The Box Set: "Succession."

Ep. 8. "America Decides."

Do you want to know a really interesting trick? When a show takes something that’s not really very creative or groundbreaking — like how “Succession” inverted the Fox News-calls-Arizona story — and then somehow makes it work in the larger picture.

“America Decides” was an amalgamation of the 2016 presidential election through a reverse telescope of 2023 storytelling that managed to be predictable and also interesting. Look no further than the fact that the show’s own previews foretold that Jeryd Mencken (Justin Kirk) would play a sizable role in the endgame, which is yet another reason to never watch previews. If that didn’t suck all the drama out of what was going to happen in this episode, 2016 surely did.