Succession has recently returned to HBO for its fourth (and final) season, and the pressure is mounting. Well, to be fair, the pressure is always mounting in this brilliant series about a fucked-up, foul-mouthed family headed by Logan Roy, a Rupert Murdoch-like media tyrant.
The spoken riffs are dazzling, as are the acting, writing, and production of this tragicomedic gem. It’s Shakespeare with dick pics.
It’s Shakespeare with dick pics.
The story centers around Logan’s three adult kids from his second marriage, whom he pulls in and out of his business orbit, treating them like chew toys, promising them power and titles only to manipulate and betray them again. The constant jockeying, only to get the rug pulled out, leaves them needy, crazy, in various states of various kinds of addiction, and angry. It’s all circular. That’s why they will always be adult children.
Picture Ivanka, Don Jr. and Eric, but as acutely verbal people with a sense of the absurd and serious satiric chops. And as with Tiffany and poor Barron Trump, Roy also has Connor, the poignant son from his first marriage, who was never as connected to his dad or his business as the second set of kids, and lives on a ranch in the West. He asks the great man only for an “extra $100 mill or so” to rev up the hilarious “one percent” of the vote he has somehow garnered in his run for President.
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The Roy-Murdoch-Trump Connection
Leo Tolstoy might have famously written that unhappy families are unhappy in their own ways, but I beg to differ. It would seem that the Trump, Murdoch, and (fictional) Roy kids all suffer from the same problem: desperation for billionaire Daddy’s approval, no matter how mercurial, cruel, or brutal he is.
And given that level of traumatic-attachment, they’ve all built up fierce appetites for the fortune and the casual entitlement that being billionaire children brings them. They’ve worked for it.
Logan, a tough nut born in Scotland (as was Brian Cox, the formidable actor who plays him) has a favorite phrase, for his nepo-babies and everyone else in the world: “Fuck off.”
He completely fetishizes the f-word, and when he says it with his Scottish lilt, it somehow comes off as more textured and contemptuous than the duller American version. In the billions of times he’s tossed it out, you’d think it would lose its power, but no. In this family, they’re all fuckin’ fuckinaires. And when they’re not having fun with the “f” word, they’re accosting each other, and top management, with kinky genitalia-related ribbing.
After this season’s first two episodes, I’m worried about Shiv.
Still, in a show in which there’s not a single character to truly admire, I’ve always rooted for Shiv, a.k.a. Siobhan, the middle child of the trio and Logan’s only daughter. Played by Sarah Snook, she’s an attractive ginger-haired person with a razor-sharp bob and similar wit. She seems to have a sense of herself and her purpose, yet in the end she is closed, always a little unknowable. And after this season’s first two episodes, I’m worried about her.
Earlier, Shiv tried to become her own woman and seemed to be thriving in a career as a political consultant to progressive candidates. She ended up working with a Presidential contender who got into an on-air (Logan-instigated) imbroglio with an anchor at ATN, the family’s powerful right-wing cable news network (think Fox). Perhaps her dad was jealous that she was working for this other powerful man, a raving liberal. At any rate, Logan sweet-talked her into leaving politics for the family business, dangling the possibility that since she is the best and smartest of all the children, his natural heir apparent, that she would succeed him as CEO.
That never happens. Logan made similar moves with older brother Kendall (Ken doll?) and younger bro Roman, or as his dad calls him, Romulus. (Who, as the myth goes, founded the city of Rome after his fratricide of his brother, Remus.) And Shiv, well, she’s walking a knife’s edge. As she struggles in the tight little box of corporate/family Loganville, Shiv becomes increasingly bitter, unfeeling, and aptly named. It turns out she’d sell out her brothers, or her own husband, to win.
Rooting for Shiv
Which brings us to her long-suffering marriage to Tom Wambsgans, British actor Matthew MacFadyen, the character with the best last name in the universe, a name that manages to capture a bit of how weird and creepy he really is. A tall and attractive guy, originally from St. Paul, Minnesota, who has no definable core and says whatever it takes to get what he wants, he appears to be the embodiment of an empty suit. Yet he does have moments of clarity, and intelligence, and can be quite funny, even intentionally.
The two were officially taking a break from marriage when the season opens. (The actress Sarah Snook, who plays Shiv, is Australian. At the very least, the two make beautiful American accents together.) At the beginning of their courtship and marriage, he seemed to truly love Shiv and want to care for her. Then again, right before the wedding, he offered to become “Tom Roy”—to take her family name, which, of course, translates to power, money and a glorious future climbing the reptilian ladder at the family bank, Waystar/Royco.
When they did become engaged, no one could figure out why Shiv was marrying a “commoner.” Papa Logan, who of course has his own pattern of vigorously disrespecting spouses and unceremoniously dumping them, seemed to have some insights into his daughter’s behavior, perhaps because it’s so much like his own.
“You’re marrying a man fathoms beneath you,” Logan yelled to Shiv, pre-wedding, “because you don’t want to risk being betrayed.”
