the nurses in my town who unionized and then had the company choose to shut down the town’s hospital.Surely even yuppies who use Yelp have kids to support. Empathy is a good thing, even for people who you do not particularly like.
I totally get that and part of me absolutely can empathize but another part of me just really doesn’t care. Vaulter was what, an analogous to buzzfeed or even here? Outlets of pretty homogenized culture, I do find those kinds of media outlets as problematic as what ATN is meant to signify. I get the hypocrisy as I am posting here while I take a shit at work, trust me that I am aware of an absurd perception at my views and I welcome the opposing viewpoint because that’s the point right? Also yea sometimes you lose a job idk whatever you get a new one you find hustles shit happens. I suppose there was just nothing about that set of entities within the scope of the show to make me want to care about them.
This.The ultimate truth is that Vaulter was overpriced from the beginning. And maybe the “digital media” ecosystem as a whole needs to take a step back and ask how the fuck the bills are gonna get paid. Unionizing won’t make a failing company profitable. At best it’ll mean instead of existing on the verge of insolvency for years, the staff get a month of severance and some healthcare right away and the whole thing closes up.Which, sure is probably better for everyone involved anyway.
Indeed, I’m not sure the show has as much sympathy for the Vaulter staff as some writers think it does. The site appeared to be a creator of inane content like “Is Every Taylor Swift Song Secretly Marxist?,” its head was plainly an asshole whose business was propped up on lies and was never going to actually be profitable. I think we are supposed to view Kendall’s actions as somewhat cold-blooded but I’ll confess that part of me kind enjoyed seeing him stick it to the hot take writing hipsters who thought they were entitled to this playground of an office.
Im with you..Lawrence was not well intended or anything, vaulter feels like a mirror that many writers want to not fully look at the reflection it presented. The situation with kendall and vaulter came off as Ken cutting the bullshit and understanding this is all about profit and efficiency for him; kendall doesn’t care about radicalism. Vaulter like buzzfeed or even here, it’s not breaking any societal or cultural anything and ther was no interesting tech about it; they weren’t some blockchain shit just some generic bullshit. Kendall finally saw that now that he has nothing to prove.
I felt that way to an extent. That said, I didn’t like seeing people lose their jobs. Lawrence may be just another rich guy, but the other staff members are probably just regular people.
‘i don’t feel bad for those people because to me they were lame’ is a wild take.
It’s more like i feel like they represent a group of people that reinforce a shitty vapid culture which I find to be socially damaging.
I’m going to stop bothering to post this over and over but this mediocre show commands an incredibly disproportionate amount of praise and copy from this site. (scratches chin)
If you think it’s a mediocre show, then wouldn’t any amount of posting about it be an incredibly disproportionate amount of posting about it? (idly sips coffee).
Anything above the standard…I don’t think the site is here to only talk about Breaking Bad and The Wire.
I like the show and enjoy reading about it. (scratches ass)
Well…
What the fuck are you on about? This laughing academy shit the bed when the show first came out (“It was one of our favorites of 2018! No, we didn’t cover it, we thought it was glib and poorly written — why do you ask?”) and only in the run-up to season two as they realized other entertainment verticals (no need to get poetic here) were eating their lunch and decided that being late to the party was better than not attending at all. The only reason this show is getting so much ink from them *now* is two-fold: One, this site’s long, slow slide into irrelevance. The AV Club being the vanguard taste-maker for the cool kids is so distant a memory its reviews and music coverage might as well have been written on parchment paper. When the last thing you’ve done to move the needle culturally is PodMass, you know you’re in trouble. So, in an effort to look like they still have something to say on anything close to the zeitgeist, they frantically ran reviews of the first season in an effort to look current, then transition into coverage as thought they always had. See, we haven’t lost a step!Two is precisely the premise of this article: Now, suddenly, they feel seen. Something they haughtily dismissed at its premier is now suddenly talking to *them!* Isn’t that exciting? That *must* make it more culturally relevant. (And yes, they pushed back against this idea by saying that the show gets more press than its numbers justify, but that’s nothing more than transparent defensiveness couched in slippery, deferent language.) All of this smacks of the kind of self-serving myopia that has drained this site of its voice and cache since the great Dissolve hemorrhage. Whatever interesting spark this site once had has long-since guttered out in a breeze of self-reflexive indifference. Is this bungling, Keystone Cops coverage of an HBO show the reason? Of course not. But it sure as hell is indicative of a larger whole.
