Vitals

Nicholas Braun as Greg Hirsch, mild-mannered media conglomerate underling and family outsider

Canada to New York City, The day before Thanksgiving 2018

Series: Succession
Episode: “I Went to Market” (Episode 1.05)
Air Date: July 1, 2018
Director: Adam Arkin
Creator: Jesse Armstrong
Costume Designer: Michelle Matland

Background

Ahead of Thanksgiving tomorrow, one of the things I’m grateful for is that—if Succession had to end this year—the fact that it did so perfectly when the series finale ended in May. To commemorate the final year from this landmark series, let’s flash back to the first season as we joined the Roys for their annual Turkey Day celebration.

From the start of Succession, the anxious Greg Hirsch (Nicholas Braun), aka “Cousin Greg”, aka “Greg the Egg”, initially served as an audience surrogate as we were all collectively introduced to the world of the extremely wealthy and highly dysfunctional Roy family, led by domineering patriarch Logan (Brian Cox) as his children Connor (Alan Ruck), Kendall (Jeremy Strong), Roman (Kieran Culkin), and Siobhan (Sarah Snook) wrested for their withholding father’s favor… and the keys to control his media conglomerate, Waystar RoyCo.

The outsider Greg had never been part of their circle, thrust into it during Logan’s 80th birthday party when his mother—Logan’s niece—dispatched him to New York for a job after he was fired from one of a Waystar amusement park for getting high inside a mascot costume. Within a month, he’s got a job with the company that pays himself just enough that he needn’t sneak food out of the Waystar break room in doggie-doo bags anymore, and he can afford enough gas to power his three-year-old Hyundai to Canada (“with the healthcare and the ennui!”) and back to transport his grandfather Ewan (James Cromwell) to New York for Logan’s Thanksgiving dinner.

Greg: Happy Thanksgiving!
Ewan: Not for the Indians.
Greg: No sir! Nope… that is still true.

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