I must admit I was skeptical when Succession first premiered in 2018. In the aftermath of the 2016 election, stories about the mega wealthy and the elite power holders in our society were at an all time high. While I agreed with the messaging of these shows and films which condemned the structures set in place in America that led to these unfair balances of power, I sometimes struggled with them from an entertainment standpoint in the same way a lot of people did with much of Trump era satire.
It became hard to enjoy, or laugh at, these fictional stories when even more ludicrous and upsetting things were actually happening in the country on a day-to-day basis. Ultimately, what made the equally satirical, comedic, and dramatic Succession so effective—and set it apart from some of the more Saturday Night Live-esque satire of that time—is that despite its absurdity, the people making the show clearly took these characters seriously; even if, from the start, the audience knew something that Logan Roy said to his children near the beginning of season four: They are not serious people.
There was never going to be a true winner in Sunday night’s series finale. Somehow, this fact got lost with a lot of viewers who had started to believe this was a show like Game of Thrones in which one character was destined to triumphantly take their seat on the Iron Throne, or in the corner office, at the end of the series.
Despite its title, this was never really a show about who was going to become the next CEO of Waystar Royco. It was a show about the stunted adult children of a cruel billionaire who manipulated them to compete for his love and attention while dangling in front of each of them something that none of them was qualified for or capable of—and something that no truly well-adjusted person would even want in the first place—the chance to be the next him. It was a show about how the poison did in fact drip through, which is why none of Logan’s children were destined for a happy ending.
The truth is there was never going to be a next Logan. Despite the fact that nearly every episode of season four featured one of the kids saying some version of “it’s what Dad would do” in order to justify some usually harebrained idea of theirs, none of them truly possessed the qualities needed to become their father; unfortunately, they never realized that this was actually a good thing. This idea highlights how brilliant it was to make Tom the ultimate successor and, foolishly in some people’s minds, the “winner” of the show.
For four seasons all we heard was that you needed to be a killer in order to take over Logan’s position, but in the end it went to the biggest yes-man on the show who spent all his time sucking up, kissing ass, and doing anything to get close, and stay close, to power. With the way Logan talked about it, you would think someone was going to have to cut off heads to become his replacement. Instead, Tom became CEO by nodding along to his new boss, Matsson, telling him he wanted to have sex with his wife, while offering him the position under the guise that he didn’t want a partner, but instead a “frontman” and a “pain sponge” for when Matsson is “under the hood doing what he loves.” This was the moment the show truly told us that Logan was gone and no replacement was coming. It was also the moment that proved despite his title at the end, Tom was not the winner of Succession.
At the end of the day, despite their ages, we were reminded throughout the course of the series that the Roy children were in fact just that, children. We saw that from the start and it remained true throughout the entire show.
Even in the series finale, these characters, who are presumably in their 30s and 40s, spent most of their time at their mom’s house and their dad’s apartment. And in the episode’s climactic moment they were inside the offices of their father’s company, but instead of executing on their plan to keep Waystar, they were doing the thing we learned in Shiv’s eulogy for Logan that they used to do when they were young kids—being disruptive and making noise outside of the rooms where the actual professionals were working and making decisions.
The children hanging out in their mother’s kitchen may have been one of the most oddly heartwarming scenes in the whole series as the audience finally got to see the siblings getting along. But, it’s not hard to see that there was a clear choice to make one of the few genuinely happy moments of the season a scene in which the siblings are essentially acting like children goofing off in their mom’s house, waking her up in the middle of the night, being purposefully juvenile, and messing with their stepdad’s cheese.
Some would say the greatest trick that creator Jesse Armstrong and the writers of Succession pulled off was making viewers sometimes like and root for these clearly unlikable characters. However, perhaps it was even more impressive to make people genuinely believe that one of the unqualified, undeserving, and frequently unintelligent siblings could somehow find their way to the CEO position at the end of the series.
In fact, one of the children “winning” and succeeding Logan would have actually been a betrayal of the story Jesse Armstrong set out to tell. Shiv ultimately had to change her mind about making Kendall CEO because deep down she knew what the audience had known all along, this guy cannot be put in charge of that entire company. Her motivation for changing her vote at the last minute can be debated, but I like to think it was in fact that simple. She was not weighing all her options and choosing to align herself with Tom, she was not making some grand sacrifice of the family company in order to save her brother from becoming her father—she simply saw Kendall take a seat in Logan’s chair and knew it wasn’t right.
It’s important to note that in Kendall’s truest moment, when trying to convince Shiv to vote his way, the best he can come up with is the perfectly delivered and truly hilarious line “I am the eldest boy!” If you are curious to know what Jesse Armstrong thinks about the kinds of people he explored and satirized with this show, that line of dialogue tells you everything you need to know. They are people who will whine and point to their last name, or who their daddy is, when things don’t go their way. Roman tells Kendall later in that scene that “we are bullshit, we’re nothing.” Perhaps a more pointedly way to say it would be that they are not, and never were, serious people.
Not A Real Person Yet 