The Fourth Season of Succession (2023) Reinvented the Show by Living Up to its Promise | REVIEW

It has been more than a month since Jesse Armstrong’s Succession, a highly addictive Shakespearian family comedy-drama, came to an end. Though I watched it week-by-week as it aired and even though I could’ve reviewed it right after the season finale was released, it never felt right to me to talk about this season of the show without actually diving in and talking about how the details of the season, how the ending of the show, and how its showstopping third episode all made this season what it actually ended up being. That meant that I had to give it some room to breathe so as to not spoil the conclusion to what I think is honestly one of the best shows of its era. One might have feared that, as the show moved into its final season, perhaps they didn’t know how to end it, that they didn’t how to do something new with it, or that what had once been so compelling and energetic about it would dim as the curtain call had been announced. Not so. In fact, I think Armstrong’s series wisely went out on a high (and presumably on its own terms) with a final season that understood that it was time to keep the promise inherent in the show’s title. It was an inevitable move, but it was also a move that ended up being risky exactly because of how early in the season it happened. Succession‘s fourth and final season is an example of a showrunner and a writer’s room understanding fully the ins and outs of a show so as to deliver a tragic but inevitable conclusion that will stick with its viewers for quite some time.

The fourth season of Succession picked up six months after the events of the third season finale, in which the central trio — Kendall (played by Jeremy Strong), Shiv (played by Sarah Snook), and Roman (played by Kieran Culkin) — raced to confront their father, Logan (played by Brian Cox), and take his company out of his hands, only for them to be humiliated by him due to Tom (played by Matthew Macfadyen) having decided to stab his wife in the back by choosing personal gain over the woman he is married to. Six months later, the aforementioned trio is actually trying to put the past behind them and start their own thing, but they only do it halfheartedly. Instead, they jump at the opportunity to incite a bidding war against their father over control of the rival news conglomerate that he had desired for years, PGM. Meanwhile, they discuss whether or not they should get the rest of the board together to veto the sale of Waystar to spite their father and gain control of the family company that all three have always wanted to lead on their own.

And that’s when the show does the one thing that could truly shake it to its core. It’s time to talk about the pivotal event of season four, so this is your final warning if you haven’t watched the series yet. Still there? Good. Well, in lesser hands, this is a show that could’ve gotten a little bit stale with time at this point in the show. There are only so many times that you can watch Logan Roy’s children team up to wound their father and fail to take his company before it gets old. Jesse Armstrong knew this before his audience did, and so, after two excellent episodes to open the series (in which Brian Cox’s Logan Roy tries one last time to sway his ‘not serious’ children from interrupting a sale that they would all benefit from), Armstrong did the smart thing and reinvented the show by removing what is arguably the linchpin of the show — i.e. Brian Cox’s Logan Roy.

In what is sure to end up as one of the best and most unforgettable episodes of television ever made (titled ‘Connor’s Wedding’), Logan Roy dies off-screen while his three youngest kids are attending his oldest kid’s wedding, which Logan, by the way, didn’t truly intend to show up to. Brian Cox doesn’t get one final monologue before his character dies, and Logan doesn’t get to go out on his terms or, frankly, in any way that might’ve been read as ‘cool.’ Rather, Armstrong and Mark Mylod (the episode’s director) go for the chaos of authenticity. In a series that is all about seizing control of both the narrative and the family company, no one has any control here. The episode has been lauded for a multitude of reasons such as the writing or the way they shot a 28-page scene as a 30-minute long take by hiding camera magazines around the set and always having a camera running, but the thing that always gets me about it is how authentic the performances are.

It was a jaw-dropping episode that subverted expectations and genuinely floored me with its raw work from especially Jeremy Strong, Sarah Snook, and Kieran Culkin. For as loathsome or stupid as you may think some of their characters can be, the authenticity of the performances makes your heart break for them. In their performances, we see that — through the startled breakdowns of the characters — they struggle to say what needs to be said to a father that has been emotionally abusive to them. They want to end on good terms, but they are being eaten up inside by what they have been put through. It is so nuanced and complicated and raw and shattering. All three of those performances are genuinely affecting.

The rest of the show is essentially the aftermath of that critical loss, and it led to a lot of really smart creative decisions. One of these was for Alexander Skarsgård’s character to take over in the central spot that Cox left behind because the show essentially turns into the trio having to convince those that aren’t bound to them by blood to listen to what they are saying. It’s a season about trying to live up to what they think their father was, as well as insisting that they are like him, despite how often they’ve cursed his name in the past. It leads to moments of shattering vulnerability for Kieran Culkin’s character, moments of both raw honesty and venomous deception in Sarah Snook’s performance, and Jeremy Strong is asked to lean into this idea that his character is able to see the cracks in his own soul but unable to let the past be the past when sibling rivalries make him regress. There are moments that make you think they have what it takes, and moments that reveal how inept and propped up by nepotism they always have been. With Strong’s Kendall, I was so impressed with the way they inserted the perfect artifact that defines his relationship with his father through the underlined/crossed-out name.

And eventually, we arrived at the final (supersized) episode (titled ‘With Open Eyes’). Like I wrote on Twitter after the episode had aired, the series finale is exactly the kind of wounding masterwork about a rotting system and a cycle of abuse that the show was always meant to be. It goes out as a true tragedy of Shakespearean proportions. As it should. In that final episode, it hits on all the right notes, and the principal cast rose to the occasion. Macfadyen played the flexibility of his Tom perfectly. Culkin nailed the vulnerability of his character again and again. Snook continued to annihilate with her performance, as she had done throughout the season. Jeremy Strong’s emotional work in the finale — from the smile to the tantrum to the emptiness — was honestly sublime. Just stunning.

To a certain extent, Armstrong’s ending always felt inevitable. Succession went out with an episode that understood and highlighted exactly how fundamentally broken our main trio always was. The poison did ultimately drip through, and their lust for power corrupted them all even further. The show ended as the kind of masterwork that leaves you with a bitter taste, but that is the nature of tragedies such as this one. These were characters that could not escape who they really were, and in our final moments with them, they reverted to their true nature. One of them chose a cold partnership over familial unity. One accepted freedom from a life they were never meant for. One was fooled by the mirage of support and left shattered, as they had risked it all to be who they thought they were meant to be. Now they are almost nothing but empty suits with a last name that has become passé in the world they had sought to dominate. With the spectacular final season of Succession, Jesse Armstrong reinvented the show early on and gave us an incredible fight for the promise of the show’s title. Armstrong closed the book on it when it reached a natural conclusion, and the cast and crew delivered. A tragic masterpiece. Bravo to all involved.

A+

– Review Written by Jeffrey Rex Bertelsen.