The show did not glamorize evil — it was a deep and insightful look into the psychological damage done by a parent who does not know how to love his children.
The show did not glamorize evil — it was a deep and insightful look into the psychological damage done by a parent who does not know how to love his children.
I think it would be easy to criticize the Succession series finale — the masterpiece that it was — for providing an ending that one did not want. I doubt many in the audience wanted Matsson to prevail in his takeover of Waystar Royco. I doubt many wanted Tom to (or predicted that he would) become the U.S. CEO. And I am sure some had a heart, or personal preference, for one of the Roy children — with some being on Team Kendall, some favoring Shiv, and still others on Team Roman.
But as I reflected on the ending and the way in which these brilliant writers and producers brought the greatest television series since Mad Men to a close, I was left with one inescapable conclusion: There was no ending that could possibly have been “satisfying” — because every single person on the show was a totally unacceptable option as a successor to Logan Roy. To love Succession and to love the characters of this show is to acknowledge — they are not serious people.
This show is not an indictment of how rich people are and behave for the very simple reason that barely any rich people actually act like that, and the only people who believe that this is how most rich people are believe so because their only impressions of rich people come from, well, watching shows like Succession.
The show did not glamorize evil — it was a deep and insightful look into the psychological damage done by a parent who does not know how to love his children. A simple lesson to remember: A rich parent who treats his children terribly and a middle-class parent who treats his children terribly have a very important thing in common — wounded children. Succession dug deeper into the wounds of bad parenting than any show I have ever watched, but class was a supplemental part of that story; it was not the story itself.
And that is why I believe Succession was a morality tale. It used tragic characters and, in some cases, painful events to make a morally affirmative statement. It blended in brilliant humor (Tom and cousin Greg’s interactions will go down in history), but it did not really cause us to feel ambiguity about the moral state of the characters. With Tony Soprano (The Sopranos) or Don Draper (Mad Men) or Walter White (Breaking Bad), we were supposed to feel a tension about the wounded characters who perpetrated such evil. With Succession, there was definitely a human connection to the Roy children, but never a temptation to say, “You know what — they can run the company some day; in fact, they should run the company some day!” Kendall, played masterfully by Jeremy Strong, represented a character complex in the sense that human nature is complex, but simple in the sense that his basic compulsions and addictions were cliché and repugnant. If you felt sorry for any of the adult children of Logan Roy, it was never to the point of believing that they should be running the business.
For someone like me, dedicated to the cause of a free and virtuous society, I believe Succession had it all. It may seem ironic to describe in such a way a show that portrayed extravagant greed and callous disregard for others. But it didn’t romanticize those things — it portrayed the fallenness of human nature as a bug, not a feature, and didn’t contrast the flaws of these characters with a utopian fantasy or an environmentalist lollipop. At the end of the day, it properly conflated two things that modern critics of free enterprise tell us are at odds with one another. Kendall Roy was not a genius titan who was too morally flawed to take the reins of the company. And he was not an upstanding beacon of virtue who let that impede his killer instinct to succeed. Rather, as Roman Roy so memorably stated in the closing episode, they were all “bullsh**”: intellectually unprepared for the job in every way and morally unsuited for it. Shiv said Kendall couldn’t have her vote because he had killed someone. But she also said that she just didn’t believe he could do the job. Both are pretty good criteria for disqualification if you ask me.
For those who love the excitement and energy of New York City, of Fortune 100 America, and of Wall Street, the show was beyond compelling. It was well-made, well-researched, and scenically unforgettable, and it credibly depicted situations in business and finance. But above all else, Succession resisted the temptation to do a Great Gatsby caricature of mega-wealthy people or suggest that with riches come unavoidable moral failure. Many characters on this show were rich and not evil personified. But the Roy family was broken, and Succession never pretended otherwise. In the end, those kids couldn’t succeed their father in running the business — because they were just way too incompetent.
That’s a story made for real life.