Succession finale review — one last twist of the knife

Warning: contains spoilers

During King Charles’s coronation there was a moment when I sensed the newly installed monarch was distracted from the ceremony confirming his life’s purpose. At the edge of his serenity lurked a question: who would claim the real crown? That is, who would become chief executive of Waystar RoyCo, the media empire built by recently deceased Logan Roy (Brian Cox)?

Over four seasons, we devoted viewers of Succession have been obsessing over the same question, watching each week as a trio of Roy siblings back-stabbingly battled one another for their tyrant father’s scarce affections and their own validation.

On Sunday night, the series’ finale brought our answer, and it was a surprise: Tom Wambsgans (Matthew Macfadyen), the eel-like interloper in the Roy clan, is the improbable new king. If you’ve not previously met Tom, his estranged wife described him early in the episode as “a highly interchangeable modular part”, adding: “Tom would honestly suck the biggest dick in the room.” In other words, he has all the makings of a great media boss.

Part of the magic and mystery of Succession is how a show devoted to such reprehensible people could be so enjoyable. It is a broken family drama, inspired by the likes of the Murdochs and the Trumps, that plays out in an elite Manhattan universe in which morals are situational, relationships are transactional and fascism is something to be bargained with for television ratings and profit. And we loved it. It was as if the show’s creator, Jesse Armstrong, held a mirror up to our decayed society and told us, reassuringly, “I see you.”

As the finale unfolded, it seemed Kendall Roy (Jeremy Strong), the eldest son from Logan’s second marriage, had at last caged his demons and was on track to claim his birthright. Somewhere in the world, Don Jr, Lachlan and Prince William were grinning. It was, Kendall acknowledged, “a fucking horrible job that clearly kills you” — but one he desperately wanted. He was done in at the last by his sister, Shiv (Sarah Snook) — either out of vengeance, an honest recognition that Kendall would be a disaster or a desire to secure her unborn child’s future. “I love you. And I cannot stomach you,” she told her brother as she twisted the knife, neatly capturing the show’s view of sibling relations.

In anointing Tom the winner, Armstrong chose a man for our times. His previous claim to fame, besides marrying into the family, was to cover up a sexual abuse scandal at the company’s cruise line division. He’s a man to shred documents that need shredding. At times a punch bag and a laughingstock, perhaps, but Tom had something the Roy children lacked: the determination of the outsider. He would literally do anything to survive. He appeared to secure his crown on Sunday night when he readily agreed to serve as a frontman and “pain sponge” for his new boss, a psychopathic Viking tech bro.

And that seemed to be one message of Succession. Just before the screen went black, a distraught Kendall was sitting alone on a park bench in Lower Manhattan, gazing over the water towards a hazy Statue of Liberty. For better and for worse, America is perpetually fed by newcomers. Logan Roy, himself, was once a poor Scottish immigrant who ended up a media baron with a photo of himself beside a smiling Ronald Reagan on his mantle. Their heirs may still be rich beyond imagination and advantaged for generations but they will never have the same vigour and animal determination as the founders. And, like the Roy kids, they may always be haunted by them.

“We are bullshit,” the hot-headed youngest sibling, Roman (Kieran Culkin), told his siblings in a belated moment of clarity on Sunday night. “We’re nothing, OK?”

I suspect the Trump and Murdoch kids did not enjoy that.