Succession: Who Succeeded?

I don’t typically cover new TV shows on this channel. The reason is because it takes time and context to really understand a show. However, when I saw Succession, I knew that I had to cover it. It was clear even from my first watch that the show had depth. It was more than just your run of the mill family drama. Underneath its salacious and at times vulgar presentation, the show had a message it was trying to send. And I was a message that at least I didn’t see people really talking about.

Now I joined the Succession bandwagon late, only starting to watch it after the finale already aired earlier this year. So I missed out on the week to week experience as it was coming out. But I was able to binge watch the show straight through, and watching it that way helped me understand the greater context of the show.

Just know though that I’ve only seen the show once, so this is not going to be a deep dive analysis like my Wire retrospective. This is just my interpretation of what the series is really all about, and it’s of course possible that I may get some details wrong. Feel free to point them out in the comments, it helps my engagement either way.

Succession follows the Roy family, the owners of Waystar Royco, one of the world’s largest media conglomerates. The patriarch of the family, the gruff Logan Roy, has built a massive business empire, but as he approaches the end of his life, the question becomes who will take over after he is gone.

He has three children who are the heirs to the company, Kendall, Roman, and Shiv. He has a fourth eldest son Connor, but he’s not actively involved in the business, though he was interested in politics from a very young age. The three siblings each hope to take the throne for themselves, and constantly fight among themselves for the right to be Logan’s heir.

However, by the end of the series, none of them inherit the company. Waystar ends up being sold to a tech company, and though still extremely wealthy, none of the kids ends up in any position of power.

Despite the show being called Succession, and the premise of the show being who would succeed Logan, ironically none of his kids end up succeeding him, at least in terms of the business. And that makes sense. None of the three were worthy to take the spot. Though each talented in their own ways, they were all too flawed to ever really be considered leaders. Logan tells them this outright in the fourth season.

However, despite this being the most common interpretation of the ending, I actually think that all three children did end up succeeding their father. Not in the company of course, but in the cycle of abuse that he was a part of and inflicted on each of them.

Throughout the series, Logan is both emotionally and physically abusive to his children, and honestly everyone around him as well. He holds the promise of succeeding him above each of his children’s heads, right before he rips it out from under them. He does this to Kendall in the Pilot, to Shiv in Season 2, and though he dies before it’s revealed, it’s implied he was going to do the same thing to Roman.

He’s also extremely mean to his kids, calling them names and constantly putting them down. When Roman records a story about how much he loves his father, which is both a fake story and only being done to help Logan’s image, he mocks his son for the display of emotion.

Now, Logan’s abuse of his children can be read in part as an attempt to prepare them for the role of CEO. His philosophy in business is that you need to be extremely cutthroat to survive, and this might be his version of tough love parenting.

However I think that in reality, he’s just continuing the cycle of abuse that he was subject to. Logan’s backstory is only given to us in little pieces. He was born in Scotland to a relatively poor family. When WW2 broke out, he, his older brother Ewan, and his baby sister Rose went to live with their Uncle and Aunt in Canada.

It’s heavily implied that their new guardians were abusive to him. We see that Logan’s back is covered in scars, presumably from being whipped as a child. He also outright says that his Uncle would not tolerate backtalk.

In addition to the physical abuse, they also inflicted psychological abuse on Logan. After returning from school, Logan’s sister Rose died from polio. Logan blamed himself, believing that he brought home the disease, and his Aunt and Uncle encouraged this belief.

Though it’s never outright stated, this abuse may have been a primary motivator in driving Logan’s business ambitions. It’s as if he took all the pain of his childhood and used it as fuel while he built his empire. It might have even been his attempt at protecting himself from ever being vulnerable like that again. Ewan says this in the first season.

This need to never appear vulnerable seems to extend to his children as well. In the family therapy episode, the kids say that Logan can’t swim.

However we later see that he can indeed swim. The implication is that the kids believe that he can’t because he’s never done it in front of them, presumably because he doesn’t want them to see his scars.

This refusal to ever open himself up emotionally resulted in his extremely distant relationship with his kids. They admit that their feelings for their father go back and forth between fearing him and desperately seeking his validation.

Each of Logan’s children deal with the abuse in different ways, and I think it will be helpful to examine each of these characters individually.

Kendall is the eldest of the three siblings. He is also the one mostly involved with the business, having spent many years working in the company. At the start of the series, he’s been promised the position of CEO when Logan retires after his 80th birthday.

However Kendall is also a cocaine addict. His substance abuse results in his separation from his wife and two children, and Logan believes he is weak because of this. He ends up denying him the position after promising it to him for many years.

Of the three children, Kendall has the most adverse relationship to his father. He leads several coups against his father over the course of the show to try and take over the company, none of them working. He also is the one that challenges their father the most, outright calling him evil and believing that he is a better man than him.

However, despite thinking that he is better than him, he also believes that he is the only real successor to their father. Even when he is working with his siblings, he secretly plots for himself to be the real head of the company. He comes so close as well, being one vote short of retaining control of the company. However a betrayal from Shiv in the final episode leads him to being left with nothing.

However despite the fact that Kendall didn’t ever get to be a true CEO, he did end up succeeding his father. Kendall is a terrible father to his own children. Though he claims to love them, he almost never sees them, focusing entirely on his business aspirations. This is exactly like Logan, always prioritizing the business over his family.

He even becomes an abuser just like his father. In the final episode, when Roman calls out the fact that he isn’t the biological father of his children, Kendall ends up choking him, abusing him just like their father did to Roman. It’s a stunning contrast to how Kendall defended Roman when Logan hit him before.

Though Kendall has been the one calling out their father the most throughout the entire series, he ends up being almost exactly like him.

