Succession: The pleasure of the billionaire Roy family's pain

The grimly compelling and gross familial dysfunction of Succession is deliciously addictive, writes Suzanne Harrington

Brian Cox in Succession

Is there anything more delicious than having what feels like voyeuristic access to a hideous billionaire family? The kind that treats helicopters like minicabs, has no discernible humanity, and spends their lives cut-throating, double-crossing, and duping each other, despite being closely related?

As Succession reached a pivotal moment in its current season — look away now if you’re not up to date — watching it feels more like being a motorway pile-up rubber necker than a TV series viewer.

Hooked on the venal ghastliness of television’s most toxic family, who communicate via quips and chirrups, sound-bites and expletives, and show intimacy only to their phone screens, we have so many questions.

Is Shiv channelling Ivanka, Ghislaine, or both? Who is Logan based on — Murdoch? Maxwell? King Lear? And although Kendall and Roman, like both Ian and Kevin Maxwell and Don and Eric Trump, work for the family business, surely the fictional Roy boys are not boorish enough to compare to the real-life Trump brothers? 

Or are the junior Trumps and Roys comparable only as gruesome sets of poster boys for sociopathic Daddy issues?

We adore watching the horrid rich. While the White Lotus series has been a vivid feast of five-star opulence against sun-drenched backdrops, its beautiful hotel interiors filled with comedically entitled guests in varying shades of awful, and rich-people-on-a-yacht comedy-drama  Triangle of Sadness offer unsubtle but enjoyable parody.

CRACK TV

Succession — with its muted palette of blacks, greys, reddish beiges, its sleek surfaces, and blank opulence — stands alone in its relentless presentation of monsters. There is not a single relatable, redeemable character. It is hilarious. It is horrendous. It is crack TV.

Blackmail, duplicity, the cover-up of the killing of a lowly waiter, sex scandals, faux-feminism, dick pic mix-ups, Oedipal ick, transactional marriages, employees played like chess pieces, all manipulated by a fractured, amoral family corrupted by incalculable wealth and power. None of them are having fun or enjoying their sumptuous lives. This makes Succession so compelling — viewer schadenfreude, a horror show critique of late capitalism in corporate America.

In terms of family dynamics, Succession is Shakespearean. Logan Roy — le roi (the king) — is a filthy swirl of King Lear, Julius Caesar, Titus Andronicus. (Brian Cox is a Shakespearean actor, and it shows.) Like Stalin, his lackies cower in his presence, laughing at the jokes he doesn’t make; prowling around the ATN newsroom (a fictional version of Fox News?), he parodies Rupert Murdoch addressing his minions at the Wall Street Journal in 2007 when Logan stands on a pile of boxes to elevate himself. 

He humiliates his sons, pitting them against each other. He strings his only daughter, Shiv (Sarah Snook), along with promises of power, then gives divorce lawyer advice to his son-in-law, the comically oleaginous Tom (Matthew McFadyen), prompting Shiv to exclaim in fury, “I’ve been Mom-ed.”

Mom (Harriet Walter) is distant, posh, and frosty, remaining absent and semi-estranged throughout; she has little personal interest in her children, nor they in her.

The opening sequence suggests a childhood rich in privilege but low on hugs: grainy Super-8 reels set to bleak Beethoven-ish piano, showing unsmiling children against a backdrop of mansions, ponies, parties, servants. Nobody looks like they’re enjoying it. 

And now the king is dead. Who will succeed him?

The cast of Succession

DEATH ON AN AEROPLANE

Episode 3 of Season 4 will go down in television history as one of the greatest death scenes; not Logan dying in the sky on his enormous private plane, but the reactions of Shiv, Kendall, Roman, and Connor on the ground, as they negotiate Connor’s semi-farcical wedding. 

Never has a media oligarch dying mid-air caused such an outbreak of conflicted emotion; swallowed tears, love and hate jumbled incoherently, demands for cardiologists long after his heart has stopped, mutterings about how ‘the event’ will impact ‘the market’.

Blistering, compelling, appalling. And with an outcome impossible to predict. 

The three siblings — although not Connor (Alan Ruck), the libertine brother from another mother — are trauma bonded, after a lifetime of being parented by a raging megalomaniac. Unlike Connor, the three younger siblings are locked together, unable to detach, mired in dysfunctional attachment. They have no idea how to relate to each other, outsiders or to themselves.

Initially working for a Bernie Saunders-type politician in Season One, Shiv has been the most visibly corrupted, yet her character remains the most opaque. Lured toward power by a promise of being made CEO by her manipulative father until betrayed, she calls Logan “a human fucking gaslight”. She adopts a harsher girlboss carapace, with accompanying hair and wardrobe; we can visibly see her character hardening — she has no friends, just rivals — but what drives her remains elusive. She is frustratingly enigmatic — poised, socially skilled, blank.

(Drawing Shiv and Ivanka parallels is irresistible. From the abandonment of core values in pursuit of power, to disillusionment and distancing from their respective patriarchs, the boundaries between the Trump and Roy first daughters are somewhat blurred. Like Shiv, Ivanka has taken a major step back from her toxic dad. Like Shiv, she’s keen to protect her brand.)

TERRIBLE PEOPLE

We have more of a handle on Kendall (Jeremy Strong), a kind of beta tech-bro in a baseball cap, blank-eyed and prone to spouting ersatz Buddhism (“Be like water”), afraid of his father, desperate for his approval, plucking up courage to rebel, before always collapsing inward. He is deeply naff in his eagerness to be cool, acting out his wounded pain via drug addiction and a failed marriage.

Echoing family tradition, he seems to have emotionally abandoned his own children and remains continuously emasculated by his ruthless, heartless father.

Roman (Kieran Culkin) is the baby of the trio, comically obnoxious, and programmed to insult everything in his orbit. His sexual attachment to 60-something senior exec Gerri (J Smith-Cameron) reveals Mommy issues to rival his Daddy ones. Double ick. 

Roman is fast and funny (“Your face is giving me a headache”; “If I murder a Buddhist will I come back as a Buddhist?”) but without any moral compass; he offers an employee’s child a million dollars to hit a home run. When the child misses, Roman shrugs.

Despite all the corporate posturing alongside his two older siblings, he is undoubtedly the most damaged, and the most desperate for Daddy’s attention; a stunted six-year-old with a billionaire bank account and inherited misanthropy.

Flashes of vulnerability make you wonder if he is redeemable, just as flashes of humanity make you wonder if Shiv is as shut down as she seems. Nobody talks about feelings, save Connor, who says he is used to living without love, describing it as his superpower.

Between all the machine gun dialogue and ceaseless backstabbing, comedic relief is provided by Tom and Cousin Greg (Nicholas Braun), the toadying Timon and Pumbaa of Waystar Royco who snitch, plot, suck up and betray each other and anyone else on their self-serving radar. 

One of the funniest moments is when Greg brings a date with a bad handbag into the Roy inner circle; seeing the choice of handbag cause consternation is genuinely funny. These are terrible, terrible people, and we cannot get enough.