Succession
What a finale, what a season; the HBO family-corporate dramedy reaches its wonderful conclusion
Before this season started, I read Brandon Taylor’s review in The New Yorker, where he explained the show would finally have some momentum after a lot of stagnation. Indeed, had it gone much further in the cycle of double-crosses it had settled into, Jesse Armstrong’s masterpiece would have been at risk of falling into a formulaic rut more befitting a sitcom or network drama than a prestige drama satire. For me, the lack of serious emotional resolution to Roman’s kidnapping during a coup in the middle of the second season helped seal for me what was initially revealed when I learned Armstrong was behind Peep Show – Succession, for all its dramatic music and high society polish, is a comedy. It’s darkly satirical but not gonzo or overwhelmingly absurdist.
Confusion has been imparted to the series timeline by the quick movement of events and the fact it took five years to get four seasons. All in all, what we’re looking at takes approximately two years: two years of family betrayals, major and minor traumas, taboo lust affairs, petulant screaming, overplayed hands in informal negotiations, scandals swept under rugs and cried out; four years of brilliant television, two years of torrid life. It was stupendously orchestrated, in the more literal sense of Nicholas Britell’s wonderful composition and the less literal sense of the writing done by Armstrong and his team (Jamie Carragher, Susan Soon He Stanton, Alice Birch, Georgia Pritchett, Tony Roche, Jon Brown, Will Tracy, Lucy Prebble, Jonathan Glatzer, Ted Cohen, Anna Jordan, Mary Laws, Will Arbery, executive story editor Miriam Battye, and staff writers Nathan Elston and Callie Hersheway) or the direction by Mark Mylod (16 episodes and also executive producer), Andrij Panekh (6), Shari Springer Berman, Robert Pulcini, Lorene Scafaria (3 each), Adam Arkin, Becky Matin, Kevin Bray (2 each), Miguel Arteta, S.J. Clarkson, Adam McKay (also executive producer), Mat Shakman, and Cathy Yan.
It was exceptional television, and ends as WBD are moving from having a standalone HBO app to “Max” – whose rollout and changeover was flawed, a needless inconvenience to members done in part to salvage the Discovery App. This amid a writer’s strike. Dumb times, dark days.
There are book lists of recommendations to fill the gap Succession will leave in the cultural diets of the audience. It picked up where GoT left off; does HBO have something to pick up the audience pieces? (I guess The Last of Us, which I have not yet been moved to watch)
Before we get to what comes next, let’s reflect on what’s yet happened. Succession started concerned with the illness of Logan Roy (Brian Cox), Rupert Murdoch-inspired media mogul and hard-hearted patriarch. The traumas inflicted on his adult children in their younger days reverberate as they remain pawns in a game for him, to be played against each other as they move to succeed or usurp his position. The tactical and transactional nature of their relationships makes the few, occasional moments of genuine affection and care between the various members of the clan and their orbiting satellites – led, notably, by Kendall (Jeremy Strong), Roman (Kieran Culkin), and Siobhan (Sarah Snook) though augmented by their older half-brother Connor (Alan Ruck), once-removed younger cousin Greg (Nicholas Braun), and, of course, dear interloper Tom Wambsgans (Matthew Macfadyen as Shiv’s husband and Greg’s boss) – surprising and touching. As the show went from season to season, daddy’s imminent demise seemed to take a back seat, almost forgotten, until this year he finally croaked, moving the position jockeying-and-jostling into a new phase as the family split on how to handle his deal to have Waystar-Royco (more-or-less a stand-in for NewsCorp, but sharing similarities with Disney, ViacomCBS, NBCUniversal, and others) absorbed into tech multimedia conglomerate GoJo (led by Swedish tech billionaire Lukas Matsson, played by Alexander Skarsgard).