The same thing holds true for Shiv. Throughout the series, Shiv believes that she is the only responsible one among her siblings. She’s not a drug addict like Kendall or a sexual deviant like Roman, and thinks herself above their petty need for power. Instead she focuses on her career as a political strategist, advancing the careers of politicians whose values she respects.

However her father says that in reality, she’s scared to compete, and instead is choosing something that she cannot fail at. The same thing is true of her marriage to Tom. Everyone, including Shiv and Tom themselves, consider him beneath her. He’s a middle management type, and is marrying up into the royal family. And because of this Shiv dominates the relationship, using and cheating on Tom without any fear of him ever leaving her.

However Tom eventually does grow a backbone, and stands up for himself. He separates from Shiv, and finally starts working for himself instead of her. At the end of the series, he is named CEO by the new owner, something Shiv had been trying and failing to gain for herself. Though still a servant to a new master, Tom is sitting on the throne that all of the children had wanted.

This coincides right when Shiv finds out that she is pregnant with Tom’s child. Realizing that the only way she can cling to power is at Tom’s side, she joins him as his wife again. Their final scene shows Tom forcing her to take his hand, a sign that he is now the dominant one in the relationship.

This parallels the exact same thing that happened to their mother Caroline. Throughout the show, Shiv and her mother had a difficult relationship. Caroline was an emotionally absent mother, trapped in a marriage to a powerful man that she did not love. She outright says that both she and Shiv should never have had children, as they did not have the emotional capacity for it.

In the end, Shiv ends up exactly like her mother. She is in a loveless marriage based on money and power. Though she will have children, it’s heavily implied that like many rich kids they will be raised by nannies while the parents focus on their business. And thus the cycle of their parents continues downward to the next generation.

Finally that leaves Roman. When we are first introduced to Roman, he’s presented as a total freak. He’s not only constantly joking in the meanest, most offensive way possible, he seems to be a sexual degenerate.

However slowly, we learn that Roman is actually something of a masochist. Despite his bravado, he cannot get off in normal ways, instead only becoming aroused when being talked down to and made fun of. He eventually engages in a sort of submissive relationship with Geri because she is willing to satisfy his needs by talking down to him.

This need to be humiliated and in pain extends beyond sex. When Kendall sends him an edited message of their father mocking him, he replays the message over and over again. And after their father dies, Roman jumps into a crowd of protestors, goading them into beating him up. It’s clear that on some level Roman craves pain.

We also get hints as to why he is like this. Though Logan emotionally abuses all of his children, the physical abuse seems to be limited to Roman only. It’s casually mentioned throughout the show that Logan beat Roman, and when he’s angry at Shiv in the second season, he takes it out on Roman, knocking his tooth out.

After this event, when Logan pretends like he doesn’t remember it happening, Roman plays along with it. It’s like he’s learned by this point that nothing is going to change, so there’s no point in fighting it. Wherever people bring up the abuse, he deflects saying that it doesn’t bother him.

Roman is like an abused puppy. He’s so scarred by the abuse that he suffered, that he can’t function normally without the pain. When one of the protestors tries to help him up, he reacts violently. It’s like he’s so unused to support that he cannot accept a kind or positive gesture.

Despite what Logan did to him, Roman is actually the most devoted of all the children to their father. Even when the three had banded together to fight their father, Roman was secretly in talks with him. And when Logan dies, Roman breaks down completely at his funeral.

Roman has learned to expect abuse, and in a tragic way need it. The loss of his father hits him the hardest because he cannot function without pain. Right before the final vote, Roman starts breaking down in front of Kendall, and the subtext is that he needs Kendall to hurt him as well, which Kendall does because again he is trying to step into the role of their father.

I’ve seen many people saying that Roman got the best ending out of the three children. After the vote fails, he acknowledges that the three siblings are not worthy, showing that he has acheived self-awareness. And the last shot of him in the show is him at a bar smiling, seemingly finally free of their family.

But I actually don’t think that is the case. As we’ve seen, Roman is scarred both physically and emotionally. I don’t think he will ever be free from the abuse he suffered anymore than Kendall or Shiv will ever be.

Instead the character that actually gets a happy ending on the show is Connor, the sibling that everyone forgot. Throughout the show, Connor is pretty much a joke. He’s in a relationship with a prostitute who clearly doesn’t love him. He makes a failed bid for president that only serves to embarrass the family. And he’s constantly ignored by everyone including his siblings because he isn’t a part of the business like them.

However as embarrassing as Connor is, his redeeming quality is that he doesn’t need his father’s approval like the rest of the siblings. Connor was Logan’s first child. Logan eventually divorced his mother and moved on, and she ended up in a mental hospital. It was years before Connor eventually got to see his father again, and thus was never given shares in the company like the other kids were.

However this seems to have given Connor the healthiest outlook on their family. Being abandoned and forgotten has helped him develop an inner strength. Unlike his siblings, he doesn’t crave Logan’s approval because he realizes they will never get it.

The same holds true for his relationship with Willa. He understands that she is with him partially for the money. However despite this, they are able to have a genuine understanding, and arguably a happy relationship. This is more than can be said for most of the other characters.

And in a weird way, because he was never in line for the throne like the others, Logan seems to have had more affection for Connor than the rest of his children. Connor eventually shows the other three a video of him and their father at dinner. They are shocked to see how calm and happy he acts around Connor, and they realize that he had a relationship with their father that they never did.

In the end, Succession to me is a show about abuse. Underneath the facade of business and power, the show is about a family that has been broken beyond repair. Logan created an empire of shit, a business that runs on hate and crushes people beneath it. And his children are the inheritors of this legacy. They all succeeded.