What makes winners win? In the sordid and serpentine world of HBO’s Succession (available on Disney+ Hotstar in India), it is the ability to sacrifice everything but the desire to win.
Winners, as the third season of Succession reveals, are habitually capable of doing ruthless things, for they see society not as a collection of the good and the bad or the right and the wrong, but as a collection of those who win and those who do not.
After two simmering seasons of compelling tension, backstabbing, and power moves that are only possible in the arenas of the super rich, season 3 of Succession arrived in October with the show at the zenith of its popularity.
Saddled with expectations to not just entertain but to do so keeping intact the tragicomic nuances that only Succession seems to have mastered, it was natural to think whether the show would become a victim of its own reputation. But after eight riveting episodes and a season finale (premiering on December 13 in India) that is arguably the magnum opus of showrunner Jesse Armstrong’s career, Succession has lived up to its hype. It is just about the finest television you can watch right now.
The second season of Succession ends on a cliffhanger with Kendall Roy, the most turbulent of the contenders hoping to take over media mogul Logan Roy’s empire, calling out his father for potential complicity in sexual and human rights abuse at Waystar Royco, the conglomerate which Logan heads as patriarch.
And yet, the first half of the third season does not drive any closer towards the expected climax that should succeed a cliffhanger. Instead, the confusion over who is best placed to eventually displace Logan spirals on, with a civil war breaking out among the three Roy siblings (also including younger sister Siobhan or Shiv, played by an increasingly intemperate Sarah Snook, and youngest brother Roman, played by an exquisite Kieran Culkin) who do not know whether to be each other’s allies or adversaries.
Ever since it became clear that power outweighs love for every single character on Succession, one of the show’s USPs has been to create an atmosphere where no two people can entirely trust each other. This familiar pattern plays out again in the first few episodes of season 3. Though nothing really happens with respect to the movement of the main plot until the fifth episode, where the promise of disruption and disorder is unsurprisingly punctured, there is much ado about how to sustain the stasis at the heart of the show.
With any other group of creative minds and talents, this would effectively be a recipe for boredom, if not downright disappointment. But not with the team at Succession. Even when nothing happens in Succession, a lot does.
Take, for instance, the fourth episode, where one of Waystar’s most influential shareholders Josh Aaronson (played by an elegantly understated Adrien Brody) invites Logan and Kendall to his private island to discuss the prospect of his investment in the company being endangered. For most of the episode, Logan and Kendall attempt to win individual bouts of their cold war while at the same time trying to persuade Aaronson that they are on the same team. They fail, but their failure is neither dramatic nor (as it turns out in the next episode) pivotal. The entire episode becomes an exercise in concentrating emotions so tightly yet neatly that the cathartic release only arrives once something actually happens, which in this case is Logan almost having a heart attack out of exhaustion.
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The sucker punch
For Succession fans, season finales are when all the cards that have been stacked up carefully over the preceding weeks are hurled into the air in the form of a controlled chaos. It happens in the first season when Logan manages to outmaneuver Kendall even as he saves his son and it happens once again last season when Kendall manages to outmanoeuvre Logan without saving himself.
In the season 3 finale, there is no saving to be done. With all the important players gathering in pristine Tuscany for the wedding of Logan’s ex-wife Caroline, this is, as CNN rightly hailed, the “most eventful wedding in terms of behind-the-scenes drama since The Godfather”.
Midway through the episode, Kendall breaks down in front of Shiv and Roman, no longer able to bear the brunt of having killed a man in the first season. Even though Kendall’s collapse, performed with haunting precision by Jeremy Strong, is belated and bereft of consequence, the emotional rollercoaster hits full tilt in his confession scene. All of a sudden, three characters who have always guarded their emotions on account of early childhood scars, are asked to let themselves loose, to drop their games and, for once, be entirely human.
On the other hand, their dad and winner-in-chief Logan is about to concede defeat by selling Waystar to upstart tech enterprise GoJo and its mercurial chief Lukas Matson (played by an insouciant Alexander Skarsgård). But here is the golden rule of Succession (at least until now): even when Logan loses, Logan wins.
The same, unfortunately, does not apply to his children, who receive the sucker punch of their lives in a manner that is entirely befitting of Succession: your best weapon will kill you first.
Orchestrating the coup de grâce in the finale is Tom Wambsgans (Matthew Macfadyen), who is finally given his due for being the bishop on the Succession chess board. The bonhomie that has been ritualised between Tom and Greg Hirsch (Nicholas Braun), the socially awkward arriviste and grandson of Logan’s brother, over three seasons culminates with the two sealing their dynamic as one of perfect symbiosis (it is possible to “make a Tomlette without breaking some Greggs!” after all)
With pathos for Kendall merging into sympathy for Siobhan, with Roman’s incisive humour cutting everything like a knife, and with Tom and Greg looking out for each other (a collector’s item in the show), the emotional palate of the finale is nothing short of the most refined degustation.
As for what one may potentially feel about Logan, one could be forgiven for being glad that he is still the imperious ringmaster and still making every swear word seem delectably Shakespearean.
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The American nightmare
The table read for the pilot episode of Succession took place on November 8, 2016, the night Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton to emerge as the President of the United States. “We watched the results come in, and everyone wandered off into the night – good for storytelling, bad for humanity,” recollected Macfadyen afterwards.
Throughout its first season, Succession seemed a fitting show from Trumpian times – the quid pro quo between legacy media and government in America, the approximation of Fox News in ATN, Waystar’s broadcast wing, and above all, the Teflon-esque quality of Logan that mirrored Trump himself, since no scandal could stick to either.
But while Trumpism is still very much alive in America, Trump is gone (for now). Succession, though, has only become more relevant. The reason for this is that Succession, which neither satirises wealth nor fetishises it, is brutal in its depiction of the American nightmare- – the land where avarice for oneself meets apathy for the rest. No matter which political ideology is in charge, the ideology of power is perpetually tilted towards the privileged. At the end of the day, regardless of who wins the battle of the 1%, everyone else loses.
Across the Atlantic, The Guardian columnist Rafael Behr recently came up with an excellent and expedient term to analyse the corruptibility of British politics – “cakeism”. It means that when you belong to a high enough echelon of the social ladder, you can have your cake and eat it, too. What appears mutually exclusive from the outside is welded together as complementary by the inner workings of the establishment. Cakeism has been applicable in America for decades, which is why Bill Clinton could get away with sleaze, George W. Bush could get away with Iraq and Afghanistan, Barack Obama could get away with his penchant for drones, and Trump could get away with just about anything.
For two seasons and eight episodes, Succession, too, has been a theatre for full-baked cakeism. But the season 3 finale might prove to be a turning point. For the first time in the history of the show, fortunes may be irreversible and damages may be insurmountable. Some cakes have been eaten and cannot be retained anymore. Does this indicate a pivot for the fourth season? Does Armstrong want to project a different order, a different America?
As with the incessant query about Joe Biden’s regime, has a new era really begun for Succession?
Only time (and the strings of power) will tell.
Priyam Marik is a post-graduate student of journalism at the University of Sussex, United Kingdom.