In Succession - Austerlitz, Season 1 Episode 7

Episode by episode, series by series

Welcome to Connor Roy’s desert retreat!

And what an amazing gaff it is - spoilt only by it being lumbered with a name that signposts Con’s Napoleon complex, and it being populated exclusively by arseholes.

It is to Austerlitz that the Clan Roy has repaired to repair itself. The notion of a few days’ family therapy sounds like yet another idea lifted straight from a sitcom. But with retreats being as much a part of modern business as hotdesking, it’s not so hard to believe that so troubled and yet so high-profile a family might recruit a man like Dr Alon Parfitt to put them back together again.

Parfitt is, incidentally, a great single-episode characters of the kind that were such a feature of Jesse Armstrong’s second greatest creation, Peep Show. Brilliantly played
by Griffin Dunne, the not-so-good doctor is so far out of his depth that there’s a charming irony in his coming a cropper in the shallow end of a swimming pool.
Nice to hear some Philip Larkin in American TV show, mind.