It’s here. The fourth and final season of the HBO dramatic black-comedy series “Succession” aired in the United States Sunday night. It did not disappoint.
We’re fans of the show and have been watching since the series premiered in 2018. Nearly five years later, the eternal question posed at the beginning of the show remains: Who will be the successor to the business empire of the aging media mogul Logan Roy?
It’s a question surely to be answered in this final season, though the answer could be “nobody.” Roy may end up firmly holding on to the corporate reigns of power. In doing so, he would leave a power-hungry and morally bankrupt trio of his adult children bereft of the approval and love of their father, remaining sibling “frenemies” who constantly vacillate between vying for his favor and conspiring together to take him down.
“Succession” is the sharpest of dark satires. Logan Roy and his children are a loosely fictionalized version of mega-rich Fox News tycoon Rupert Murdoch and his entitled, less-powerful and slightly less mega-rich adult kids.
Each episode is filled with the mercurial Roy and his children, Kendall, Roman, and Shiv, assorted members of the extended family and Roy’s craven corporate leadership team hurling brilliantly cutting insults at each other and at their business rivals, treating people like disposable diapers and lying to each other like its going out of fashion.
Almost every character in “Succession” is unpleasant and unlikeable. They present as a menagerie of assholes, to varying degrees despicable, manipulative, idiotic, greedy, insecure and wildly out of touch with reality.
It makes for absolutely delicious dialogue and entertaining narrative.
At times cringy and deplorable, one can’t look away at the desperate train wreck of the Roy family dynamic. Context here is everything. The Roys live in a ceaseless at-risk flow-state of riches, power and status, a one-percenters’ world of slights, grudges, spite, avarice, jealousy and fear. In short, the human psychological condition amplified by extreme wealth and privilege.
GLOBAL GRAPHICA 