Wait "Succession" was pulling punches?!
‘Succession’ stops pulling punches in its final season
With an end in sight, the HBO hit breaks out of rinse-and-repeat mode but remains wickedly delightful
Review by Lili Loofbourow
Brian Cox as Logan Roy in Season 4 of HBO's “Succession.” (Macall B. Polay/HBO)
It’s hard to discuss the upcoming season without spoilers, but this glimpse of something like regret in Logan Roy is new. So is the sense that we are finally, after several seasons spent in an admittedly entertaining rut (with Jeremy Strong’s Kendall rebelling against his dad again only to lose again, break down again, bounce back again, rebel again …) entering a period of high-stakes, irreversible change.
When Logan announced last season that he was selling Waystar RoyCo, the family business, to GoJo CEO Lukas Matsson (Alexander Skarsgard), he didn’t just end the contest for the crown that powered the series; he killed the very idea of a Roy dynasty. No kingdom to rule over means no king. That’s a shocking development, only one of many. By rather unstrategically rejecting all his children (well, the three contenders), Logan provoked them to finally unite. Despite some necessary table-setting, therefore, the fourth season is poised to be the show’s best.
What repetitions we do get (and there are several, including a Pierce family subplot) feel pointed and productive. Logan’s party, for instance, rhymes in spirit if not style with Kendall’s 40th birthday fete, which culminated in him weeping over the gifts from his children he couldn’t find in the piles of loot from near-strangers. It also reprises Logan’s fateful birthday party from the pilot, which — even if it ended with Logan hospitalized — had him surrounded by family.
While Logan sulks, Shiv (Sarah Snook), Kendall and Roman (Kieran Culkin) have joined up after being simultaneously clobbered by, well, everyone. They’re “working,” which here means pooh-poohing graphic design ideas other people have come up with for a new media entity they want to launch called “The Hundred.” Kendall describes it as “Substack meets MasterClass meets the Economist meets the New Yorker.”
This is the state of play: As Logan prepares for a life after Waystar, his three younger kids have gathered to build something new, freed at last from their father’s sick need to pit them against one another.
(...)
The fourth season doesn’t (at least in the four episodes critics received) break out of that rarefied mode; we will not be litigating the consequences to the public of Roydom and its excesses. This is not that kind of show.
“Smart people know what they are,” Logan tells one of his children this season. This series is smart, and it knows what it is. If it remains narrowly and unapologetically focused on the callow miseries of its billionaires, it is finally, after spinning its wheels for several seasons, ready to push its premise to the breaking point.
Despite how timidly and how often this show about movers and shakers has retreated from any truly irreversible change to its glitzy status quo, “Succession’s” final season has a vision it at least — and at last — has the guts to execute.
Succession (10 episodes) returns Sunday, March 26, on HBO. New episodes air weekly.
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