‘Succession’s Season 4 Trailer: Cousin Greg Moments, Ranked

The Rundown is a weekly column that highlights some of the biggest, weirdest, and most notable events of the week in entertainment. The number of items could vary, as could the subject matter. It will not always make a ton of sense. Some items might not even be about entertainment, to be honest, or from this week. The important thing is that it’s Friday, and we are here to have some fun.

ITEM NUMBER ONE – My sweet boy

There is some good news and bad news out there this week, and you probably know it all already, but I’m going to share it anyway because that’s what we do around here.

GOOD NEWS: The trailer for the final season of Succession dropped this week.

BAD NEWS: Uhhhh the thing where the “good news” contained the phrase “the final season of Succession”

I am both fantastically excited and deeply bummed out. I kind of don’t want to talk about it right now. Let’s just watch the trailer again in silence for a couple of minutes.

Here’s the thing: There is a lot going on here. So much, really, with the family dynamics being blasted with a jackhammer and Logan grumbling a lot and the Shiv/Tom relationship headed for what appears to be a gutting stretch, if not a gutting end. I got legitimately excited when I heard the music start to build. Those tinkly pianos, man. I hear them and I start to get all wound up. Shout out to Pavlov and Nicholas Britell.

But again, there will be plenty of time to discuss all of that. I’m going to recap every episode right here at this fine website. Today, right now, we are going to focus on the important things. We are going to talk about my sweet and slightly evil boy Cousin Greg. I have missed him so much.

Here are Cousin Greg’s five appearances in this trailer, ranked.

5. Clapping for Logan

While I do not necessarily love to see him sucking up to Logan like this, there are two things I appreciate about this situation:

• I love to see my beautiful lanky prince doing happy claps
• It increases the chances that this whole endeavor ends with Greg in charge of the entire company, which is all I have ever wanted from this show

Conflicting. Let’s move on.

4. Math

The context here is kind of important, so we can kind of mention it: Connor, the oldest of all the Roy children and most likely to go bankrupt after buying a vineyard that becomes infested with termites, is lamenting his various polling/approval numbers, which are lingering at one percent. Enter Cousin Greg, our gangly Greek chorus, our sky-high voice of reason-ish, our 6’6 little woodland creature in the tiger cage.

The delivery here puts it over the top. I genuinely can’t tell if he’s being sincere or kind of a dick. This is a useful skill to have in life and especially on a critically-acclaimed television show.

3. Please tell me more about the kill list

I hope this is an entire episode.

I hope Greg is on the kill list.

I hope he goes full Home Alone on a squadron of assassins and defeats all of them by accident.

I hope, at the very least, he brings up this kill list a lot and talks about it every episode.

2. Everything happening here

What I like here, in no particular order:

• He appears to be spying on Logan, which increases the possibility of Subterfuge Greg returning for the first time since he was wearing a wire in a bathroom a while back
• His use of the word “moseying”
• The thing where “if Santa was a hitman” made me think about the Crashmore sketch from I Think You Should Leave
• The very slim chance that this means he will just be narrating the action for a while, like how Gonzo was Charles Dickens in The Muppet Christmas Carol

He’s a good boy.

1. LOOK AT HIM ON HIS BIKE

Yes.

Yessssss.

Yesssssssssssss.

I don’t know if I’m ready for this all to end but I’m definitely ready to have this goofball back in my life. Like I said, it is all very conflicting. We have much to process. But let’s just take this weekend to think about Greg on a bicycle. The other stuff can wait.

ITEM NUMBER TWO – I need some of these at once

The Mandalorian came back for a third season, which is cool. It was a little confusing if you’re the type of viewer who remembers things that happened two years ago and is very concerned about continuity, based mostly on the thing where Baby Yoda left with Luke Skywalker for Jedi training at the end of season two and was just, like, back in this week’s episode for reasons that went mostly unexplained. Turns out you had to watch the Boba Fett show to understand why it all happened. Luckily, I am not this type of viewer. I’m just in it for the pew pews and cute little green guys. Which is not me casting judgment. I can and have done five-minute monologues on the chronology of the Fast & Furious movies. We all have our thing.

Anyway, I already discussed Baby Yoda’s little floating stroller/saucer thing, which we first saw in the trailer and which I still love and planned on being my favorite thing in this season. And it was well on its way to being just that.

UNTIL

Carl Weathers came back as a character whose name I do not remember but I refer to lovingly as “Space Apollo Creed” and he had on a cape and he had two little robots following him around lifting up the back of the cape so it didn’t drag on the streets as he walked through town.

This is… awesome.

I love it.

