There’s a horrifying kind of wide eyed mania about the Roys in the fourth and final season of HBO’s Succession. It’s been three months since the explosive season three finale saw a betrayal of biblical proportions: the Roy children, Kendall (Jeremy Strong), Roman (Kieran Culkin) and Shiv (Sarah Snook) attempted a dramatic coup of their father Logan’s (Brian Cox) company, Waystar Royco, only to be ruthlessly double-crossed by Shiv’s husband, Tom (Matthew Macfadyen), leaving Logan victoriously preparing to sell the company to GoJo.
Now, the Roy children, or “new gen Roy,” as Kendall calls them, are licking their wounds, regrouping, and raring up to go again — but they’re not quite sure where to. With the sale of Waystar Royco just days away, they are looking for a new source of relevance in the form of a new venture. Their latest flimsy idea is The Hundred — “an indispensable bespoke information hub,” as Roman unenthusiastically dubs it during an investors pitch rehearsal. The Roy children have always been chronically unoriginal, and without jobs in their father’s empire, they tend to flail around with similar lacklustre ideas.
Meanwhile, Logan is celebrating his birthday. It’s an eerie echo of the pilot episode’s birthday party that saw the entire Roy clan come together in Logan’s apartment for an awkward, tension-riddled celebration. This second birthday party serves as a ghostly reminder of how broken the Roy household has already become. It’s also a reminder that allegiances in the world of Waystar Royco are as fragile as ever. After all, when Tom asks Logan, “We’ll always be good, right?” his reply is the noncommittal, “If we’re good, we’re good.”
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The party also provides a setting for some of the episode’s most iconic lines. The writers continue to deliver their unique brand of aggressively precise, sparkling humour. We get zingers like, “Squeezed down from one? Cause that’s the lowest number… possible,” from Greg or, “She’s wolfing all the canapes like a famished warthog,” from Tom.
In typical Succession style, the festivities don’t last long for Logan and co, who soon stomp upstairs to finish a deal — they are, it turns out, in the final stages of buying Pierce, a rival media conglomerate. The Hundred doesn’t really excite the young Roys. But what does get them going is the seductive idea of revenge. When they hear that their father is bidding for Pierce, they can’t resist the thought of snatching it out from under him. And so begins an electric bidding war.
What follows is the brand of corporate battle that only Succession can pull off. Succession, after all, becomes its most exhilarating when the company seems to be on the verge of either major change or total collapse. And this battle that opens season four is one of the all-time greats — it has the intensity of the epic boardroom vote of season one and the thrill of season two’s anxious yacht meeting.
The inclusion of a Succession-style war so early on is a sign that this season, we’ll be hurdling forwards at a frenetic, manic pace. But even though we’ve been here before, there is a dangerous new mania fizzing away under the veneer of control. The family and their empire are heading towards emotional and corporate combustion. The political landscape also looms large, promising to play a big part in the show’s denouement. There are several notable references to the coming election and Roy’s role in swaying public opinion. “It’s fucking 1933 and I want to have a say,” Shiv says at one point.
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Beyond its corporate battlefields, we are sometimes offered glimpses at the human wreckage left behind. The final scene of the opening episode, for instance, is a stark reminder of the broken, shell-like people that operate within this brutal, soulless world. There is, after all, a reason why words like “Shakespearean,” “allegorical” and “theatrical” are often used to describe Succession. And after this explosive opener, there’s an undeniable sense of being on an accelerating ride towards a grand tragic ending — in the most Shakespearean sense of the word.