Sarah Snook’s real-life pregnancy was written into the series in a meaningful way that added poignancy to the climax. Fans of various individual cast members and characters (like the wizened trio of Peter Friedman as COO/vice-chairman Frank Vernon, David Rasch as CFO Karl Muller, and J. Smith Cameron as general counsel and former acting-CEO Gerri Kellman or Justine Lupe as call-girl-turned-playwright/politician’s wife Willa, Zoe Winters as assistant-mistress Kerry, Harriet Walter as the adult child trio’s mother Lady Caroline Collingwood, Hiam Abbass as Logan’s estranged widow Marcia, and especially James Cromwell as Ewan Roy) had their moments in the sun. Succession show concluded in a most satisfying way – with a surprise ending laid out for us to pick up either from the start or at any moment between then and now.
Not every show gets to go out on top, though HBO has been very successful at developing those that do. And what stupendous, ensnaring spectacle it was. Succession took casual aim at the vapidity and banality in the American political-economic system. It had characters raise points – valid and compromised – about the state of discourse, the fabrication of stock numbers, the connection between the casual whims of those invested in this corporate intrigue to world economy and public wellbeing. It was a show about bullshit, about bad poker-faces and the sense of self-security in their ability and intellect which the wealthy have and believe they have earned as evidenced by their wealth, even if they’re born into it. And, after all, the climax and the whole fourth season rotated around what was just a business deal. Another merger, with amoral emotionless layoffs as detritus. Concerns raised around mergers and acquisitions are all about name and legacy here – ego and influence; lip-service is sometimes paid to threats to society but the characters are mega-wealthy folks who don’t ever have or want to take those concerns seriously.
Succession was a dramatized, fictionalized chronicle of so much that is wrong with the world – the rot in the core of the apple, these super-rich on whose whims the world spins but who are fundamentally incurious about the world around them. Their world is so small; they just wear nicer clothes and travel to more places than most people. The material differences between a billionaire who shoplifts poorly for the rush and the unhoused people he steps over shouldn’t be forgotten, but the emptiness of these people, in all the brilliant interiority defined in the writing, direction, and performances, ought to be well remembered.
As much as anything, Succession was a show about the diminishing personal return of unfathomable wealth, about how the happiness money can buy dissipates, about how constantly striving once any reasonable idea of need has been met is a sickness of a sort; a viral disease that spreads to everything it touches. Succession was a show about psychopaths and sociopaths, about how everything looks like a nail when you only know how to use hammers. That it’s inspired by the Murdochs is obvious, the Redstones less so to those of us out of the know. The Pierce family – inspired by the NYT-publishing Sulzbergers and formerly Wall Street Journal-owning Bancrofts – dress themselves up or imagine themselves to be better than the Roys. They’re more liberal-literati, an ideological foil at least, but still get in bed with them financially, politically, and, at times, literally.
Succession is a show all about bravado and posturing – about lucky-born people that are never as smart as they think they are and even when it casts, they can only fall so far down. They have billions, so much of their own, for themselves, while those that suffer in the wake of their avarice – children in the global south, cruise ship workers thrown off ships, waiters drowned doing a favor, scientists dead at a rocket launch – are reduced to dark jokes and falsified memories.
It was brilliant and I loved it – laughed heartily, drew sweetness form moments bitter and sour. That the only character born without blood relation to this capitalist oligarchy ends up the victor come as little succor for fans who wanted a clean victory or a redemption arc for any immediate members of this demonic family. What we got instead was the continued intermingling of tragedy and farce, an ending with an ellipsis, the true to life conclusion that every resolution leaves questions open. Though, I suppose, those of us engaged by the reconciliation of a woman who has told her husband – in word as well as deed – that she doesn’t care about him gets to reunite with a husband who told her she perhaps shouldn’t have children, pregnant with his baby. Something sick within me – or something not – was delighted at the reconciliation of a truly toxic couple. Reunited in their kingdom of deceit, pulling the levers of destructive media power, under the thumb of an eccentric savant from Northern Europe; capitalists eating a poison of the spirit, hoping they don’t pass it on to their next generation. The show ends in some ways as it begins – a cycle of economic success dependent on estranged and isolated family members; everyone has grown and changed, and at the same time none of them have. They are, at their cores, the people they have always been and that we have always seen them to be. And their dramas and traumas will echo out into the world, but so many of the direst consequences are indirect; for them the price is a crushing psychological toll cushioned by ongoing financial wellbeing. That was Succession.