Succession signs off
Graham Hillard
Succession’s second season ended with an all-time cliffhanger and then left audiences dangling for more than two years. Something about a global pandemic. Now, a mere 15 months have passed since season three knocked HBO’s love-hateable Roy family into new and interesting alignments. By the award-winning drama’s glacial standards, the fourth (and final) season has arrived in the blink of an eye. It’s no certainty that the actors even had time to break character.
The show’s latest run begins some three months after last season’s conclusion. Logan (Brian Cox), the Roys’ arch-manipulative paterfamilias, is going ahead with the sale of his media empire to Swedish meatball Lukas Matsson (Alexander Skarsgard). Their opposition to the deal apparently forgotten, the Roy children have begun planning new ventures of their own. Kendall (Jeremy Strong) and Roman (Kieran Culkin) are hard at work on “The Hundred,” an obviously doomed infotainment service billed, ridiculously, as “Substack meets Masterclass meets the Economist meets the New Yorker.” Siobhan (Sarah Snook) has surprisingly lighter ambitions, having merely “talk[ed] about talking” to a Democratic presidential campaign that inexplicably wants her help.
Among Succession’s shrewdest insights is its familiarity with the unsteadying wind of obsession, a family curse that sends each Roy down the path to humiliation. For Logan’s eldest son, Connor (Alan Ruck), this grievous birthright requires spending yet another $100 million to maintain his 1% standing in the GOP presidential primary. Cousin Greg (Nicholas Braun), a perpetual outsider despite near-constant self-abasement, is so enthralled with wealth that no task is beneath him, no matter how grim. Note the young man’s expression, rattled but proud, upon informing Logan’s mistress that she won’t be getting her own television show. “I did the job,” he repeats to himself in a private moment. Those dogged, self-congratulatory words could well be the motto on the Roys’ family crest.
Given its characters’ vulnerability to fixations, it is no surprise that Succession moves, in its newest episodes, to resurrect past deals. Determined, for the third time in four seasons, to purchase the liberal media giant PGM, Logan discovers that he is being outbid by his own children. What are new projects compared to the irresistible prospect of tweaking Dad? By the end of episode two, one could be forgiven for assuming that Succession’s concluding stretch will merely run back previous seasons’ tape, Groundhog Day-style, with occasional novel flourishes. Such a move would be fitting, if not wholly satisfying, a coherent tribute to a family that has never seen a way forward except through one another.
Whatever its potential, however, such a design is not what showrunner Jesse Armstrong has in mind for his opus’s swan song. Instead, and thrillingly, the new season reshuffles its cards in an extraordinary third episode, sending its characters in uncharted directions. “There be dragons,” as old-world maps used to warn? Indeed. But there lie fresh dramatic possibilities as well. I haven’t been this excited to watch a TV show’s final run since an unmasked Walter White was stalking Albuquerque.
Like its comic forerunner Veep, Succession specializes in dialogue that straddles absurdity and malice. Lean a little to either side and lose the writing’s cantankerous clarity or its disconcerting strangeness. “It looks like if Santa Claus was a hitman,” Greg remarks of Logan during a tour of a newsroom floor. “It’s like Israel-Palestine, except harder and much more important,” Siobhan’s husband, Tom (Matthew Macfadyen), declares of a tricky business negotiation. As in previous seasons, many of Succession’s funniest lines are unprintable, a consequence of Armstrong’s infatuation with a certain earthy obscenity. Then again, the new season’s best scenes are often its quietest. A premiere-capping divorce conversation between Tom and Siobhan is human and haunting. So is much of episode three, which wrongfoots the entire clan to startling effect.
For what, besides this quickly shifting tone, will Succession be remembered? Though I might nominate its ghastly corporate portmanteaus (“Waystar,” “GoJo”), their satirical brilliance may be too slight to leave a mark. Others will point to the show’s technical flourishes, including its cinema verite-inspired blocking and controlled-chaos camerawork. Perhaps the best wager is that audiences hence will celebrate the series’s claustrophobic portrayal of siblinghood, an accomplishment that has often brought to mind HBO’s original family drama, Six Feet Under. If memory serves, that show concluded with a brother talking his sister literally to death. One can easily imagine the Roy children suffering such a fate.
Until then, might we get a spinoff or two? Armstrong has hinted that such a project could be in the works. Though each fan will have his preferences, it seems clear to me that the future belongs to Macfadyen’s Tom. Yes, I would watch Kendall and Roman bicker over subscription models, and yes, I would probably tune in for Siobhan in the West Wing. (But don’t test me.) Yet Tom’s story feels, at present, the least finished. A moral monster and an unfillable pit of need, Tom is nevertheless a man worth cheering for, representing as he does the vast American middle biting at the Roys’ heels. Succession has always been, at heart, a saga of class striving, irrespective of its characters’ riches. Will the poor boy from Minnesota capture his Gatsbyesque dream at last? Let’s find out.
Graham Hillard is the author of Wolf Intervals (Poiema Poetry Series) and a Washington Examiner magazine contributing writer.