what do you want to talk about
Always great to hear someone with seemingly no idea about how any websites work expounding at great length about how and why people who work at websites have written or discussed something (or why they’ve, say, placed something on a best-of-the-year list).
Yeah, I do understand that I am pissing away my life on these boards…at least in the old school days pre-registered username and even to a lesser extent pre-kinja it was less of a great example of the shitshow that is 2019. I mean, of course shows like Freaks and Geeks get more ink than their numbers, but this one just feels off, maybe for the reasons you say.
I think it’s an okay show, and will continue to watch it eventually on the DVR until such time as I get too far behind and delete it all in a fit of indifference, a la True Blood. (scratches kitty’s chin)
Don’t bother.Its really not a good show. Like, it’s striving for a certain sense of “wow, rich and powerful people are just as stupid as dumb and boring as the rest of us”. But honestly, that just makes for a boring show.
Difficult to argue matters of taste but I disagree that this show is mediocre. I think it’s an ambitious satire with a unique sensibility and rhythm that takes a while to sink in. I can certainly understand not liking it though, especially if you only watch one or two episodes.But “mediocre?” Mediocre is Mindhunter, that, like most Netflix/Hulu/Amazon “prestige” dramas is perfectly watchable with some great performances and direction but desperately needed a few more passes in the writer’s room. Or City on the Hill, again watchable but also totally derivative and filled with the same irrelevant stock Boston characters that for some (probably Affleck-related) reason we keep getting foisted on us. “Mediocre” are shows that exist because the creators had deals and this is what the committee agreed could be viable. I think Succession has more inspiration and effort behind it than that, though I do understand why people write it off or were turned off.
I’m sorry someone likes a show more than you do. This must be a very difficult time for you.
Waystar Royco buying Vaulter is so … 3 years ago. It’s Univision. A legacy media outlet with financial problems. GHP, Bustle and the other current buyers of digital media are entirely different beasts than Univision or the fictionalized Waystar Royco. Also, let’s talk about the upside of your revolving door situation. In a business losing money, it keeps the lights on. If Univision hadn’t found a buyer for GMG, they wouldn’t have responded with “Oh well, guess we’ll just have to keep on plugging along as is”.
One question I have for ownership critics of digital media companies is … what would you do differently and is there any evidence that it is more likely to work than their ideas? The only answer that is without question more dumb than having sales guys in interviews, crowdsourcing cover photos, not covering yourself or even violating editorial independence is not changing anything.
The problem is that in a world with Facebook (and more broadly, The Internet), any writer can near instantly reach an unlimited audience. Given the unprecedented amount of *free* writing out there, what can you do to justify getting someone to actually *pay* you for it?
As someone who writes for a bunch of places and has his own site (as well as accounts at Twitter, Letterboxd, Facebook, Instagram, etc.), “unlimited” is a misleading word here. Or maybe “can” is just doing a lot of work. Yes, I *can* write a tweet that several hundred thousand people might see. I *can* also write stuff that like, 50 people will see. Which do you think happens more often?Of course, this doesn’t matter if people perceive some rando’s Letterboxd account as being approximately as good as [whatever your favorite culture site is; I won’t be presumptuous], and visit accordingly. And there are certainly some randos where I’m shocked at their platform-agnostic audience. But I do think there’s a kind of talking out of two sides of the mouth going on when people insist you can get good writing anywhere for free, and yet the traffic at the A.V. Club is a lot higher than, say (to pick a place I’ve never written for but has very high-quality work) MUBI.
