TV Review – Succession Season Four

Succession Season Four (HBO)
Written by Jesse Armstrong, Tony Roche, Susan Soon He Stanton, Lucy Prebble, Jon Brown, Ted Cohen, Georgia Pritchett, Will Arbery, and Will Tracy
Directed by Mark Mylod, Becky Martin, Lorene Scafaria, Andrij Parekh, Shari Springer Berman & Robert Pulcini

***Lots of spoilers***

In Michael Parenti’s 1993 book Inventing Reality: The Politics of News Media, the author goes through each stakeholder in bringing the day’s news to the average American. The most powerful in this hierarchy are the owners of the media conglomerates that own the United States’ newspapers & television stations. While written in the late 1980s and updated in the early 1990s, Parenti does not touch on the coming power of the internet, but we can understand that it, too, is folded into the realm of control of the monied classes. The world as we perceive it, taught in American schools and raised on American media, is a fabrication. The ideology behind these things is not a conspiracy where world leaders sit plotting around a table in a secret headquarters kind. 

Instead, it’s an almost silently understood series of class control mechanisms. The wealthy don’t have to say it out loud because it is implied that everything they will do will be in their own interests. The problem with desiring this level of control is that it becomes near impossible with a population in the hundreds of millions. In this instance, you build a walled garden where people believe they have freedom of thought and that all possible ideas are laid out before them to choose from while hiding those philosophies that pose the greatest danger to your hegemony. But sometimes, you hide things away so well you create a sort of ignorance among your own upper class that serves as a ticking time bomb waiting to blow up everything you think is yours.

Six months after the events of season three, Logan Roy (Brian Cox) celebrates his birthday. Three of Logan’s four children are absent at the party in his Manhattan apartment. Kendall (Jeremy Strong), Shiv (Sarah Snook), and Roman (Kieran Culkin) are in Los Angeles, working on a new media startup to present to investors. They learn Logan is seeking to absorb PGM, the rival to Waystar/RoyCo’s ATN, to make a media conglomerate. The Roy siblings decide to interfere with the sale and try to acquire it themselves, which infuriates Logan. It’s also 48 hours until the old man completes a sale of Waystar to Scandinavian wunderkind Lukas Matsson (Alexander Skarsgard) & his media empire GoJo, which the siblings are still upset about. Oh yeah, and Tom (Matthew McFayden) is now separated from Shiv with a divorce pending after the events of the season three finale. Everything is fragmented. But one event pulls everybody together and brings out the utter worst in them.

The death of Logan Roy occurs in a Biblical sense. We see Logan alive, and then, before we know it, there’s a phone call placed from his private jet via Tom to tell the kids back in the city that their dad looks like he’s dying. The death of Logan is like a mystical event where we never see the passing, we barely glimpse his body, yet the death is palpable & weighs down those who are left behind. This goes down all while the adult children are attending the wedding of their eldest brother and third-party presidential candidate Connor (Alan Ruck) to his longtime companion/girlfriend/escort Willa (Justine Lupe). The death threats that the GoJo acquisition could fall through, their father’s final business move, and suddenly they feel a sense of loyalty to become involved. However, the more they think about this, the more each of the three contemplates tanking the deal and taking control of the company themselves. Now that Daddy is dead, they desperately want to prove they can live up to the looming monolith he represents. 

However, senior executives at WayStar want the deal to go through, fully understanding that in exchange for likely being fired by Mattson, they will receive beaucoup dollars and never have to work another day in their lives. A document is discovered in Logan’s office, a potential draft for updates to his will, where Kendall’s name is underlined (or crossed out) in a section about Logan’s successor. This seed of discord festers and blooms throughout the rest of the season as each adult sibling is revealed to have the emotional maturity of a middle schooler. They live in terror of Logan even with him dead, and despite the cockiness & bravado they muster up occasionally, these are three inept people incapable of making anything successful on their own. 

This is modern Shakespeare at its finest, the story of a king who dies and the heirs who go to war over his kingdom. Roman was shown favor by his father just before the old man’s death, and some of him believes he could be the successor. We see him go the furthest he ever has in “America Decides,” an episode devoted to ATN’s presidential election coverage. Previously, it has been established that Logan supported Jeryd Mencken (Justin Kirk), the Republican candidate and a crypto-fascist. While Kendall makes a friendly exploratory phone call to the Democratic candidate, being projected as the likely winner, Roman visits the campaign headquarters of Mencken, offering to use ATN to help influence the outcome. A voting center in Milwaukee is bombed, destroying thousands of ballots that statistics say would have gone to Democrats; Roman uses this to sow doubt in Mencken’s favor. 

Maybe these were votes for the Republicans? How can anyone say definitively when it is so close? This spits in the face of historical data that ATN’s resident stats guy shares and Roman goes AWOL. He gets the on-air talent to throw the state to the Republicans, which causes other networks to follow. Shiv is livid as she likes to see herself as a well-meaning liberal. There’s a weak attempt to reverse the damage done by Roman, but it’s too late, and the Republican wins. Mencken delivers a chilling speech about reshaping America in an image people like him would find more comfortable, and Shiv realizes she has to stop her brothers no matter what. Even worse, Kendall’s daughter, an adopted child of Central Asian heritage, was the target of harassment on the street by Mencken supporters. He struggles with what the network should do, only to be overridden by Roman. However, Kendall is quickly convinced that this is Dad’s candidate, and he will be very friendly to helping the Roy siblings tank the GoJo deal.

