SPOILER ALERT: This article contains details of tonight’s Succession series finale.
In the end, heavy is the sycophant head that wears the crown, as the series finale of Succession proved tonight.
“You fi*ckin’ grabbed the crown, the two of you,” proclaims Shiv Roy (Sarah Snook) as she sticks another blade into her hapless brothers in the “With Open Wide” episode of the Jesse Armstrong created satire . “Dad died and f*cking grabbed the crown, and you pushed me out, so I don’t know why I’m the (expletive) here,” she tells the still scheming Kendell (Jeremy Strong) and bruised Roman (Kieran Culkin) with a beautiful Caribbean sunset in the background.
“So, f*ck off, okay? I won and I’m sorry for winning, but I did …I played it better.”
Still, for all the gloating, Shiv’s attempts to come out on top in Lukas Matsson (Alexander Skarsgård) and tech giant GoJo’s multi-billion-dollar takeover of Waystar Royco and save her scarred marriage to Tom Wambsgans (Matthew Macfadyen), the youngest child of now deceased media mogul Logan Roy (Brian Cox) once again proved not up to the task.
In the end, Shiv’s recreant boardroom vote sends the trio spirally down the corporate and psychologically void to lose it all. “We are bullshit ..it’s all f**king nothing,” declares Roman as Kendall sees his dream of sitting in his father’s chair evaporate and the company is sold.
Having risen through the ranks due to his barbed filled union with Shiv, and once looking at some serious prison time to take the fall for yet another Waystar scandal, Toady Tom is now Lukas’ CEO. A powerless frontman for the antagonistic Matsson, the boy from Saint Paul, Minnesota at least finds himself for a short time the one wearing the pants in his marriage. As for the Roys’ role at Waystar, sad sack cousin Greg (Nicholas Braun) is the last family member standing.
Grabbing foreseeable tragedy out of triumph, tonight’s finale revealed the Roy offspring as amateurs at the game that they were never really raised to play. In the cunning penultimate episode of the HBO series when Strong’s Kendall called his father a “brute” during a spontaneous eulogy for Logan, you could hear a very 20th century term of praise became a 21st century insult from a boy who had no spite to offer. Or, as Lou Reed once sang: “Men of good fortune, often cause empires to fall”
With blood all over the boardroom floor, a fascist heading to the White House, and a virtual return of Logan to remind the siblings how little he cared for them, the brutal and beautiful finale closed the deal for Succession after four acclaimed seasons.
Turning birthrights into burned bridges, with the in-house minor Gertrude of the sibling’s estranged mother Caroline Collingwood (Harriet Walker) setting the stage, as with past Succession season finales, this very satisfying ender was penned by Armstrong, with Mark Mylod directing. Having long since eclipsed its origins out of a Rupert Murdoch biography screenplay of Armstrong’s that never got made, the series finale was pure palace intrigue.
Still, always more Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead than the Bard’s Hamlet or King Lear, Armstrong’s Succession was singularly observant overall. Sure the show could be merely Dynasty with better production value for particular scenes or even whole episodes. However, where Armando Iannucci’s The Thick of It was frantic and Veep was funny (both of which Armstrong was a writer on), Succession, at its best like tonight, was also very frightening.
Strategically. ruthless in his portraits, Armstrong made it clear over the series’ run that nothing captures the state of this nation like fear.
Occupying the space between theory and praxis, fiction and fact, the series ripped flesh off the cultural zeitgeist. Committed to a lack of commitment among its well-heeled characters to anything but their short-term self-interest and an ongoing state of erosion for all they touched, Succession dangled hope where there really was none in an America exhausted with itself.
Circling the empyrean heights of Hogarth, Succession succeeds when it shifted its audience out of their bias and their belief in American capitalism and captains of industry. Almost all of us know so many of these billionaires and CEOs are predatory buffoons. Yet, we rarely say it comprehensively. Add to that, and the discomfort it can breed, we rarely see it framed and articulated with such poignancy, lunacy, and bite as Succession offered
“The future is real, the past is all made up,” declared Cox’s cruel Logan Roy at his birthday party in Season 2 of the show. Tonight, with the series conclusion, that snark from 2019 proved one of the defining epithets for one of the defining series of the 21st century.
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