NB! This commentary reveals the plot of the last three episodes of “Succession”. Don’t read on if you don’t want to know what happens. Yes. “Succession”, which had its last chapter yesterday, was a phenomenon, a critic’s favorite and a sharp contemporary diagnosis. But quite honestly. Part of the reason the HBO series became so big was that it tickled the voyeur in all of us. Here we were allowed to sit, like a few million flies on the wall, and look into rooms that are usually closed off to us. This is the world in which the Roy family, media mogul Logan Roy and his grown children, travel. They have a self-evident, automatic relationship with what would be dizzying luxury for just about anyone else. “Succession” naturally spawned something close to a thousand articles about the clothes of the Roy children. This is also how the common man learned the expression “quiet luxury”; the term for the expensive, logoless garments in neutral colors that so often shroud the bodies of the truly rich. Nervous notes were taken. NEUTRAL AND EXPENSIVE: Sarah Snook’s costumes were characterized by “quiet luxury”. Photo: David M. Russel / HBO ©2020 “Succession”, for its part, is full of nervousness, only in other areas. The series was a study in the deadly combination of aggressive capitalism and personal fragility. Logan’s children, who will all inherit his media empire, are “nepo babies” in the literal sense. They were brought up in a home where competition was a virtue, and where they fought hard for something they could hardly ever get: their parents’ love. They have grown up with great privileges, but also with the inner voice that whispers that perhaps they wouldn’t do very well without the name and the network. They feel no obligation to anyone but themselves. When news interviewed actor Brian Cox, who played Logan Roy in the series, earlier this spring, he said that he saw “Succession” as a moral fable. As a story of how society had gotten there, that so much media power was placed in the hands of people who were in no way concerned with news, only with enriching themselves. THE PATRIARCH: Brian Cox plays Logan Roy, who has built his own media empire. Many thought he was based on media mogul Rupert Murdoch. Photo: AP In this sense, it was a cunning ploy by series creator Jesse Armstrong. By getting so close to the nuclear family, and all the emotional boulders they were lugging around, he could make the audience forget the higher heavens above them. And here it is necessary to say that the rest of the text describes what happens in the last episodes of “Succession”, so you can stop reading now if you don’t want to spoil any surprises for yourself. Regardless. When we get close to people’s lives, it’s hard not to feel at least a little sympathy for them. Sure, they’re cynical people, but they’re witty, entertaining. And they have their own struggles. AWARD-WINNING: Series creator Jesse Armstrong lifts the two Emmy awards he won for “Succession” during last year’s ceremony, for best drama series and best drama script. Photo: AP That sympathy took a significant turn towards the end of the fourth season. That’s when the Roy brothers, Kendall and Roman (Jeremy Strong and Kieran Culkin), became so desperate to keep control of their father’s empire that they made a deal with the radical right candidate in the US presidential election. He was supposed to intervene and prevent the company from being sold, in exchange for them declaring him the election winner – before there was any basis for that. Suddenly, the audience saw that these damaged children themselves like to cause irreparable harm. They are given the choice between doing what serves the country and what puts a small plaster on their own soul wound. And the choice is not particularly difficult. TOGETHER OR TOGETHER: Kendall, Shiv and Roman Roy competed to inherit their father’s empire, but also tried to find togetherness between battles. It went so well. Jeremy Strong, Sarah Snook and Kieran Culkin played the siblings. Photo: HBO MAX The last episode was a worthy ending, one that sent the series’ thematic ball, the family, through the air with a nice little twist before it was allowed to rest. In the end, it was Kendall and Roman’s sister, Shiv (Sarah Snook), who stood up for them. She could have let them win the battle for the company on the board, but instead chose to vote for sale. That would lead Swedish Lukas Mattson (Alexander Skarsgård) to the top of the company. But below him, in a subservient but also powerful role: Shiv’s almost-ex-husband, Tom (Matthew Macfadyen). Shiv’s decision can be read in different ways. It may have been a petty choice. Maybe Shiv couldn’t see his big brother Kendall ending up in the position she herself worked so hard to get. It might have been more idealistic: Shiv was the one who protested when the brothers were willing to let the US change for the worse to get their way. And there was little reason to believe that they would be inspired to engage in hard training of the moral core muscles in the future. NORWAY IN A GUEST ROLE: A key episode in the last season was filmed in Rauma. Photo: HBO MAX Then there is a third reason, which is deeper and more complicated. Shiv does not become queen, but she is given the power to crown a kind of king. She chooses her brother in favor of the father of the child she carries in her womb. She chooses the new family, the one she made herself, over the old and dysfunctional one. At the same time, she gives her child the same yoke that she has carried herself. It will grow up with two parents who do not exactly have a relationship characterized by mutual respect and admiration, and who are bound by the considerations of the great empire. That child would presumably have been better off if the parents had had normal jobs, and if he could go through everyday life without his heart in his throat, and without casting suspicious glances at those closest to him. But it was a good landing. Not harmonious, but that would also be completely wrong. It was both understandable and elaborative. The end also made it, it must be said, easy to forget those seasons when “Succession” was not always at its sharpest. OUT OF UNIFORM: Sarah Snook, Alan Ruck, Brian Cox, Jeremy Strong and Kieran Culkin play the members of the Roy family in “Succession.” The actors in the series have received rave reviews and won a flurry of awards. Photo: AP Then there were many heated confrontations and heated telephone conversations without the Roy family, and the dynamic between them, actually moving a centimeter forward. It was probably meant to be that way. But it was exhausting at times. Anyway, “Succession” is now over. From now on, the series has become like a photo album, which it is possible to take out and flip through occasionally to remember the beginning of a story we now know the end of. But the big story, the one that the Roy siblings treat as their own plaything, it rolls on. And soon there are presidential elections again.
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The last episode of “Succession” can be read as an escape from the dysfunctional Roy family. – Speech