I full-on pointed at the television and made someone come in and look at it. It would not be as useful to me as Yoda’s lil saucer for a bunch of reasons (the floating saucer would be a cooler way to get around than my wheelchair, I rarely wear capes, etc.), but I don’t care. I want these things, too. I can have them buzz around my apartment carrying snacks and iced tea. We are over nine months away from Christmas. You have plenty of time to find or build them for me.

ITEM NUMBER THREE – This was a great week for stories about good dudes

Not a lot of things in this world I love more than stories about people being good dudes. I’m such a sucker for them. Maybe it’s because I’m an optimist or because I would like other people to regard me as a good dude or because sometimes the world can be a weirdo hellscape and it’s nice to know people are out there doing cool stuff when they don’t necessarily have to. Whatever the reason, it’s nice.

We had two cool examples of it this week, too. One was a huge investment of time and money and resources and the other was just, like, the tiniest little thing. They both made people’s days, though. That’s what’s important here. We’ll come back to that.

First, the Dave Grohl thing, where he showed up at a shelter during the California storms this week and fed twice as many people as I had in my graduating class. You probably saw it, but still.

Grohl rolled up to LA’s Hope Of The Valley Rescue Mission on February 22 with a big meat smoker, and after 16 hours of preparation, he had enough food to feed around 500 people “ribs, pork butt, brisket, cabbage, coleslaw, and beans.”

Hope Of The Valley also shared an Instagram Story yesterday from CEO Rowan Vansleve, who posted a photo of Grohl preparing food in the rain and wrote, “In the middle of the storms this week. This is Dave Grohl cooking over 500 servings of the best barbecue for those living in our shelters. That’s class.”

Two things worth noting here, both important.

ONE: Dave Grohl has a lot of money and could have easily written a check to feed all these people but there’s something so cool about showing up and rolling up your sleeves and doing the work.

TWO: Less important than that first thing but Dave Grohl is a full-on legit barbecue fanatic, as he explained to this very website a few years ago.

“So when Nirvana became popular, the first thing I did was buy a beach house in North Carolina and I just spent years there,” he tells us like we’re all old drinking buddies. “I ate pulled pork fuckin’ from the time I was 22 ’til about 25-years-old.”

Like many of us, he’d found a food he loved and gotten hooked. But it wasn’t until about three years ago that Grohl really got into cooking the stuff for himself. He tells the story of when he broke his leg on stage and the downtime that injury forced him to have. He’d sit in his backyard with a Big Green Egg, figuring out how to make one of his favorite meals.

“You’re basically sitting there staring at these fucking thermometers all day long,” Grohl says. “I’d just sit there for nine to 12 hours at a time just … oooommmmm … meditating and watching these temperature gauges.”

Cool. Great. I love that he did all of that. But I also love, well… this.

This is what I mean about the big stuff and small stuff both being important. Martin Short didn’t spend an entire day cooking for people who were affected by gross meteorological anomalies, but he did see a father and daughter in a tough spot and took action to be helpful. It was so easy, too. It cost him nothing and still made someone else’s day. You can do little stuff like this whenever you want. Pay for the coffee the person behind you in line is getting at Dunkin. Hold the elevator for someone who is carrying groceries. Tell a stranger you like their shoes and/or hair. It feels great.

Hmm. This feels like a good time to post the Keanu ice cream story. Again. The one that starts with a young man working at a movie theater in Australia. The one that goes like this.

The lessons in all of this:

• Be a good dude whenever you can
• I use the word “dude” in a gender-inclusive way here, because ladies can be good dudes, too
• It is extremely funny that the very sweet little Martin Short story ended with the phrase “SHOUTOUT JACK FROST”

Everybody wins a little bit here.

ITEM NUMBER FOUR – Hey, do you guys wanna see Harrison Ford sing the song “Every Morning” by Sugar Ray?

I have been watching Shrinking the last few weeks. It’s good. It’s wild that we’re not all talking about it a lot. The show is from the Ted Lasso team — Bill Lawrence and Brett Goldstein — and it stars Jason Segel and Jessica Williams and Ted McGinley and a bunch of other people you probably recognize from things you have enjoyed.

It also co-stars Harrison Ford. Harrison Ford is just, like, in a television show. That’s him up there in a car singing along to “Every Morning” by Sugar Ray. I strongly suspect that I will write about this show more in the very near future because I’m really enjoying it a lot. But I needed to be sure you saw this. One of the biggest movie stars in history is doing carpool karaoke to 90s songs on a television show made by the company that built your telephone. The future is wild.

