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A couple of days before the series finale of HBO’s “Succession,” DraftKings, an online-betting platform, drew up hypothetical odds for the next C.E.O. of Waystar Royco, the Murdochian media conglomerate established by the late Logan Roy which his adult children have spent the past four seasons of the show fighting over. Shiv, Logan’s tough-as-nails-but-constantly-shafted daughter, was the front-runner, with +250 odds, followed closely by her older brother Kendall, once the tortured heir apparent, with +300 odds, and more distantly by the swaggery weakling Roman, Logan’s youngest son, with +800 odds. Connor, the eldest Roy child, perennially discounted but never fully dismissed, came in next, with +1400 odds. And then there were the wild cards: Shiv’s estranged brownnosing husband, Tom Wambsgans (+2000), and the bumbling beanpole Cousin Greg (+5000). America, or at least the part of it that watches “Succession,” was holding its breath, waiting to see which of these abhorrent characters would emerge the victor.
When I reviewed the third season of “Succession,” created by the British comedy writer Jesse Armstrong, I argued that the show should be enjoyed not as a propulsive drama but as something closer to a sitcom: a near-static, tragicomic tableau in which characters rarely change, and situations end up repeating themselves with only very modest variations. For most of the show, this approach worked fantastically well, foregrounding the relentless game of musical chairs that the Roy kids were playing—an eternal wrangle for a seat of power that, at their father’s yank, was always just slightly out of butt’s reach.
But Armstrong surprised everyone—including members of his own cast—when he announced, earlier this year, that “Succession” ’s fourth season would be its last. In an interview with The New Yorker’s Rebecca Mead, he reminded us that there’s “a promise” in the show’s title—an epic resolution apparent in its own name—even if this had become somewhat obscured by the series’ endless baits and switches. And, while Armstrong’s decision may have come with an initial jolt of disappointment (how rare is it, these days, for a show to go out during its prime?), there was something noble in the choice to put the characters out of their misery and bring their toxic cycle to an end, forcing the series to truly become the drama that its establishing premise offered.
I must admit that, as the final season unfolded, I began to feel as if I might have had enough of the Roys. It had long become clear that the characters were not going to develop of their own volition, and that some external force would have to force the issue. Logan’s death, in the season’s third episode, seemed to create the proper circumstances for this shift. But, even following the pivotal episode in which the patriarch croaks on his private jet after suffering a pulmonary embolism (Logan forwent his compression socks to “look hot” for his mistress, as Tom recounts to Greg), each episode was once again chock-full of constant reversals and counter-reversals, hinging mainly on which of the siblings were on board, at any given moment, with a deal teed up by Logan, to sell Waystar Royco to the Swedish tech mogul Lukas Matsson, and thereby cede at least some control of the company. After Logan’s death, Kendall and Roman, the company’s interim co-C.E.O.s, decide that they’d rather stay in charge forever, and their resulting schemes to sink the Matsson deal, which felt almost “Nathan for You”-like in absurdity and scale, led to every possible permutation of power struggle: Kendall and Roman vs. Shiv; Kendall vs. Shiv and Roman; Kendall, Roman, and Shiv vs. Tom and Greg; Kendall and Greg vs. Shiv vs. Tom. (Such familial alliances have always been more important than any political ones brokered by the characters, though the Roy siblings do throw their weight behind different Presidential candidates, with Kendall and Roman supporting Jeryd Mencken, a Trumpian figure who might destroy the country, and, more important, the Matsson deal.) All of these ins and outs made for a viewing experience that could sometimes feel like jogging in place for a moment too long, as we waited for the light to change.
The show was still compelling, and the dialogue was, as ever, a snappy, nihilistic delight (when Shiv reveals to her brothers that she’s pregnant, Roman responds, without missing a beat, “Is it mine?”). Sometimes, it was oddly poignant—“Dad played sudoku?” Roman asks, after finding one of the puzzles on his deceased father’s desk—and at other times it was almost too perceptive for television: “He couldn’t fit a whole woman in his head,” Shiv says, eulogizing Logan at his funeral.
But what ultimately kept me watching were not the siblings and their machinations, which seemed increasingly calcified, but the show’s minor characters, whose scenes revealed glimpses of the actual human stakes that, in the case of Kendall, Roman, and Shiv, had flattened through sheer force of reiteration. These include Logan’s mistress Kerry (maybe my favorite character this season), who is humiliatingly refused entry to Logan’s room after his death; Gerri, who, lip quivering, is summarily canned by a power-tripping Roman; and Greg, whose brutal firing of ATN employees over Zoom, using a haltingly read script, exposed the flip side of unbothered upper-level corporate jockeying.
Sunday’s finale, however, reinforced the strength of “Succession” as both a farce and prestige drama. There would be no future space for additional power-play flip-flopping, a definitiveness that lent the episode a gravitas that finally matched the show’s majestic score. No matter how things shook out, it would be the final word on the family that we’ve spent our Sunday evenings with: now that we were down to the wire, the stakes had reëmerged for the central characters.
