In the first episode of HBO’s Succession, Logan Roy is feeling his age. The series opens with him pissing on the carpet in a dark corner because he’s gotten up in the night and forgotten the way to the bathroom. It’s an image of weakness, and it is one of few moments throughout the series where he will seem so. For most of our time with him, Logan will seem more of a tyrant than a vulnerable old man, but in true Lear-ian fashion, the initial image of him that shapes our perception is Logan as a man in decline. It’s easy to forget that there’s a ticking clock on Logan’s rule (despite the show’s title) because Logan is the energy behind every character’s actions. Every move they make is as orbital planets; his gravity is absolute.
Given this, it can be easy to forget that when we meet our cast of characters they have largely removed themselves from that orbit. Just as season 4 opens with Logan’s birthday, so too does the series; Logan is turning 80 and his four children have gathered to pay their obeisance. Kendall, Logan’s second son, has been in rehab and is now attempting to make his own way in the world of expensive media acquisitions. Shiv, his only daughter, has been in DC working as a political fixer. Connor, the eldest son, has been living on a luxury ranch in the middle of nowhere, largely removed from his father’s orbit. Roman, the youngest child, has been living a hedonistic lifestyle in New York, largely removed from the family business. Only Kendall is directly involved in Waystar Royco when we meet the kids, but even he has been trying to carve a life for himself that doesn’t keep him forever in his father’s shadow. He has gone to rehab, found a company he wishes to acquire, and put together a business plan that, while less than impressive, is at least of his own design. He is trying to win back his wife and spend more time with his children. But when Logan has a stroke at the end of the first episode, priorities quickly change.
The plot of this show is, on the surface, driven by the question of who will succeed Logan as the king and CEO of Waystar Royco. On a more metaphorical level, it is driven by a more painful question: will these people ever be able to form their own lives outside of Logan’s influence? To varying degrees, by the end of the second episode all four of these characters have largely abandoned their feeble attempts at carving out separate lives. The three core children, Kendall, Shiv, and Roman waste no time deleting their previous existences and divvying up their father’s empire. Most of their on and offscreen time for the next four seasons will focus on their attempts to maintain footholds in his world. They have all the money in the world, but it opens no doors for them, instead placing them on the plot equivalent of a circular conveyer belt in a narrow windowless hallway.
At the start of the show, Kendall is the character most clearly obsessed with earning his father’s respect and love, but he is quickly joined by Shiv and Roman, who drop everything in their respective lives to step on the plot conveyer belt. All three children are wildly wealthy, and likely to remain so even if they didn’t take over the family business. Connor, for instance, doesn’t ever seem worried that opting out of the line of succession will ruin his ability to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a third-party presidential bid or finance his girlfriend’s disastrous Broadway play. Shiv’s character goes through the most rapid change in the first couple of episodes; she gives up her job in DC and moves back to New York full time, installing her fiancé Tom as an employee at Waystar to give her eyes and ears on the inside. Roman is directionless and nihilistic, but also most hopeful of a reconciliation with the father who beat him as a child, and thus most often to be found going along with Logan when it counts.
None of these characters will achieve any sense of fulfillment, joy, contentment, happiness, or glee should they achieve their goal of succession. By every metric, all four children would have a much better chance at living a fulfilling life were they to reject the plot’s proffered hand. Connor exists as a living embodiment of this option. He is not a happy man, but he is more free than the rest because he has no expectations of success. As the eldest son, the expectation that he would succeed is obvious, but within the logic of the show his choice to become a kooky libertarian who lives in the desert with his call-girl girlfriend who only enters his father’s direct orbit on special occasions keeps him from suffering the same obsessive circularity the other kids do.
But the stage is set and the die is cast: three successors vying for one crown, all trying to convince Daddy not that they love him so much more than their siblings (a la Lear) but that he should love them back. The characters in this series are all driven not by positive goals (become CEO of Waystar) but by their addictions instead (make Logan love me). They are driven by the fatal flaws that define them, just as in any classical tragedy. There is nothing stopping them from declining the invitation the plot has presented them, or forcing them to continue to chase their addictions, just as their is nothing stopping Narcissus from staring at his own beauty or Achilles from climbing in his boat and heading home. In season four, Connor says,
The good thing about having a family that doesn’t love you is that you learn to live without it. You’re all chasing after Dad, saying, ‘Love me, please love me. I need love. I need attention.’ You’re needy love sponges. And I’m a plant that grows on rocks and lives off insects that die inside of me. If Willa doesn’t come back, that’s fine. Because I don’t need love. It’s like a superpower.
More than most shows I’ve seen, Succession believes in fate. Each character enters the action and is placed on a track that they follow without deviation. They are so finely crafted that there is no question in the audience’s mind of what they will do under a given set of circumstances; they cannot surprise us. This is true for all of the characters, not just the three children. As we get to know them better, it is clear that Willa is going to come back and marry Connor and that Kerry is going to start sleeping with Logan. I never feel surprise at anything that happens in this show, just a deep sadness that these characters will never be able to break out of their doomed loops. I think this may be the saddest show I’ve ever seen. It’s incredible humor is as necessary to the success of the show as its Shakespearean influences and it’s real-world antecedents. Without the antics of its two sad clowns, Tom and Greg, to provide some measure of relief, I think it would be unwatchable.
