The f-word gets dropped roughly every seven minutes on Succession, and yet the show itself is largely absent of much actual, you know, fucking.

The HBO series, now nearing the end of its second season, follows the Roy family: a media empire headed up by the cantankerous Logan Roy (Brian Cox), whose obnoxious children Connor (Alan Ruck), Kendall (Jeremy Strong), Shiv (Sarah Snook), and Roman (Kieran Culkin), all vie for his approval and a stake in - and ultimately control of - the company.

It's a Hieronymus Bosch painting of power-hungry madness, a banquet of obscene wealth where platters of lobster are thrown in the bin and everyone walks out of helicopters without ducking, because, as Culkin says of the Roy children, "we grew up getting out of helicopters, you just walk right the fuck out."

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In this world, where the language used to talk about ruining rivals is frequently carnal, the act of sex itself is surprisingly infrequent, especially for an HBO creation. This is the network which lured viewers into Game of Thrones with a boob count which rivalled its death toll, after all. Does this suggest a certain prudery in the writers’ room, which is overseen by Jesse Armstrong (The Thick of It, Peepshow)? Or is the lack of sex in Succession making a bigger point about the psychological machinations of the powerful?

A quick run-down through the love lives of Roy offspring shows that, despite their character differences, they are united in a distinct lack of sexual satisfaction.



HBO

Just as he started season one with the hopes of the future Waystar Royco in his hands, so second eldest son Kendall seems like the most likely candidate to be getting some. He’s single, well-groomed and has a ready supply of bachelor pads and party drugs (when he’s not in expensively bleak rehab facilities) with which to woo suitoresses.

And yet Kendall's sex life is strangely unglamorous, mostly because it’s largely limited to the hallway floor with his estranged wife Rava (Natalie Gold). Kendall is all front, claiming he is “looking for pussy like a fucking techno Gatsby,” but in reality floating around parties gormless and high while trying to work the room.

In the second series, when he meets the similarly substance-prone scion of a rival media dynasty, Naomi Pierce (Annabelle Dexter-Jones), they kiss in between swigs of vodka in the family chopper in an unusually tender moment. The fact Kendall wakes up alone having shit the bed suggests he did so figuratively as well as literally.

In the most recent instalment, 'Return', a FaceTime call where Naomi demands a dick pic from Kendall is one of many suggestive moments in the most sexual and, perhaps not coincidentally, most depressing episode of the show thus far. Later she appears at breakfast with no explanation of how she ended up there. As with many things on Succession, a crucial moment has happened in the wings, leaving did-they-didn't-they lingering in the air.

HBO

The same episode is similarly ambiguous about what is going on romantically between Logan and Rhea Jarrell (Holly Hunter), a coupling which Roman describes as being, "like a rhino fucking a hummingbird". After a titillating discussion of the flaws in Logan's children, he invites her to dinner, later gruffly asking, "you wanna stay over or what?"

Both Kendall and Logan are sceptical of the other's romantic interests, with Kendall's attempts to warn his father of Rhea's possibly duplicitous intentions resulting in Logan barking back, "you're the one who's cunt-struck". The way both of them see it, a new bedfellow is a possible Achilles' heel to be exploited.

HBO

In the last season a little false hope was provided by Shiv, seemingly the most switched-on sibling, who despite frequently turning down her partner Tom (an exquisitely unctuous Matthew Macfadyen), rekindles her relationship with an ex when he convinces her to come work for a Sandersesque presidential hopeful.

Nate (Ashley Zukerman) initially proposes they masturbate in separate rooms at the same time to avoid technically cheating, and their affair remains as perfunctory as it progresses, with Shiv shoving his hand inside her trousers while they're sat in a carpark. Later we only see the aftermath of them in bed looking at their phones, the shared post-coital cigarette replaced by the parallel solitary scroll.

HBO

Youngest son Roman's sexual antics are more visible, not to mention more unsettling. In the first season he takes to his newly-acquired office by jerking off and using the window as his Kleenex. Later, when his alliance with Waystar Royco’s matronly general counsel Gerri (J. Smith-Cameron) goes down a strange path, she calls him a "little slime puppy" down the phone as hurries to undo his trousers.

Writing in the New Yorker Troy Patterson notes that "most relationships on the show are psychodramas of humiliation and submission", and while Gerri and Roman's relationship is the most on the nose illustration of that idea, it's still telling that Roman gets his kicks from being powerless. Like most of the sexual antics in the show, it's an egotistical, selfish kind of sex, one about self-service, and here it isn't even carried out in the same room as the other person.



By contrast, Roman struggles to make sparks fly in the bedroom with his Amazonian girlfriend Tabitha, with her joking (but not really) about the fact they never have sex, and their attempts to get steamy on the phone resulting in some very uncomfortable television.



HBO

Roman and Tabitha are one of several relationships on the show which work like business partnerships, with Logan and Marcia, Shiv and Tom, and Connor and Willa, too, feeling like sexless arrangements built around power and control.

A snapshot of Shiv and Tom's honeymoon shows them watching Kendall's TV appearance with the blinds of their yacht bedroom closed. Shiv wears her usual corporate chastity belt of high-waist trousers while they both try to casually suss out whether the other wants to fly home for the action. For Shiv and Tom, scheming is foreplay, and foreplay, it seems, at least for now, is enough.

HBO

When so much of life is about power and owning people, Succession suggests that what is actually sexy is losing control, and that for people who can have everything they want, the real passion lies is outside these strategically engineered relationships in which they always have the upper hand.

Sex feels like it's everywhere in Succession, with Tom describing impressing Logan at work as finger-banging his G-spot, and Kendall referring to the proxy war as a “big dick competition”. Yet beyond the lustful language used to describe fucking people over, it's a show that keeps the real intimacy behind closed doors, with the audience in a kind of low-level, unsatisfied arousal as a result.

When we get to see sexual moments they are usually self-serving and often a little disgusting, less to do with the other person and everything to do with the character's fantasies of themselves.

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