ITEM NUMBER FIVE – Go Birds

Here’s a tweet I have been thinking about for days now.

Aaaaand now I need an Abbott Elementary crossover episode with Always Sunny. Plots I would enjoy include:

• The teachers at Abbott helping Charlie learn to read
• Dennis and Ava going on a date after matching on Tinder
• Sweet Dee and Jacob getting into a car accident in the parking lot at the Wells Fargo Center
• Frank and Barbara stuck in an elevator together for an afternoon
• Mr. Johnson and Charlie killing rats together, which is an idea my coworker Josh Kurp had that I immediately visualized

Please hurry up and make this. I need it to live.

READER MAIL

If you have questions about television, movies, food, local news, weather, or whatever you want, shoot them to me on Twitter or at [email protected] (put “RUNDOWN” in the subject line). I am the first writer to ever answer reader mail in a column. Do not look up this last part.

From Nick:

I write to you regarding the Paddington movies. My wife and I have a stereotypically different taste in movies. Her escape is through rom-coms and lighter fare, to which I get bored and play on my phone. I’ll put on a brooding, slow indie film, to which she almost instantly falls asleep. We’ve grown to understand each other’s tastes and now meet in the middle with, say, a Pixar movie or certain comedies, and watch our ‘own’ movies on our own time. Communication! Progress! I am much more Online than her and have seen the love of Paddington over the years. I feel like this movie is perfect for both of us. When I first brought it up, she thought I was pandering to her and demeaning her. I think she thinks this movie is like your Garfields, and Yogi Bears, and Marmadukes, which is understandable. I’ve tried to explain that this movie is well-regarded, but to no avail. It has been a running bit of ours for literal years now, where we are scrolling through things to watch and I stop on Paddington, raise my brow and make eye contact and get denied. How do I convince her to watch Paddington (and Paddington 2!)? note: I thought having a baby might green-light a Paddington showing, but no luck so far.

Thank you for your help.

Oh, you poor man. I cannot even begin to imagine how desperate you have to be in your marital confusion to wake up one day and think “I should email Brian about this.” But I get it. Let me see what I can do. Here are a few sentences I would toss out to see if they achieve any level of success:

“Hey, did you know Hugh Grant plays a singing and dancing villain in Paddington 2 and the character is named Phoenix Buchanan?”

“Come onnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn.”

“This guy on the internet swears it’s good and he likes the kinds of movies I like.”

The last one is your best option because if she hates it you can just blame it on me. God, I am terrible at giving advice. I suspect I did not need to say that after you read those ideas.

Congrats on the baby, buddy.

AND NOW, THE NEWS

To St. Louis!

St. Louis Zoo officials say they are working to find a way to keep an Andean bear named Ben inside his enclosure after he escaped Thursday for the second time this month.

Hmm.

Yes.

It is settled.

I love Ben.

The bear escaped on Feb. 7 by tearing apart clips that were attached stainless steel mesh to the frame of the enclosure’s door. He did not wander far and was outside for about 90 minutes before being returned.

I love that Ben busted out and just wandered around for a little while. Sometimes this happens. One time in 8th or 9th grade, many years before my injury, I snuck out of my second-story bedroom window and was so wrapped up in the whole process and success of it all that I only realized once I was out that I didn’t really have a plan beyond that. I was just, like, in my yard, in my development, way out in the suburbs. I didn’t even know anyone who had a car yet. I think I just walked around for a while and came back in through the front door.

I don’t know if this story is more insulting to me or the bear.

In response, the zoo added stainless steel clips with 450 pounds of tensile strength to the mesh. But Ben managed to snap those clips Thursday.

I need to see Ocean’s Eleven but with this bear as one of the crew. I need to see Brad Pitt explain Ben’s prowess at escaping captivity. I need to see George Clooney at the zoo with an ice cream cone saying “it could work.” I need to see Bernie Mac get mad when Ben eats his steak. I need…

Ah, dammit. Now I’m sad again that Bernie Mac is gone. I did this to myself. That happens sometimes.

Zoo officials said they are working on alternative ways to secure the enclosure and will seek advice from the Association of Zoos & Aquariums Bear Taxon Advisory Group.

I know this just means they’re calling up some guy in an office who knows a lot about bears, but it’s a lot more fun to picture this being the guy who knows about bears. Like, he comes into the zoo in a helicopter and he steps out of it wearing a suit and sunglasses and his hair stays perfectly in place despite the whipping propellers and he just goes by “The Kodiak Wrangler” and he looks at the frazzled manager as he’s calmly buttoning his jacket and he just says “I hear you have a bear problem.”

I would watch that movie.