Is Succession a comedy? This was the question that apparently stumped Jeremy Strong in the New Yorker's recent, instantly viral profile of the actor.
"In the sense that, like, Chekhov is comedy?" wondered Strong, who plays the show's hangdog princeling, Kendall Roy. No, shot back the interviewer – in the sense that it's funny.
Strong was widely scorned on social media for his comments. But he did seem to be orbiting one of the fundamental truths about Succession – which is that it is a comedy until suddenly it isn’t. The point was illustrated in the scorched-earth conclusion to series one, in which Kendall was responsible for the death of a waiter at his sister’s wedding and could evade responsibility only by throwing himself at the mercy of the bullying father out of whose shadow he had spent so much of his life trying to crawl.
“You’re my number one boy,” Logan Roy (played by Brian Cox) said as he embraced Kendall. It sounded more like a prison sentence than a profession of affection.
Until this week's finale season three of Succession was happy to perform a clapping-seal routine for its audience
Succession season three has rarely risen to such heights. Until this week's finale it was happy to perform a clapping-seal routine for its audience. As the squabbling Roy siblings competed for their media-mogul dad's affection, show-runner Jesse Armstrong appeared to be twirling around and around the same old maypole.
Characters who had previously felt multifaceted and tricky to pin down had calcified into meme-friendly caricatures. As the youngest Roy, Kieran Culkin’s Roman has become the second coming of the old Viz character Finbarr Saunders and his Double Entendres.
His sister Shiv (Sarah Snook) spent the best part of eight episodes trying to assess her position in the pecking order and delivering variations on the line “what’s your position?” to potential signs and/or power brokers. The eldest Roy sibling, Connor (Alan Ruck), seemed to have forgotten he was still in Succession. And Strong’s Kendall appeared not to have progressed at all from the catharsis of the end of season one. He was a character preserved in aspic.
But in the final chapter Succession cranked through the gears and, once again, stopped being a comedy. Logan did what he'd implicitly threatened from the start, selling out his media conglomerate, Waystar Royco, to the reptilian dotcom billionaire Lukas Mattson (Alexander Skarsgård portraying a scaly blend of Mark Zuckerberg and Spotify's Daniel Ek). That left his kids out in the cold, their inheritance turned to ashes.
The internet greeted this reveal as a shock for the ages: the Red Wedding with stock options instead of swords. Yet in truth Logan had been showing us who he was all along: when had he ever demonstrated loyalty or affection towards his kids?
Succession departs with Logan cashing out and his horrible, broken children twisting in the wind. It's a gut-punch sign off. And maybe that is where Succession should fade to black
That said, it was impossible to ignore the Shakespearean overtones as Logan plunged the knife. The true twist was that he was tipped off about his children’s plans to topple him by none other than Shiv’s hapless husband, Tom (Matthew Macfadyen).
The Roy siblings’ strategy was to stymie Logan’s plan to flog the corporation to Mattson by using powers of veto invested in them as a condition of Roy’s divorce from their mother, Caroline (all of this unfolding against the backdrop of Caroline’s wedding in Italy). However, apparently forewarned by Tom, Logan had amended his arrangement with his ex-wife. The kids had been defenestrated and the deal was sealed.
It was a devastating coup de grace – its impact heightened by Kendall's earlier tearful confession to Shiv and Roman about the death of the waiter in Scotland two seasons ago. And there was revenge for Tom, whose devotion to Shiv had been quietly rebuffed.
So, after a flabby and sometimes tedious series, Armstrong had pulled a rabbit from a hat. Yet how many more rabbits are left? Succession departs with Logan cashing out and his horrible, broken children twisting in the wind. It’s a gut-punch sign-off. And maybe that is where Succession should fade to black.
In life and, especially, in television the trick is knowing when to bow out. This year Succession fumbled its way to a powerful ending. But it is possible that Armstrong has said all he has to about hypercapitalism and the toxicity of the megarich. Perhaps he and Succession should follow Logan’s example and quit while they’re ahead.
