I can't believe it's come to this. Here I am, in 2023, writing a response to--a "take" on--the ending of a television series, like it's 2011. Yes, I am going to talk about Succession. Spoilers below the cut.
That the majority of the Succession viewerbase seemed wholly and sincerely caught up in "Which Roy kid takes over?" debates always seemed odd to me. Odd, but not unexpected. This being the internet and public discourse being what it is, there was the typical identification with the various characters, explanations of why this one's frailties were quite sympathetic, or that one's shortcomings were only small flaws in the broader context of their potential, so on and so forth.
Of course, this resulted in attendant debates about the show and its overall thrust, with claims made that it rendered the oligarchic class too sympathetic and full of relatable, human drama despite the production's satirical aims, or that their lavish and obscene lifestyles are presented as being simply too aspirational for us regular schlubs to truly abjure. Schematically, these are similar to debates had in academia about early modern plays of state. Does something like Shakespeare's Henry V ultimately disclose the brittle nonsense and stupid jingoism of monarchy, did it Get the Wheels Turning in the heads of its original audience (whose children and grandchildren would go on to behead an actual king some 60 years later)? Or did it in fact blunt the populace's discontent with being ruled by a king by showing he could feel conflicted about his solemn duties as a leader, and silly and relatable and bad at learning French, just like the the rest of us?
This question is ultimately insoluble; culture and history do not work in easy bifurcations like that. What plays of this type do patently and unambiguously show, over and over again, is that monarchy is a system of social organization that tends to produce certain types of people who work to exploit it to better their situations, idealistically or cynically, and this with some regularity results in various types of social and political instability that are then papered over with the bandages of monarchy itself. "All those famines and wars happened because the last guy was a bad king," says the dude standing at the end of the play, "and now that I, a good king, am in charge, it will never happen again." Until, of course, it does, if not during his lifetime then probably his inheritors'.
Whether or not individual people were for or against monarchy is in a sense irrelevant, because they all end up telling similar stories. Taken agnostically, what is clear is that everyone agreed monarchy could result in problems and the only solution seemingly ever offered to those problems was more but slightly modified monarchy. Whether or not this was done in full sincerity or with a tired wink on the part of the playwrights is a realm of debate, but for purposes of making the comparison with Succession clear I'd like to point to the form of the problem rather than its content, the preoccupation with an institution rather than the individuals who get mushed up in its capillaries.
Succession is such a canny show partly because it knows how to exploit the institution-character muddle and the strange chicken-and-egg problems that arise from it. The very title of the program and the "Roy" surname's etymological links to kingship signal at least some low-level cognizance of this, beg for the monarchical read I'm tapdancing out for you right now. Every member of the Roy family is a human being; they've got hopes and dreams and feelings about others, a sense of something wrong in the world and their lives and a desire to work on it. But they have been born into institutions that alienate them so much from the vast majority of human life that their reactions to their own feelings, their absolute lack of perspective on everything, means these wistful hopes and petty familial backstabs play out in ways that degrade countless people and undermine what few social goods do exist for the benefit of those who are not them.
The Roys and their associated hangers-on are monstrously warped by their wealth and power in ways they never really understand; the show's most hysterically subdued joke, in my opinion, is when stormy-minded, tortured Kendall recovers from the trauma of his season one car accident and brush with involuntary manslaughter by switching all personal travel to a motor-bike, for which he still employs a chauffeur, riding solemnly through the streets of New York with his arms wrapped around the waist of Some Guy He Pays to Do This. It's a mark of the show's quality that it never makes an actual punchline out of it, but merely allows you to see it and think to yourself "Fucking hell, my dude."
Which is all to say, my approach to the show was more one that apprehended the characters not as factions within a narrative for the viewership to take sides on, like a fantasized sports team, but rather words in a sentence, a sentence articulating an argument about (and largely against) the world and lifestyle the show represented. This is not, in other words, a show in which Shiv finds the right way to girlboss herself into power and turn Fox News kind of feminist, but a show about how a world in which something like Fox News exists produces hopeful girlbosses like Shiv precisely because they can be exploited to maintain the bigger social machine that keeps things like Fox News going.
One of the big mistakes a lot of kings in plays make is assuming that their bloodline means something. Now, obviously, it sort of does--monarchy is bound up in the whole heredity business--but looking at the actual history of monarchical institutions (and narratives about them) shows you how slippery this logic could be. Blood did not work like gravity, drawing the next heir inexorably to the throne one after the other in regular procession, for the mess of human life offers oversights, accidents, heirless marriages, sudden deaths, illegitimate claimants, siblings and distant cousins who were favored by the aristocracy for their more popular stances on religion, whatever. Your royal blood may earn you a lot of privileges, sure, but in fact, it may end up being the most useful to other people when it's, uhhh, outside of your body.
This is what the Roy children all learn, in their own way, ending the series shuttered out of the media firm which they've spent the past four seasons dueling each other over. They think they matter as individuals, with hopes and dreams and so on, but they were only useful bodies for the institution that their father built (and which in some sense devoured him) to propagate itself, and they are dispensed with because the terrain of the world has shifted such that they are no longer useful to it. Big Tech is here and old media needs to fall into line--and it does.