Thing is, the AV Club is free *for me*. And attempts to turn pageviews into revenue using the old advertiser model have turned into a rolling skirmish involving Adblock, “pivot to video”, and a lot of media concerns changing hands with distressing frequency. People are indeed interested in curated, high-quality content – the open question is how to reliably turn that interest into money.
I mean, I’m as guilty of enjoying Free Content as anyone, but it’s kinda funny that for years, a preference for a particular publication was fairly easy to turn into money, because you could just charge people for that publication. Obviously not every site can go full-on subscription. My point is only that people *do* value some writing more than others, the same way they might have valued Entertainment Weekly over like, the local pennysaver newsletter in 1995—resulting in magazine subscribers.Now, is a lot of free stuff on the internet much better than some newsletter from 1995? Of course. So that does make subscription models seem less tenable. But part of me does think the answer to that open question is “charge them money.” I do love that anyone I know can read almost anything I write for free! But I wonder if that doesn’t make much sense in the long run.
The problem is that as soon as you “charge them money”…they leave, and instead follow any of the myriad other sites that don’t. I *suspect* this would be true even if the vast majority of professional writers required people pay for their work – this was my initial (vaguely phrased) idea. But we’re not anywhere near that point in reality, because you can read reams of professional writing on almost any topic for free.The reason it was (emphasis past tense) easy to turn people’s preference for written content into money was because there was a bottleneck at the point of publication and distribution. Yeah, the pennysaver newsletter could stuff mailboxes, but it couldn’t be in newsstands all over the country. Without that bottleneck, anyone can widely disseminate anything, and we have yet to find any broadly appealing content attractive enough to reliably overcome the repelling force of a paywall.
This article is how I found out Clayton’s no longer with AV Club.
That’s not true, he was here talking up Drake’s latest B-sides last week.
It doesn’t mean he hasn’t left the AV Club, much like Ignatiy.
Honest question, is there an official list of A.V. Club staffers, reporters, correspondents, and Great Job, Internet! jacklegs? I wasn’t aware that Vishnevetsky had cut ties here.
There’s an “About” link at the bottom of the page with current staff and titles.
Thanks, Gwen! Just noticed that the ‘infinite scroll’ on the main page all but prevents that link from appearing on the mobile interface.
Does anybody know where Sean is currently working?
Arby’s. They have the meats.
It could be worse. Kendall could’ve also made them switch to Kinja.
There’s satire, then there’s just plain absurdity, nobody would….
How strong is your do not compete agreement? Is there one? Everybody collectively walk out and start your own site (s). Especially if you believe in what you do has value. What has the value? Pretty much just The Onion itself, right? Maybe Deadspin. You’re not going to replace The Onion, but Deadspin is easy. Just bring Magary. Readers will follow.
Yup, if folks quit places like the A.V. Club en masse and start another, it’ll totally be a success! Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m just going to take a big swig of coffee and open a new tab in my browser to The Dissolve . . .
I genuinely still visit The Dissolve from time to time to look for columns about past movies I may just now be getting around to watching.
yeah i’m glad it’s still online at least. it’s gonna be fucked when these sites are just gone.
Too inside baseball. Review another episode of The Big Bang theory please.
Every digital media outlet going crazy over this episode has been very boring for normal people.
Succession pops the digital-media bubble: (skeleton crew remaining at) The A.V. Club reacts
The AV Club isn’t the kind of site that does headlines like “Were Taylor Swift’s Headlines Marxist The Whole Time?” or whatever it was. Some other sites on this network, on the other hand…to put it another way, I wasn’t sure who to root for in the scene where he laid them off.
Kendall’s coat in that header pic btw. It’s so nice. I would live in it.
Is Kendall’s daughter adopted?