REVIEW: Succession – Season Four [2023]

Rating: TV-MA | Episodes: 10 | Runtime: 60 minutes
Release Date: March 26th, 2023 (USA)
Studio: Home Box Office (HBO)
Creator(s): Jesse Armstrong

I love you, but you are not serious people.

It was bound to happen. The show is called “Succession” after all. At some point Logan Roy (Brian Cox) will have to step down. Someone will have to take over. No matter how stubborn and vindictive the character proves, he cannot outrun death even if he somehow manages to outrun those vying for the crown.

What I never would have expected, however, is how early it happens. Not because it doesn’t work as a surprise, but because of how much time is therefore left to absorb without the greatest aspect this show possessed: the war between father and children. Because the second he is off the table as a viable adversary, the intrigue dies. Sure, there’s questions about which of the kids will take his place (if any, considering they’re all unfit for the job—courtesy of Logan’s monstrousness). But that’s merely paperwork. Picking someone (or no one) to tie the bow. It lacks teeth.

Looking back at Jesse Armstrong’s creation as a whole proves it never really had any. Lots of bark. Lots of laughs. Lots of effective allusions to capitalism’s dysfunction. But the moments where we did actually see those pearly whites never quite drew blood. It was always a series of rewinds and breakdowns instead. Something always arrived at the eleventh hour to stall momentum and leave us in virtually the exact same place at the end of the season as we were at the start.

That’s not to say the show wasn’t good. Or entertaining. Or memorable. It was. Did it ever reach the narrative heights so many anoint it as possessing to sit amongst the top-tier of “prestige” television? No. It was a lark that utilized broken people to unmask a broken system. It gave us a means of watching the faux mighty trip and fall since their real-life counterparts seem much too insulated to ever follow suit.

Season Four is thus the clean-up. It’s about giving Kendall (Jeremy Strong) his thousandth opportunity to take the reins because he will always be too blind to see that it was never his father who stymied his previous attempts. It was always his own self-sabotage and insufficiency. It’s about following through on Shiv’s (Sarah Snook) play for power to leverage what she believed to be a more wholesome résumé and subsequently more digestible face than her brothers.

Except, of course, that it was never truly real. She was still a Roy. Still a cutthroat, paranoid mover and shaker willing to compromise whatever image she cultivated for a path to the throne. One of my favorite parts of the series is the reality that Kendall and Shiv are the exact same person. They come at it from different sides, but neither is strong enough to support their misplaced hero complexes. Neither can escape the nervous rambling that ultimately scares anyone who initially considered them competent.

Roman (Kieran Culkin) does it too. Perhaps worse since he wears his lack of confidence in a worse way. Whereas Kendall and Shiv worry the world is lying to them, Roman is conscious of the fact he’s lying to himself. He tries to hide that truth with belligerence. He tries to mask how much he suffers with violence because that’s the façade of power he’s endured and learned at the hands of his father.

Regardless of Kendall being pushed to the forefront, Roman has always been the one who’s hurting most. We finally get to see it this season as Culkin is finally able to shine. He steals every single scene he’s in. It doesn’t matter if he’s having a manic episode or a depressive one, the tears and grins eventually mix together into a collective pool of raw emotion that Roman simply cannot carry. He’s spent so much time trying to coexist with the others that he’s become a walking mask desperate for release.

Armstrong and company do a very good job at reconciling what each sibling is to the other and why their love can never translate into trust. I honestly think he stuck the landing with the finale too, ending the show in what is perhaps the best and most honest way he possibly could. But there’s a lot of redundancy along the way. Much like each prior season, we receive about six episodes worth of narrative in a ten-episode package.

Betrayals find reconciliation and egos beget more betrayals, rinse and repeat. We’re given tiny morsels of real development in the background to tease a desire to turn these clichéd cutouts into three-dimensionally complex human beings, but a joke or reversal or lengthy fence-sitting session always renders it a distant memory. Cue Kendall’s kids, Roman’s proclivities, Logan’s scars, and Shiv’s contacts to push them around the board before evaporating as empty manipulations.

It’s never more prevalent than when the show tries to pretend one or more of the Roys has a conscience (Season 4’s major flaw, born from Logan’s absence). Or that they have a modicum of self-awareness. Because they don’t. We know they don’t. We’ve been shown countless times they don’t. To keep pretending does a disservice to the whole because it lays bare how little the writers can actually do to try and add weight to their cartoon. They can only spruce things up with sarcasm, crocodile tears, and easy forgiveness.

Credit Armstrong for not making the show into a full-on train wreck for us to salivate over blood, but the alternative didn’t have to be so monotonously circuitous. The Roy kids know nothing but driving themselves off-the-rails so having a clear vision to finally right the ship is never a plausible outcome. Maybe their nemeses will drive off first (Alexander Skarsgård gets a lot more to do this season), but that chaos loses something when Cox is no longer in a position to rub their faces in it.

To me the work’s success is therefore about the performances above the writing. If it never reaches the heights of its hype story-wise, it certainly does with its acting thanks to one of the strongest casts this century. Too many see their time cut short prematurely (I’m still mad the promise of more from Hiam Abbass’ Marcia was never fulfilled), but others (like J. Smith-Cameron’s Gerri) grow and captivate in their place.

Special mention to Matthew Macfadyen too (he’s my second favorite this season behind Culkin thanks to his mask finally coming off). He’s always toeing the line between family (Shiv) and work (Greg) with ambition forever driving him forward. His Tom might be the “empty suit,” but he understands the game. He played his way into it while the Roys squandered their leg up like those in their position often do. It lets us respect him despite our loathing whereas we merely pity the kids. American exceptionalism is and always has been a lie those in power tell to hide their wealth of inadequacies.