I know that we were meant to watch the epic, 90-minute, concluding episode of Succession obsessing over which member of the Roy clan would inherit the family business. But Succession has a life and subtext distinct from the story on screen now. When a TV show stops being just a TV show and starts being a cultural moment, you relate it to the wider world, sending back your conclusions as it how it jigsaws into real life.
So, yes, there was the matter of wrapping up who would be crowned King of Waystar Royco, the central storyline which reached a satisfyingly flawed conclusion (6-6 votes split at a crucial moment? Convenient!) at the 85-minute mark. Leaving just enough time to watch the three Roy offspring all lost, alone and soundtracked by a tumultuous, Wagnerian new rendition of the theme tune.
Look, as soon as you saw Kendall, Shiv and Roman briefly happy in their mother’s home, making daft with the food blender and licking their inconsequential stepfather’s beloved cheese, you knew it was curtains for the lot of them. In Succession, happiness is only ever an arbiter of weakness and failure to come.
Succession is an old-fashioned story of play-dirty ambition. It set out it’s stall early. The first scene of episode one was monstrous, gorgeous patriarch Logan Roy pissing on his own deep pile carpet while wandering about his luxurious condominium in the middle of the night, half awake. Ever since, the drama has followed each one of his children attempting to mark their own territory on the family fortune. Because their father didn’t know how to love them, these actions are always a strained facsimile of his complete moral vacuity.
For the last six episodes, they’ve been cast adrift in the wake of his death. We knew that none of them were up to the job. Only Roman could see it, as he navigated his own nervous breakdown, never quite tipping over the edge. This has been Roman’s season. So, of course he was gifted the crescendo speech of the finale. 'We are bullshit. You are bullshit. I am bullshit. We’re nothing.'
Like all stories of blind, empty ambition, everybody ultimately left with nothing. Nominally, the winner at Waystar Royco were the shareholders of GoJo, the tech-bro company which finally saw the Roy family excluded from their legacy media company. The excruciatingly slippery Tom Wambsgans, Shiv’s husband, triple, then quadruple-crossed his way to CEO. Shiv placed a reluctant, tentative, non-committal palm in the hand of her estranged husband’s hand, suggesting she cannot let go of her father’s grip, staying married into the company she’d just given up on. Her baby bump, a chilling reminder that the cycle of Roy ambition has new tentacles to grow.
Roman took a sip of a martini, like a rubbish boyfriend in Sex and The City. This is as good as it’ll get for him, Junior James Bond, practising how not to care while nursing the bruises of what one friend described to me as his wander through 'the least convincing riot scene since Kendall Jenner advertised Diet Coke'. Kendall sat and looked out at Staten Island at the Hudson river’s edge in Battery Park - with a bodyguard behind him to stop anything untoward happening, a towering physical symbol of why he was incapable of Daddy’s job in the first place.
So far, so conclusive. Yet Succession has never really been a family drama. It’s never really been about human beings, part of the reason I’ve never quite understood the argument of people who don’t like Succession because of its venal characters. There are, of course, problems with Succession. Watching an hour and a half of must-see TV in 2023 without a single Black face feels noticeably odd. While it may well represent an accurate reflection of corporate US media boardrooms, even now, that not a single member of those boardrooms have worried about that absence in one single episode, has always felt deeply remiss.
Shiv, Roman and Kendall have only been cyphers, living documents of the crumbling old media landscape around them. Succession’s great triumph has been to capture in detail the final hours of the old media Titanic as it plumets towards the iceberg. So every time we hear a story about a crisis at the heart of mass media – whether it be Fox paying out £7billion for falsifying news about the last American election, Elon Musk’s blue ticks or the chicanery of Boris Johnson’s appointments at the top of BBC – we now see it in terms of Succession.
Who hasn’t been following the case of This Morning and Phillip Schofield recently, matching up the real life players with characters from Succession? (We'll leave you to draw your own conclusions as to who's who).
Succession’s absolute, unmitigated success has been to let us peek behind the curtains of a dying industry’s grubby Oz, to spot the Wizard winding up an old machine and pretending it’s fit for purpose. That is why Succession has not just been a priceless overview of how news is made. It has become news in and of itself. Bravo, all.