MONDAY NIGHT’S SERIES finale of Succession has won rave reviews – five stars from The Guardian, an A from AV Club, 9.6/10 on IMDb, and on.
What little there is left to say by way of review would either fall into the camp of plainly obvious or embarrassingly contrarian. The show has ended, its central question was answered, and now, a void has opened.
A series defined by backstabbing climaxed in a veritable merry-go-round of dorsal wounds. In no particular order: Greg betrayed Tom, Tom betrayed Shiv, Matsson also betrayed Shiv, Stewy betrayed Kendall and then betrayed Matsson five seconds later, Karolina betrayed Hugo, and most fatally, Shiv betrayed Kendall.
The episode’s second act threatened to end this cycle of betrayal once and for all, with the siblings finally crowning Kendall as the successor to their father Logan Roy. At last, at long last, it seemed that their many hatchets had been buried, and that the show was on course for its cleanest possible ending. Kendall Roy CEO, supported by his loving siblings, Roman and Siobhan.
In what what can unmistakably be identified forever as “the kitchen scene,” creator Jesse Armstrong and director Mark Mylod carefully constructed a palace of tenderness, sentiment and familial affection. They did this so they could pull the rug on it at the very last minute.
It’s a tool they’ve relied upon heavily this season. Episode 3, the prolonged death sequence of Logan Roy, suggested a conclusive cementing of the siblings’ fractured relationship. The episode was an immaculate feat of narrative, of performance, of writing and of direction. The next week, all of that hard-earned, gut-wrenching progress was undone almost entirely.
Whether this is a criticism, a virtue, or a very boring statement of fact, will depend on each viewer’s own personal interpretation. But it is certainly a choice. Typically, when a story spends so much effort on constructing, painstakingly, a moment of reconciliation between deeply fractured loved ones, it is expected that such a thing will hold.
kendall roy in succession 1x02 and 4x10 pic.twitter.com/a74WsmwOqy
— ma¡le (@milfadyen) May 29, 2023
Kendall screwed it for himself in the end. In Shiv’s moment of weakness, he proved that he was unable to pitch himself. Rather than give her time to breathe, he breathed down her neck, he called her stupid, he framed the conversation around his own personal need to be CEO, and eventually collapsed into a tantrum, absurdly screaming “I am the eldest boy!” and confirming to the audience, and surely to Siobhan Roy, that he was never the sensible option he believed himself to be.
That analysis is based on the premise that there was any sensible option here, in a world where everything is run either by sociopaths who cosy up to proto-fascist presidents, legacy billionaires with no understanding beyond their lust for power, and banality-of-evil operators who accept the status quo for what it is, and clamour like crabs towards the top of the bucket. Which is to say: our world.
This season’s eighth episode, the election set-piece, an exquisitely detailed ship in a bottle, spelled out the real world stakes of the boardroom squabbling, and reminded us all that for the brief reminders of humanity, that these were people whose self-interest by far trumps their interest in civil society, the protection of democracy, safety, honesty, integrity, order, or any of the things that the public at large tend to prize.
The show’s focus on Kendall’s unbridled pathos made him the easiest to empathise with, which, in a universe so devoid of empathy, nearly stretched as far as rooting for him. The finale leaned into this – his “Happy Ken” moment on the raft, his meal fit for a king with his siblings — a standalone moment of joy in the four hollow years that we’ve known him.
Armstrong and Mylod tricked the audience not only into believing that everything would be fine, but that “fine” was even a remote possibly in this world that mirrors our own down to the last fibre.
It was masterful and sickening, following precisely the throughline of the show’s final season, and in the immediate aftermath, it has been accepted that the show did what so many others fail to do, and delivered on its enormous potential all the way until the end.
Succession was a television show. Now it is over. pic.twitter.com/YvP6ArRggC
— Josiah Durie (@josiahdurie) May 29, 2023
As the sun sets on Succession, so too does it set (though self-evidently not quite yet) on the cottage industry of theses, think-pieces and deep dives into every element of the show – Jeremy Strong’s method acting, what the show was trying to tell us about the rich and powerful, endless reams of theories about who would end up “on top,” and what, as viewers, we were supposed to be feeling each Tuesday morning.
Writers from all publications told us that it was never about who would end up as CEO, that many of theories online suggested a damning indictment of modern-day media literacy, that we were empathising with these people either too much, or not enough, and analysed the roles of the most minute characters down to the bone.
In 2021, Vice even published a “deconstruction” of the use of the phrase “Uh-huh” in the show’s script.
Simply put, Succession gave us a lot to talk about.
When Game of Thrones’ ending bombed hard enough to almost erase eight years of cultural significance back in 2019, its HBO sibling Succession stepped confidently into the breach as the kind of show that produces so much conversation that its cultural value almost matched, if not outstripped, its undeniably lofty quality.
The perfect setup for a movie... there is no way this is over.
— @jason (@Jason) May 29, 2023
... and it this is over, I'm funding a startup just to make AI episodes of Succession pic.twitter.com/Mzfoz3LPYQ
Succession ends at a time when tech bros across the internet threaten to replace the skill known as writing with putting prompts into AI generators and somehow making a show out of it (if you want to find out for yourself how dreadful a script written by AI would be, go ahead and try it).
Here on the corporeal plane, where art still exists, the Writers Guild of America is on strike, leaving the production of many beloved shows in a state of limbo – a limbo that would have also halted Succession, had it not just ended.
Succession creator Jesse Armstrong has donated money to support the strike, and true to his left-wing onscreen counterpart Ewan, James Cromwell has expressed support, noting that “All of us win when the writers win.”
As with all great shows, Succession leaves behind a vacuum, but never has that vacuum looked quite so wide, and never has our position on its edge been so precipitous.
Succession was not the only good show on television. It wasn’t the first and it won’t be the last. But its finale served to remind us that the hunger for great art remains as voracious as ever, and that without it, we’d all have an awful lot less to say.
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