The Rundown: Ruin Every Character On ‘Succession’ But Leave Jess Jordan Alone

The Rundown is a weekly column that highlights some of the biggest, weirdest, and most notable events of the week in entertainment. The number of items could vary, as could the subject matter. It will not always make a ton of sense. Some items might not even be about entertainment, to be honest, or from this week. The important thing is that it’s Friday, and we are here to have some fun.

Things are not going too great for anyone on Succession right now, as we zoom toward the conclusion of the series. Kendall Roy is manic and spiraling and stretching numbers out so thin you can see through them. Roman is kind of just firing people a lot. Shiv is crying alone in an office and holding a lot of alcoholic drinks for a person who, last time we checked, is zeroing in on her third trimester of pregnancy. And mostly, if I’m being real about it all, it’s fine. None of these dopes are super sympathetic. They’re all billionaire nepo babies who are high-ranking figures of an evil business conglomerate that stands for pretty much everything I stand against. The fact that I feel any sympathy for them at all is basically Stockholm Syndrome setting in after three-plus seasons. Even my beloved Karl is a black-hearted corporate snake, deep-down. The season finale could be every character on this show getting rounded up and herded onto a chunk of ice and shoved out to sea and it would be fine. It really would.

Actually, wait. No. There is one character we need to save from this frigid death at sea: Jess Jordan, Kendall’s poor assistant, who pops up every now and then looking almost exactly as exhausted as any human would look after another day serving at the whims of the world’s wealthiest sad little boy. Here she is on a tarmac looking more relatable than anyone on this show has ever looked.

Here she, in heels and business attire, tending to a rabbit, which is almost definitely not something she expected to be doing when she landed a job working closely with the top-level executives at one of the largest corporations in the world.

Here she is playing messenger between family members who are so broken and bitter that they can only communicate through a flustered and overworked person on the company payroll, one who probably has a degree in business and thought this would be a good learning experience and is now stuck playing babysitter to spoiled failsons.

Here she is looking at a literal Trojan Horse that showed up in an elevator and asking if they should pop it open, which is somehow both a normal thing that happened on this show and a blast to picture her explaining to some old college friends over drinks one night.

Look at her face in all of these. Look at her face every time she’s on screen. It’s become maybe my favorite part of the whole show. She’s almost definitely my favorite character, or at least the one I root for most, especially now that my sweet boy Cousin Greg is turning into a goon. I want to get her out of this snake pit. I do not care what happens to anyone else on this show. But I need Jess Jordan to be okay. It is my one request in all of this.

Hmm. That’s not true. I have two requests, although this second one is kind of tied into the first one. I am sure Jess Jordan has signed many ironclad confidentiality forms and NDAs written by many high-priced lawyers who are somehow less sympathetic as humans than the other monsters who litter this fantastic little show, but I want her to write a tell-all. Just spill all the dirt on the Roy family in book form and promote it on primetime in an interview with Oprah. Full national scandal about it. Millions flooding into her bank account as the family battles a devastating and deserved public relations catastrophe. I would like that.

Do take a second to think about this, though, for real. Think of all the things we’ve seen these people do and all the rooms these things have happened in where Jess Jordan was just standing silent in the background. Jess Jordan has seen things. Jess Jordan knows things. It would be fine with me if the entire series finale is a six-month flash-forward that just follows Jess Jordan prepping for that hypothetical Oprah interview and ignoring panicked phone calls from Kendall. I would enjoy that a lot. I think Jess Jordan would, too. This is the face of a woman who has some things to get off of her chest.

LET JESS JORDAN THRIVE

MAKE THE LAST SHOT OF THE ENTIRE SERIES HER RIDING OFF INTO THE SUNSET IN A SPEEDBOAT

DO THE OPRAH INTERVIEW

PLEASE

FOR ME

THANK YOU

Welllllllll there’s another writers’ strike happening in Hollywood. There are lots of issues at play this time around, some of them having to do with a zillion shows running on a zillion streaming services in ways that no one really foresaw — or could have — the last time a contract was hammered out and some of them having to do with the potential of AI-generated scripts and some of them having to do with… other stuff. It’s a lot. I recommend you go read about it a little this weekend, preferably not from a guy who is planning to end his 3000-word Friday column with some jokes about Fruit Roll-ups. Yes, that is coming. Yes, I feel okay about it.

The last time we did all of this was back in 2007 and things got… weird. Then, like today, the first productions affected were the late-night shows that churn out new episodes every day. Unlike today, however, Conan was on television back then. Which was good. Because Conan is the kind of guy who can turn “a man spinning his wedding ring on his desk” into compelling television. That’s the video of it up there. Watch it now and remember what a freaking natural that dude is.

Conan went back to his show in large part because he’s a performer and the boss and he wanted to save as many of the other staffers on the show from losing their primary source of income (camera operators, sound guys, etc.), but he also made sure to stake his claim as one of television’s all-time good dudes. From a report in Deadline way back when.

I just learned that Conan O’Brien has made arrangements to pay his staff who will be laid off by NBC as of Friday. About 80 production people — like talent bookers, producers, production assistants — will be taken care of by the Late Night host who is supposed to move to The Tonight Show in 2009. Sources tell me this is on a week-to-week basis for the moment until or if Conan, who’s a WGA member and got his start as a comedy writer, goes back to work. Obviously, NBC is dying for him to return to the air because its late night ratings for the repeats have tanked. None of the late night shows have been in production during the entire November sweeps and the networks have to give sponsors free spots or “give backs” at a cost of millions.

Sooooooo… a couple things here. The first is, wow, what an absolute time capsule that paragraph is. It’s from back when Deadline — now a major industry publication — was mostly just one lady typing into a box. And it mentions Conan taking over The Tonight Show in 2009, which, uh, yeah. I actually winced a little when I read that again. We were all so young and naive back then. Conan, too. But the main takeaway here, I think, is that Conan was really just one of one as a host and dude, especially when he was at his peak. Like he was when he was spinning that ring. And like he was… here.

— Rachel Paige (@rachmeetsworld) May 2, 2023

I don’t know if any of our current late-night hosts have this level of chaotic energy, the kind to not just think of this stuff but actually follow through and do it on television. I guess we’ll find out. Things are going to get pretty weird, and it’s going to start happening pretty soon.