As the show comes to an end, their humor becomes less easy to laugh at. In a scene from episode one of season four that’s practically lifted from Lear, Logan is waiting to hear if he or his children will win a bidding war for another media company. He’s in a roaring mood, exhorting his lieutenants and hangers on to tell him a joke. “C’mon, roast me!” he commands. Only cousin Greg will play the Fool, saying “Where are your kids? Where’s all your kids, Uncle Logan, on your big birthday?” There’s no trace of humor in anyone’s eyes, no chuckle in the room. It recalled to mind Lear’s warning to the Fool in Act 1, scene 4. He says “Take heed sirrah — the whip.” The Fool responds, “Truth’s a dog must to kennel; he must be whipped out.”
I mentioned in my review of the King Lear adaptation Ran that I particularly appreciated the way that film emphasized the generational cycle of violence that had created the circumstances of the plot. That has been a running undercurrent throughout Succession as well, and has contributed to the feeling that our characters’ actions and ends are fated. The Greeks, and through them Shakespeare, were well-versed in the concept of generational trauma long before we had the therapy-speak to call it that; all of Aeschylus (and Lear) could be summed up with the pithy phrase, “hurt people hurt people.” Throughout Succession we’ve been left breadcrumbs about the physical abuse Logan was subject to when he was a child. In season 1 episode 7, there’s a hanging shot of Logan’s back as he gets into the pool for a swim; it’s crisscrossed with deep scars. Before that, we see Logan hit Kendall’s young autistic son in season one and learn that he used to hit Roman regularly. We finally see Logan strike Roman in season two, in front of all the other main characters, as if it were his right.
It is an accepted part of the viewing experience that we hold in our minds a specific contradiction while watching this show. First, we understand this as a thinly veiled satire of the Murdoch family. Second, we have allowed ourselves the luxury of seeing these characters as too horrible to be real. In order to laugh at them, and to come away from each episode without having cried our eyes out, we have to believe both of these things to be true at the same time. In Vulture’s review of season 4, episode 2, Scott Tobias writes,
The standard disclaimer to talking about how you feel about the characters in Succession is that they’re all pieces of shit. If they existed in the real world, we would find them as detestable as Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, or other billionaire world-beaters and their failsons. But seeing them in only that one dimension would make for lousy television. The greatness of that Connor monologue, and the impromptu family meeting that precedes it, is that the writers have a strong feeling for the agonies that eat away at all these characters. (Perhaps the only TV fantasy more alluring than imagining a billionaire lifestyle is watching them suffer.)
I think that’s a bit too safe a read on what Succession is trying to do to us. Tobias’ argument is that the writers have given these characters depth because not to do so would be bad television, which is right. But the implication here is that if the characters were real, we would see them as detestable (as pieces of shit) because it is only through writerly flourish that we can see them as characters with “agonies.” I think it is far more likely that were we to come to know Rupert or Lachlan Murdoch as intimately as we’ve come to know the Roys, we’d feel the same sympathies. Not to pick on Tobias’ piece, but I also think he mistakes the draw of this show in stating that the viewers are looking to indulge the fantasy of watching billionaires suffer. Perhaps that’s part of the initial draw, but if so, the magic of the writers room is to sneak us toward empathy. Sympathy for the devil is a myth. There are no devils here, just broken people.
Succession and Lear share in common that they bring us into the story at the end. We meet Logan and his children when the damage that’s been done to both generations is too deep to repair. Considering Logan used his autistic grandson as a food taster in season three, that generation doesn’t have a whole lot of hope at escaping the cycle. What we don’t get in Lear, but that we should be encouraged to imagine, is what has come before. I said our characters were driven by their addictions, to their need to be loved by Logan, to be recognized as an equal by him. That is what keeps them anchored to the story; that’s what makes it impossible for them to make the obvious choice and just walk away. But the thing that drives them would never make them happy even if they could achieve it. Too much has been broken for any reckoning, any victory to overcome what’s come before. In season 4, episode 2, Logan apologizes to his three children, the first time he’s ever shown the inclination to acknowledge he’s done them some wrongs. The only one who can even listen to him is Roman; Shiv and Kendall laugh in his face, starting to list the things that he should be apologizing for; the list is endless and heinous and Logan cannot accept its existence because how could he with himself if he did? Here we are at the end of the series and the possibility of some resolve, some catharsis, some cycle-breaking moment feels as impossible as it has ever been. What’s done is done.
And then, Succession fulfills its title and Logan dies, meaning that they will never get closure, never have lived a life that wasn’t about him. I don’t know how the season will wrap, but as funny as it may be, as much schadenfreude as we may feel regarding these characters, my statement stands: this may be the saddest show I’ve ever seen.