Daniel Jimenez: Celebs Rumors

Ethan Shanfeld SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for Season 4, Episode 8 of “Succession,” now streaming on HBO Max. It’s Roman Roy’s world, and we’re all just living in it. Sunday’s hopefully-not-prescient episode of “Succession” pulls back the curtain on how, democracy be damned, a national election can ultimately be swayed by a few people who hold enormous wealth and power. Such is the case with Jeryd Mencken, Justin Kirk’s slippery Republican presidential candidate who flirts with fascism and makes a not-so-subtle deal with Roman. (Kendall tried to accomplish the same mutual back-scratching last episode with Democrat Daniel Jimenez’s campaign, but his adviser Nate was uncomfortable with the proposition.) When, on election night, a suspicious fire breaks out at a Milwaukee vote-counting center, calling into question the results of 100,000 ballots, Mencken outright promises Roman (Kieran Culkin) that he’ll kill the GoJo merger in exchange for ATN’s support. (It’s unclear whether the fire was started by left-wing extremists or “Menckenists,” as Shiv calls them, but the political alignment of the missing ballots points to the latter.)

The Roy siblings’ alliance is on thin ice during Sunday’s episode of Succession, and the fate of America hangs in the balance.

Ethan Shanfeld SPOILER ALERT: This recap contains spoilers for Season 4, Episode 7 of “Succession,” now streaming on HBO Max. The election looms over “Succession,” which means not only will there be a new president of the United States but, more importantly? Nate is back. The charming — or sleazy, depending on how you view him — political strategist, portrayed by Ashley Zukerman, has reentered the world of the Roys in order to mingle with Waystar’s top brass and the political elite, and make Tom (Matthew Macfadyen) jealous in his own home. In Episode 7, titled “Tailgate Party,” Tom and Shiv (Sarah Snook) host a gathering on election eve, at which Lukas Matsson (Alexander Skarsgård) makes a surprise (well, to the Roy boys) visit. A double agent, Shiv plays informant to the GoJo chief in exchange for a key role in the company should the deal close. But the prospect of a Waystar-GoJo merger, which Kendall (Jeremy Strong) and Roman (Kieran Culkin) have been trying to tank since visiting Norway, seems less likely at the end of the episode, as Shiv worries she picked the wrong team. The Waystar co-CEOs believe they’ve exposed cracks in Matsson’s bid to buy their father’s company, so much so that, by episode’s end, Kendall is floating the idea of Waystar acquiring GoJo.

A mountain lion that frequents residential areas in the Griffith Park-Silver Lake-Hollywood area is apparently growing more aggressive.