In a broad view, it's perfectly appropriate that Tom, Shiv's opportunistic husband from a tasteless upper-middle class Midwestern family, is the one who wins out. Many plays about monarchical instability pivot on characters who are identified as ambitious social climbers from the lower rungs of high society, people less beholden to the mystique of decorum and privilege that renders their social betters flat-footed in the face of disruption. Tom has no grand designs for the future of Waystar Royco, no vision about what startling new markets his leadership will open up; he merely wants to toady up to the actual boss, sustain the enterprise, pick lice from its shaggy hide. The beast rewards him for it.
Succession is satire, a genre dedicated to the anatomy of personal vices and collective social failures. That the grotesques win is partly the point. It is not and never was a narrative about assessing and rewarding the just; it is a story about a stupid and vicious world that births irrevocably broken individuals and uses their human capacities for hope to fertilize its continued decadence. The prototype for the three central Roy children is their also-ran older brother, Conner, a half-sibling who has more or less severed from the company but still maintains grand delusions about his place in the world, summarized by his bonkers vanity presidential campaign.
In the end, with all their fantasies broken, the Roys settle into the vacuity of their wealthy, insulated non-lives while Waystar Royco soldiers on, pumping its venom into the world, headed by a man who (for the show's infrequently glimpsed general public) is probably best known for trying to throw a presidential election to a fascist Republican, a narrative thread the show allows to linger unresolved in the vague hints of State court stultification (against the fascist?) and glancing mentions of politically motivated street violence.
And in the end, that's pretty good for what it is, nice and even-keel. Of the moment but not working too hot, you know?
But I think the show could have gone harder. The satire could have been keener--not just keener, but meaner.
Darker.
And I think, maybe, more meaningful, had it done so. All the pieces were there.
So roundabout, we come back to the title of this post--that I think Succession pulled its punches. Now, this is not an early modern play, so there is no last-ditch effort for a talking head to say "Hey, capitalism might be good if we do it the right way" and the show is pretty clearly uninterested in that happening.
It's fine satire, but as I said, what I found myself longing for was something grander, more vicious. We are left, instead, with a world of big business and cut-throat maneuvering that has outpaced our central characters and will, one presumes, continue to outpace the next round of marks who think they actually matter, but it has more or less existed as this awful Thing for a considerable amount of time. Oh, the cycle, it continues--the brittle social order marches on, bruised perhaps, but with no serious hint of an executioner's blade on the horizon, and that's just the way it is.
Because, yes, while it was a story about institutions and their warping effects on individuals and social fabric, the finale played out basically like a mega-size version of a regular episode, with similar stakes as more or less the past two seasons. The final narrative is about these people, the Roys and their parasites and their predators, and ultimately shies away from considering too closely the hellish world that they create for anyone that doesn't fall into those three categories, and what that might lead to.
And that's not to say the creators and team behind the show are unaware of this, or uninterested in it. It's just not really the story they decided to focus on for whatever reason (which is assuredly fine--you can't make one thing that pleases all people). My complaint here is not that Succession was ruined by its ending or even that it was a bad ending; it's more that it was a good show that could have been a bit better, and this happened, I think, because in the end it actually was a little more in love with its characters than I hoped.
So let us write some fanfic, you and I, with me providing the words and you providing the imagination: the fascist presidential candidate, Mencken (named, almost certainly, in reference to famed American satirist and renowned elitist bigot H.L. Mencken) ultimately assumes control of the presidency, plying Kendall and Roman with his business-friendly authoritarianism, while Swedish tech idiot-king Matsson, poised to acquire Waystar, makes mirrored overtures to Shiv, as he did in the actual show. Also as in the ending we got, Matsson fucks over Shiv, but (in our fanfic) does it in collusion with Mencken, who's dedicated to naming a new American CEO for policy and image purposes (actual plot point). Despite Mattson's distaste for Mencken, a willingness to play ball with him would not be out of character (nor stray too far from his real-world type, the Muskerberg class). Both of them want someone who, as Shiv actually puts it, sucks the biggest dick in the room, so let's go ahead and say Tom still comes out on top--or Greg, why not? Maybe they take turns.
Anyway, that's irrelevant, or could be irrelevant, because the track I wish Succession's satire had taken would have managed to look squarely at world outside of the Waystar bubble. See, the Roy kids, while estranged from the company earlier in this season, had successfully negotiated a buyout of Pierce Global Media, a rival, "liberal" media network their father had dreamed of acquiring (Shiv, a limousine liberal for much of the show's run, in fact objects to such a merger as bad for democracy, but is happy to make a play for her own buyout when it becomes a cudgel for her and her siblings to beat their dad). When patriarch Logan dies and everyone gets pulled back into the Waystar singularity, it's rather unclear what happened with this PGM plotline, but to my mind it provided an interesting layup to a hypothetical end-state where a fascist president has installed a loyal lackey at the head of Fox News, which so happens to have just merged with MSNBC, ensuring a newly unified front for wide band, full-bore authoritarian propaganda as the country collapses in on itself.
In my head, Succession (and any wordplay you want to read into that title) was never about what happens next for the Roy family and their business interests; it was about what happens next for America, the place where institutions like this and their creatures are allowed to thrive, and the rest of us just have to live with it--if you can call it living for much longer.
Maybe Living+?