“Succession” has always done big life events well: weddings, funerals, birthdays, company votes. The final episode—a blockbuster hour and a half in length—proceeds toward a board meeting that will determine whether Waystar Royco will accept Matsson’s offer to purchase the company or whether it will remain in the family’s control. Early on, Shiv, whom Matsson has promised to make the company’s American C.E.O. if she helps him carry the deal through, goes head to head with Kendall, who is interested in blocking the deal and leading the company himself. After hearing from Caroline, their frosty British mother, that Roman is holed up at her Barbados villa, Kendall and Shiv both head to the island retreat—situated not far from “that horrible place where I think one of the guys from Pink Floyd did a poo in the pool”—each hoping to drag their brother over to their side of the voting bloc. Roman, who is convalescing after suffering a quasi-breakdown at Logan’s funeral, and a physical beatdown at the hand of street protesters afterward, immediately sniffs out their intention. “Fucking scorpion party,” he says. “Take a pop at the human fucking vote.”
Caroline makes condoling comments about Roman’s fragile state of body and mind, but her maternal instincts seemingly end there; she admits that she cannot bring herself to administer Roman’s eye drops, because eyes “revolt her.” “Eyes? Like, human eyes we all have?” Shiv asks incredulously, to which Caroline responds: “I don’t like to think of all these blobs of jelly rolling around in your head, just, face eggs.” This hilariously chilling image came back to me when, a bit later, Matsson dines with Tom and requests that he pitch himself as potential C.E.O., forcing Shiv out of the role he promised her, because she is “kind of pushy.” He’d rather have the obsequious Tom, who is, for his part, ready to step up. “I squeeze the costs and juice the revenue,” he says, of his business strategy, going on to explain to his prospective boss that he’s adept at “cutting heads and harvesting eyeballs.”
As “Succession” has taught us all along, people aren’t always people. They are votes, they are heads, they are eyeballs. And the variations of “It’s me” or “Why can’t it be me?” or “What about me?”—uttered, at different points of the episode, by Kendall, Shiv, and Roman in reference to the role of C.E.O.—are the natural complements to this perspective. Personhood is available only when it refers to the person assuming it—everyone else, family or not, doesn’t make the cut.
And yet, the Roys, too, are humans, with eyeballs and other body parts that sometimes fail them. (This includes the late, great Logan, with his blocked arteries and failing urinary tract.) There’s a striking physicality in the finale, evident in the dialogue—“He played you like a big fiddle, like a pregnant cello,” Roman says to Shiv, of Matsson, who has a tendency to reduce the aspiring C.E.O. to her womb and her sex organs—and in the characters’ actions, which grow in ferocity as the episode goes on. At first, the invocations of violence are playful, tongue-in-cheek; after Kendall pitches himself to Roman and Shiv as the sole head of the company, and asks them to support him in the board meeting, his siblings joke about how the easiest option might just be to kill him, “a biff to the head and a bonk on the noggin.” (“We were thinking of murdering you,” Shiv tells Kendall later, “but it’s too much prep.”) The savagery is put on pause when they finally accept the idea of him as Logan’s successor, and, for the first time in “Succession” history, a real smile, as warm as the sun, spreads on Kendall’s face. Shiv and Roman recognize the moment’s lack of precedent. “That’s what a happy Kendall looks like,” Shiv says, not just because he got “the bauble” of the C.E.O.-ship, but because his brother and sister are letting him have it, even though Logan ostensibly promised it to all of them at different points. It is, for once and however briefly, a moment of genuine connection between the siblings.
But this is Jesse Armstrong’s “Succession,” and nothing gold can stay. At the board meeting, Shiv decides that she can’t stomach Kendall as C.E.O., and leaves before casting her deciding vote. She is followed into the hallway by Kendall and Roman, and the three siblings duke it out in a nearby conference room, which is decidedly not soundproof. Shiv and Kendall take turns arguing for their spot as Logan’s rightful successor—Shiv, by withholding her vote from Kendall out of spite, and Kendall, by adopting his father’s tactics of brutalizing Roman. The conference room is a mess of arms and limbs, the eyeballs of the board peering in through the glass walls, and their ears ringing with Kendall’s petulant (and inaccurate) cries of “I’m the eldest boy!”
“It’s bits of glue and broken shows,” Roman says to Kendall, of Waystar Royco, their father’s lifework and, up until now, the family’s lifeblood. “It’s all fucking nothing, man. . . . We’re nothing.” After one last embarrassment in front of the corporate suits, Kendall finally gives up and departs the building, for good this time. (As he exits, a random corporate punter follows him into the elevator; Armstrong is seemingly unable to resist undercutting the soberness of the moment.) Not long after, Tom arrives, to be fêted as the new C.E.O. As Shiv referred to him earlier, in conversation with Matsson, Tom is “a highly interchangeable modular part”—whether an eyeball or an eyeball harvester, he will be whatever it is that the Swede needs, and that is precisely why he’s perfect. Perhaps this is the show’s ultimate twist—that the key to succeeding Logan was to be nothing like Logan at all.
As the finale draws to a close, we get a deeper look at Logan’s true legacy. Kendall, followed at a distance by his father’s old bodyguard, wanders to the water, a king without a kingdom; Roman, sipping a martini at a bar, is also alone, though at least secure in the knowledge that, if he is nothing, then so is his brother; and Shiv, in maybe the darkest denouement of all, has joined Tom in his town car, once again in the position of a lesser complement to a powerful man. Thanks, in part, to the siblings’ messy efforts at power-grabbing, the country is in chaos, with the fate of the Presidency unclear. But, for the children of “Succession,” all that matters is the family, even when it’s gone. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