For Shiv’s part, it’s the classic poor little rich girl thing. She grew up nurture-free, with no safe place to go—not to her monstrously cold mother or her bigger monster father, whom she started living with after the divorce, when she was 14. (Or 10. Memories differ.) She wants stability, and maybe even “normalcy.” Even now she’d like to show her parents, with their fleets of loveless marriages, that she’s found it. With Tom, she knew she had someone solid who worshipped her. But most importantly, he was someone she could control. It would also allow her to avoid true intimacy, a cliché, but her true emotions are way too painful to face.
Like her dad, she cannot show vulnerability.
That’s why on their wedding night she told Tom of her recent affair, and announced that she wanted an “open” relationship. Tom is more of a traditional guy. He was never into threesomes. Whereas to survive, Shiv got very used to triangulating, compartmentalizing, and hiding things.
In the first episode of this new season, on the eve of Logan’s Waystar/Royco sale, the kids are, for once, united. Kendall, the oldest brother, calls them “the new GenRoys” after their dad locked them out of his company at the end of Season 3. Since then, they’ve been plotting a new media start-up, “The Hundred,” which Kendall describes as “Substack-meets-Masterclass-meets-The Economist-meets-The-New Yorker.”
You’re marrying a man fathoms beneath you because you don’t want to risk being betrayed.
But, being Roys, just for an added twist, they suddenly decide to “fuck The Hundred”—and instead undermine their father’s successful pursuit of Waystar/Royco’s biggest competitor, Pierce Global Media.
Just as Logan has an accepted deal in place, the kids, using what they intend to get from the profits of their dad’s sale, start a bidding war out from under Logan’s nose. Nan Pierce, the old-school-New England, liberal head of PGM, has her own problems with Logan’s vulgarity and virulent right-wing politics and lets it be known that she could work with Shiv. So the trio, full of fury, fly up to Nan the Matriarch’s Santa Barbara manse to negotiate their own deal.
When Logan gets wind of this, he’s hurt to the core. Raging like King Lear, he tells Tom, “Call your fucking wife. And tell them to get their own fucking idea. It’s pathetic. And tell her she’s never had a single fucking idea in her entire fucking life.”
A Powerful Woman Unraveling
Though she manages to pull it off, Shiv is obviously unraveling, which is why her brother Roman greets her in his groovy L.A. getaway home with one of his all-time best lines: “You look tired and your face is giving me a headache.”
It looks like she needs to go home to shower and change.
You can see it in her slightly disheveled hair and what she’s wearing. Unlike her signature, armored-up turtlenecks and pants suits, she doesn’t seem at home in or at all fortified by her clothes, which include a Skims-like brown shapewear tank top and cotton pants with an elasticized tie at the waist, which hangs down over her belly. She’s at loose ends, and it looks like she needs to go home to shower and change.
What’s rankling her for real, though, is the dissolution of her marriage. Earlier she’d gotten a call from Tom, now Logan’s right-hand man, telling her in his weird roundabout way that he could possibly be dating (“social not sexual”) Naomi Pierce, Nan’s niece, an attractive young woman who also dated Shiv’s brother Kendall. (Talk about an incestuous group.)
After all the sturm and drang on the west coast, she flies home to her Wall Street area loft. She gets in late, and her dog, Mondale, barks as if he doesn’t know her. She goes into her room of a closet and starts taking out clothes, Tom was sleeping, and comes out to talk. He says he didn’t realize she was coming home.
A Glimmer of Hope
“I needed wardrobe access,” she says.
He mentions that he thought she took her favorites.
“I don’t want to be restricted to my favorites, Tom,” she says, ever the contrarian.
Tom asks if she wants to talk.
She spews some venom in his direction about dating “models.”
“Do you want to get into a full accounting of all the pain in our marriage?” he asks.
“I don’t want to rake up a lot of bullshit for not a lot of profit, Tom,” she says. “I don’t think it’s good for me to hear all that. I think it might be time for you and I to move on.”
Not only did her talk of profit bother me, but what really upset me was her faulty grammar in “Time for you and I.”
He keeps asking to talk.
She says, “We can talk things to death. We both made mistakes, and a whole lot of crying and bullshit is not gonna help that,” again channeling her father.
The framing of the scene is exquisite. She sits on the other side of the bed, then lies down.
“I could see if I could make love to you,” he says, sensing a softening in her.
She says no. He asks, “Should I go? Are you gonna go?”
“Um,” she says. “ I’m tired so, but you can stay there if you like.”
And we get a beautifully composed shot of them both lying in bed, distant but reaching out to each other, his wedding ringed hand over hers.
Is She or Isn’t She?
Lest we think there’s hope, though, by the second episode, she’s furious over another issue with Tom: he’s tied up every top divorce lawyer in New York, so they are all “conflicted out” from taking her case. She takes it hard because she knows it’s her dad’s tactic, and that he advised Tom to do this. So she not only feels screwed by her dad, but also cries, “I got Mommed.” Poor kid. Same circle, betrayed on all sides.
To complicate matters, there’s a play-within-a play going on.
But to complicate matters, there’s a play-within-a play going on. At the party for the Season 4 opener, Sarah Snook announced that she’s pregnant IRL.
Was it written into the script as the season progresses?
We’ll see. As we know, Shiv’s very good at compartmentalizing and hiding things.
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