Succession recap: Kendall and Roman Roy feel the urge to act like big boys
Kieran Culkin as Roman Roy in episode six of Succession.
This week, Succession is a tale of two princes. Though Kendall and Roman are theoretically equals at the head of Waystar Royco, they are dealing with the responsibilities of following in their father’s footsteps in very different ways. With the takeover of Waystar by GoJo proceeding fitfully, the Roys fly to Los Angeles to rein in their free-spending Hollywood studio and launch a loopy new lifestyle division, Living+.
Kendall has been charged with the theoretically trickier task of unveiling Living+ to the world. It’s a wackadoodle attempt at bringing the dotcom philosophy to assisted living. The pitch is that clients will live in luxuriant gated communities, receiving visits from Waystar-affiliated movie stars and top-of-the-line life-extending treatments. Nobody lives forever, jokes Kendall. But Living+ might be the next best thing.
We expect Kendall to make a mess of the pitch – and he is indeed waylaid by unforeseen events (more below). However, he also surprises us by stepping comfortably into the late Logan’s shoes. At any rate, it goes better than his last big speech – at which he delivered the notorious 'Kendall rap' (“Bitches be catty, but the king's my daddy”).
The real growing pains are those of Roman, who tries to double down on his father’s reputation for toughness only to reveal himself as a frightened child in over his head. He cracks when meeting the head of Waystar’s movie division. She expresses concern over the ATN news division and its support for a quasi-fascistic presidential candidate, Jeryd Mencken.
He sacks her on the spot – and when Waystar executive Gerri finds out and reacts with horror he fires her too (though it is unclear she has actually left the company or that he even really means to show her the door). In just a few hours he has sabotaged, Waystar’s entire movie operation. All so he could be more like his dad.
Roman breaks the news to Kendall, who thinks the sackings will go down well. The Roy brothers are cleaning house and rebooting the company.
But hang on, aren’t they supposed to be simply watching the shop as the Waystar deal goes through? Maybe not: in a confab with the execs they explain that GoJo boss Lukas Matsson behaved strangely on their visit to Europe. Maybe he’s not the person to entrust the future of Waystar?
The suits bat aside these fears. Gerri, before her firing, says that Matsson’s flakiness is already “priced in”. “He’s a genius,” she explains. “Nobody minds a genius acting weird.”
Matsson thinks the Roys are plenty flaky too. He calls Shiv to share his concerns about her brothers – and then dangles the carrot of potentially keeping her onboard to handle aspects of the business he considers too boring to deal with. He has one more thing to say: he doesn't like Living+ and wants Shiv to kill it.
She, however, is too busy having illicit canoodles with her estranged husband Tom. They reconnect after he discovers that she has scheduled time to be alone in a suite crying her eyes out. In the Roys' world, even grieving for your father has to be time-tabled.
Kendall gives the Living+ address and there is applause all around. Until Matsson tries to sabotage it by sending a tweet that suggests the service will be, in the words of one of the suits, a “concentration camp for grannies”. Kendall, to his credit, steamrolls the controversy by talking up the new division (albeit with wildly inflated growth projections, delivered by a deep-faked video of Logan that will surely come back to haunt Waystar).
He is praised by the board. Roman meanwhile slinks away. We see him crying in a car, listening to a playback of Logan’s voice. He is a little lost boy, haunted by the dad who gave him everything except the one thing he needed – which was, of course and inevitably, a father’s love.
