For 4 seasons now, HBO’s Succession has given folks one thing to tweet about on Sunday nights. Everyone, it appears, is obsessive about the Roys. With the finale airing on Sunday, it will appear that the large tent social gathering is about to finish. That’s not solely the case. Online, Succession screengrabs, quotes, and references dominate the discourse in a way that isn’t more likely to dissipate anytime quickly. Through its memes, Succession is already tiptoeing into eternity.

Evidence of the present’s meme-ification is all over the place, from the picket lines of the Writers Guild of America strike to your Twitter timeline each time a wealthy individual does one thing dumb. It’s a testomony to the standard of the writing and the particular model of the present that almost each episode gives an all-time one-liner, the type excellent for a GIF or picture macro. Creator Jesse Armstrong beforehand made the sweatily deranged UK comedy Peep Show, and he clearly nonetheless hungers for the type of singularly broken quips which can be perfect meme fodder.

The Simpsons’ on-line dominance might be ascribed to its quirky, coincidental predictive powers and to the truth that it’s all the time good to see Homer sink right into a shrub. When The Sopranos gained new relevance in the course of the pandemic, The New York Times Magazine argued that it was the best way the present had captured America’s nationwide decline —“a humiliating, slow-motion slide down a hill into a puddle of filth”—that had given it on-line resonance. Succession, too, appears destined to dwell on in our on-line hearts. But what story will its memes inform?

Maris Kreizman is a author and podcaster who recaps the present on Twitter by encouraging folks to “tag yourself in tonight’s episode.” She traces her adoration again to a second season episode about Vaulter, a fictional Gawker/Vice-like entity that the Roys capriciously destroy. “Kendall fires the entire staff off, and afterward he walks into a bodega, steals a pack of batteries, and then throws the batteries in the trash,” Kreizman sums up. “Having dealt with multiple media companies that treat their employees like trash, I had never identified with an inanimate object as I did that pack of batteries.” She tagged herself because the batteries after which simply saved on tagging.

Interestingly, Kreizman isn’t the one Succession meme-maker to say that the destruction of Vaulter was the second they fell in love. Perhaps counterintuitively, Succession’s depiction of the workings of the digital media trade as ruthless and inane has truly motivated actual digital media employees to actively work together with the present on-line.

Writing for Polygon, Gita Jackson described the show’s online fan community as “fiercely dedicated” to the fates of those fictional lives and ascribed that dedication to at least one main by line: “On platforms like Twitter and Tumblr, fans of the show analyze trailers frame by frame and discuss their hopes and dreams for the characters. Despite being a show about ruthless capitalists, some of whom supported a fascist presidential candidate, the way that all the characters have been so wounded by their abusive father makes it easy for the audience to empathize with them.”