“America Decides” and the next two episodes, “Church and State” and “With Open Eyes,” are a trilogy that wraps up the series. A visitation of almost every crucial supporting character from the show’s run and a display of how damaging aristocracy is to the lives of working Americans. While Logan may not be on the screen, he is a roaring dragon of a ghost haunting the waking & sleeping minds of his flailing & failing kids. They plot behind each other’s backs and seem to exist in perpetual mood swings. In one instance, they are seething with hatred for each other, and in the next, they are bawling their eyes out and hugging. Logan’s funeral in “Church and States” looks like a time for Roman to shine, delivering his father’s eulogy and finally outshining Kendall. Yet, that’s not what goes down. 

After a fiery & honest atonement from Uncle Ewan (James Cromwell), where he laments at what a horrible person his brother turned out to be, Roman takes to the stage only to suffer a quick breakdown and slink away, begging one of the others to take his place. Kendall does and stumbles through his own speech, an honest expression of his admiration for his father but one that reveals the speaker’s worldview. Kendall sees the world as something other than a place where people can or should be content. He likes that his father agitated people through his media outlets, framing it as inspiring people to have a hunger inside them. This is commented on in the episode’s final scene, where a distraught Roman, ashamed of his public display of emotion, wanders the streets where protests against Mencken’s win have broken out. He pushes his way into the crowd screaming profanities at them, only to get a well-deserved beatdown.

The series finale, “With Open Eyes,” is the perfect capper for this series. The first half allows the Roy siblings to make a truce after some pretty devastating lies are revealed. They will likely retain control, with all three backing Kendall as CEO for the upcoming board vote on the GoJo merger. Yet, something in Shiv is still unsettled. Little does she know that the sharpest dagger has been saved for her. When the vote to sell to Mattson comes around to Shiv, she leaves the room, needing a moment to breathe and think. Kendall and Roman pursue to ensure she sticks with the plan. This is when the three are nakedly revealed before us: squabbling children who never advanced much beyond their adolescence. Their father built a perfect machine in that when he died, the heirs to it had been raised so horribly & developed almost no sense of humility that the empire would have to collapse. In this way, Logan could prove in death that he was superior; the only way his company could go on would be to break it up and sell it off. 

Shiv’s statement that she doesn’t think Kendall would be good at running the company doesn’t need evidence backing it up. We have four seasons worth of proof that Kendall is a fuck-up and would fuck this up too. Roman’s chest-puffing was already shown to be a hollow act when he collapses into tears after strutting around in the wake of destroying the country. And if you think Shiv is better, that’s only because she claims to adhere to a different side of the political ideology than her brothers. A wealthy American Liberal is basically a Reagan Republican while the right wing has gone mask off Nazi. Shiv is just as self-interested as her fascistic younger brother and her dullard, politically apathetic elder. None are good partners, siblings, children, or business people. Roman hits the nail on the head with his final epiphany of “We are bullshit. We are nothing.”

Their tragedy reaches truly Shakespearean heights in this finale. The kingdom is turned over to the invader. The senior execs make their remarks, a commentary on the state of the Roy family. The best of all is that Tom is made CEO, not because of his remarkable business acumen but because Shiv’s attempted disparagement about her husband to Mattson (he’s a simpering bootlicker, essentially) proved to be a selling point. With an incoming president preferring domestic corporate leadership, Mattson needed someone who would do as they were told. Shiv thought she was his pick, but she was too close to the company and eager to push back. Tom is perfect in that whatever he is told, he will do, proven by his complicity in using ATN to throw an election.

We conclude with Roman sitting in a bar with a drink, the look on his face too ambiguous to determine whether he is happy about being out from underneath the shadow of Logan. Shiv is humiliated in such a cutting way, now the pregnant wife of the CEO of the man who runs her father’s former company. Tom’s extension of his hand is a silent offer to act in this capacity in exchange for some small retainer of her family’s glory. Kendall ends up the fallen prince, wandering the streets in a daze, unable to process the one thing he believed he would be good at simply wasn’t to be. Even worse, he’s hired his father’s former bodyguard, who will be behind a few paces, keeping him from ending things. Kendall is a living ghost, a husk of regret, who cannot conceive of purpose outside this singular thing.

Succession is the story of how our livelihoods & worldviews are shaped by people born into wealth. Not only that, they were raised by hate-filled men whose only desire is to ensure humanity proves they are savage beasts. The irony is that the children of the wealthy are the worst of them all, uncaring about their decisions’ impact on the average person, seeing their own ascent to power as the only thing worthy of their energy. Not that the world we are left with is any better. Tom will do whatever he is told, and Mattson will continue shaping a world that makes him money. Did they deserve to win? Not really, but neither did the Roy siblings. That’s the thing about the game on display; no one capable of winning it should win. They are all terrible people who don’t seek to use the media power they have or could have to make the world a better place. Instead, it’s all about pumping their rotten egos at the cost of the free world. Jesse Armstrong and his collaborators have delivered a potent tragedy fashioned perfectly for our times, a saga of late-stage capitalism that displays the harm done by those born into systems of power.