Smartphone Anxiety: Succession ’s Technological Allegories

This article considers technological allegories of the smartphone in Succession (HBO, 2018–2023), a media industry, family drama following the Roys and their legacy media conglomerate, Waystar Royco. Analyzing key story arcs in seasons 3 and 4, wherein smartphones become pivotal props in the plot and mise-en-scène, I argue that Succession spells out broader cultural anxieties about the decline of a television-oriented system of social meaning-making through smartphones as allegorical signifiers. The series narrates this decline through mobile devices’ plot and audiovisual applications alongside mobile television idioms (second screens and cord-cutting) and mobile computational mechanisms (virtual private networks, or VPNs).