Piss and Power in “Succession”

As I watched the latest episode of “Succession,” I found myself asking a question that had nagged at me before: Was I crazy, or was this show kind of obsessed with urine? Allow me to backtrack and set the scene. In “Retired Janitors of Idaho,” the fifth episode of Season 3, which aired this past Sunday on HBO, we saw the Roy family in crisis mode, attempting to maintain control of their media conglomerate, Waystar Royco, in the face of a potential shareholder vote. And yet, alongside the Roys’ race to strike a last-minute deal with Sandy and Stewy, a pair of alliteratively named corporate raiders, in order to avert the vote and save the company, another stressful drama was playing out—in Logan Roy’s urinary tract. “I think I might need to piss,” the octogenarian C.E.O. announces, to his assistant, at the beginning of the episode; and, although everyone knows that a bladder that threatens to give way in the first act will do so in the third, Logan’s makes for an exception to prove the rule. His desire to relieve himself and his painful inability to do so, owing to what turns out to be a U.T.I., is not just a plot point but a motif that can help us understand the show more broadly. In the world of “Succession,” pee is a symbol of power, and one can track the waning or surging of a character’s authority by keeping a close eye on the state of his urethra.

“Succession” is a show that is gleeful about breaking taboos, and since its première, in 2019, it’s flung around not just urine but a whole gross slew of bodily secretions. We’ve had references to excrement, both metaphorical (“He particularly loved the guys who ate the shit for him, and he never even knew it,” Kendall Roy says, of his father, to his slavish brother-in-law, Tom Wambsgans, in Season 2) and literal (that same season, Kendall wakes up after a hard night of partying to discover that he has soiled his own bed). There has also been ejaculate (who could forget that iconic moment, in Season 1, in which Roman Roy jerks off triumphantly onto his own office window, high above the city?) and, more recently, spit (in the third episode of Season 3, Shiv Roy hocked an impressive loogie right into the pages of her brother Kendall’s notebook).

But it is pee that is the show’s favorite excretion, and this has been the case from the very beginning. The first episode of the series opens in media res when, in a predawn darkness, a disoriented Logan stumbles out of bed in search of the bathroom, before missing it by a mile and urinating, instead, on the hallway floor. “Where the fuck am I?” he asks, and, immediately, we know that something is amiss with this guy. We eventually learn that he is suffering from a brain hemorrhage, an ailment that kicks off the show’s succession drama; the Roy kids barter over who gets to be temporary C.E.O. of the company while their father lies unconscious in the hospital. Later that season, the pee scene is reprised when Logan, who has returned to work after recovering from a hemorrhage-induced stroke, declares that he must use the bathroom (“I need a piss”), only to wander into Kendall’s office, where he pees on the carpet.

Although he has once again missed the toilet, this time around, Logan seems to know exactly what he’s doing. The territory is now marked as his own, symbolically reclaimed from Kendall, who had been chosen to run the company in his absence. (“I’m back,” Logan roars onstage at a Waystar-sponsored charity gala, in a later scene. “Better than ever!”) But, lest we forget, pee is a volatile element: in the following episode, Logan is once again a loser in the urine wars, when anti-Waystar protesters pelt him with a plastic bagful. (Roman: “We don’t know that it was actually piss.” Logan: “It was piss.”)

“Succession” is not the first HBO series to depict men pissing in places that they shouldn’t, as if they are dogs walking on their hind legs. In Season 4 of “Game of Thrones,” a champion Meereenese fighter urinates on the ground as a kind of dare, to mock Daenerys’s army of castrated soldiers; after Daenerys’s adviser Daario slays the fighter, he himself pees on the ground, to mark his triumph. This behavior might seem fitting for a medieval drama, but it also permeates shows that are set in more contemporary times: “The Sopranos,” which, much like “Succession,” was interested in the overt and covert ways in which power shifts between men, has also dabbled in pee. In Season 3, Patsy Parisi, a Soprano-family soldier, is thinking of shooting Tony, the boss of the family, whom he believes had a hand in his brother’s murder. Instead, Patsy decides to pee in Tony’s pool—a more minor but still resonant act of directed revenge. Later that season, in the infamous “Pine Barrens” episode, during which Paulie Walnuts and Christopher get lost in the woods after a botched hit job, the power struggle between the men emerges when the latter tells the former not to pee by his car window. (“I don’t want to smell your piss!”)

Toward the end of “The Sopranos,” we get another pee scene that is more layered. Uncle Junior, who is confined to a mental-care institution, gets into a scuffle with a fellow-resident, which leads to the facility’s doctors upping his meds. The pills make Junior feel lethargic, so he decides to stop taking them, but, later, when he is in the common room, telling a joke to a group of friends, he wets himself. Some of the drugs were meant to treat his incontinence. Junior, who is forced to relinquish control in order to regain control of his bodily functions, goes back to taking his medications.

In “Succession,” too, peeing isn’t in and of itself a sign of domination, although the ability to control when and where to pee, for oneself and for others, might be. “If you need to leak, piss in a bucket,” Logan barks, right before he sadistically forces his top executives to play “boar on the floor,” in Season 2; “I’m pulling your pisser,” he says, when an unfortunate lackey attempts to urinate into a champagne bucket. Such antics speak to an obvious immaturity, and, possibly, to a bad business sense: as Freud notes in “Civilization and Its Discontents,” early man had a phallic attraction to extinguishing fire with a stream of his own urine. But, he continues, “The first person to renounce this desire and spare the fire was able to carry it off with him and subdue it to his own use.” This element of the civilizing process can be traced in the words of Roman, who, earlier this season, resisted signing Shiv’s screed against Kendall because he felt a certain loyalty toward his older brother. After all, “he taught me how to aim my pee-pee into the toilet.”

“I need to piss,” Logan repeats, more and more desperately, in the show’s most recent episode. And, when he can’t, he becomes “piss mad”: a fallen god suffering hallucinations, convinced he has a dead cat under his chair and unable to make a sound call as to whether to accept the deal that Stewy and Sandy are offering, therefore putting Waystar in grave danger. “His urethra has wrested control of his brain!” Shiv cries. (In an interesting parallel, Sandy, too, is a living corpse in a wheelchair, from which he can only mumble directives in his daughter’s ear. Daddies aren’t what they used to be.)

The biggest threat to Logan’s empire is a biological one: his failing body and mind. Leaning on Tom, Logan limps to the bathroom, where, a moment later, the wail of a wounded animal emerges from his stall. “Are you O.K., big man? Did you get it caught?” Tom asks, rushing to his side. “You don’t need me to hold the scepter, do you?” The moment is strangely touching. Two men, most often distrustful and derisive, huddled together over a toilet, experiencing a nearly affectionate exchange. “Thank you, son,” Logan says. For once in the history of “Succession,” an attempt to urinate feels almost tender.