HBO Max series Succession enters its final season, setting up a messy endgame

By Zach Hagadone Reader Staff

There are few villains on either the big or small screen more suited to our times than Logan Roy, the tyrannical head of the fictional Fox News-ish media empire at the center of the hit series Succession, which just entered its first fourth and final season March 26 on HBO Max.

Roy, played to brutal perfection by Brian Cox, is frequently likened to News Corporation head honcho Rupert Murdoch, but with more than a little King Lear thrown into the mix. The central tension throughout the series has been (and remains) Roy’s power struggle with his own three children over the multi-billion-dollar family business.

Logan Roy is unashamedly a bad guy. He’s foul-mouthed, conniving and as overbearing as he is manipulative — all traits that he’s passed on, in varying portions, to his eldest son Connor (Alan Ruck); middle kids Kendall (Jeremy

Strong) and Siobhan, a.k.a. “Shiv” (Sarah Snook); and youngest son, the absurdly named Romulus, a.k.a. “Roman” (Kieran Culkin).

All of them think they are much smarter and capable than they actually are, having strived and scrambled sometimes in concert, sometimes against one another, in the so-far unsuccessful attempt to dethrone dear old dad.

The Roy family’s generational tussle should be un-relatable to most people because of its ultra-wealthy trappings, but it isn’t — standing in for the broader real-life cultural conflict between a class of elders who by the luck of the timing of their birth came up in a climate of unprecedented wealth and opportunity (featuring structural barriers to prosperity that were objectively far lower than the ones we have today), but who refuse to relinquish their grip on the levers of economic, social and political power. At least that’s the broadstroke case for white people, as the Roy family most definitely is.

Meantime, wrapped up in the literal notion of “succession,” are ruminations on the moral rot at the core of post-post-industrial capitalism, in which the ultimate commodity is the degree to which an individual is able to control the narrative and therefore bend reality to their will. Logan Roy has been defining the “truth” not only to his own family but the country at large for so long that he has constructed an unassailable vantage point, from which he swats away his kids in one instance, while cajoling them to join him near the summit when it suits him.

As the series enters its Götterdämmerung, the big question is whether Roy’s god-like position is really so unassailable after all.

In the onset of Season 4, the first episode evocatively titled “The Munsters,” the Roy kids are plotting a sortie in their bid to be… richer than they already are? (Character motivation beyond greedy spite and family trauma is sometimes hard to discern in the show.)

The Roys’ plan: Start their own media company, described in high-finance buzzword poetry as “Substack meets Masterclass meets the Economist meets The New Yorker”; a “private members club but for everyone”; and “an indispensable bespoke information hub,” serving up “high-calorie info-snacks” spiced with the “ethos of a nonprofit but the path to crazy margins.” Even Forbes, which also highlighted those particular phrases, wrote that “it all feels too real sometimes,” despite its essential absurdity.

Added to Logan Roy’s Lear complex may be an even older storytelling tradition — that of the tragic Greek trope of hubris. That’s also a particularly apt concept for the show to play with, insofar as a viewer might be inclined to think of the patriarchal Roy as an avatar for the kind of prickly 21st-century American exceptionalism so well exemplified and propagated by the likes of Fox News and its collaborators.

Will Roy be “disrupted” by his own progeny? Will he give one (or two or all) of them a pathway to the figurative throne? Why would we even care?

That’s a valid question, but I suspect that the answer lies somewhere in the vicinity of the compulsion to watch rich people be mean to each other, even though they always win at some level, so long as they remain fabulously rich.

Essentially, Succession manages even after three seasons to remain a finely woven grab-bag of the most poisonous aspects of our current civilization; and, while containing literally no characters worth rooting for or feeling sympathetic toward (and that includes all the various in-laws, extended Roy family members, handlers, toadies, executives and nemeses), staying riveting.

New episodes of Succession stream Sundays on HBO Max.