Succession – HBO’s acidic drama returns for an explosive final season
Razor sharp dialogue, family infighting, corporate manoeuvring, and more abound in the latest misadventures of the Roy clan
The Roy’s are all here. The family at the head of one of the largest media companies in the world will be at each other’s throats in this sure to be climactic season.
HBO’S been on a roll these last few months with House of the Dragon, The White Lotus, The Last of Us, and now the fourth and final season of Succession has rolled around the corner, offering a veritable hailstorm of F-words creatively dispersed as the Roy family tears itself apart.
Succession hits the ground running after the shocking conclusion of season three, when volcanic paterfamilias Logan Roy (Brian Cox) outmanoeuvred his three overly ambitious children, Ken (Jeremy Strong), Shiv (Sarah Snook), and Roman (Kieran Culkin) during an attempted coup of the family owned conglomerate Waystar Royco.
In a way, talking about the actual plot of Succession is a challenge, not really when it comes to avoiding spoilers – though there are a couple big ones early in this season – but because not a lot changes over the course of a season.
In contrast to previous seasons, Ken (Jeremy Strong), Shiv (Sarah Snook), and Roman (Kieran Culkin) are working together this time, but will this alliance be a lasting one? – Pic courtesy of HBO Go
There are moves and countermoves, alliances between characters shift, and reversals of fortune are par for the course, but ultimately Logan comes out on top. This being the final season, things have to change, or do they?
For three seasons now (and counting), the siblings have been fighting their elderly father and each other over who should lead their company, whose closest real world equivalent is Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, a sprawling media organisation that has its hands in every pie and can influence the course of world events.
But what’s funny is none of the characters, be they the Roys, or the other figures that make up Succession’s ensemble, like eldest son Connor (Alan Ruck), Shiv’s estranged husband Tom (Matthew Macfadyen), or even the comedic reservoir that is Cousin Greg (Nicholas Braun), have any grand plans with what they want to do with Waystar. It’s all just power for the sake of power.
Brian Cox is as fiery as ever as the seemingly all-powerful Logan Roy. – Pic courtesy of HBO Go
Where the show succeeds – and continues to do so in season four – is in its rapid-fire and razor sharp dialogue, which is really unparalleled in television. Showrunner Jesse Armstrong and his team of writers know their way around every curse word in the English language, and are not afraid of making their characters be intensely unlikable.
The cast is once again uniformly strong across the board as the actors embody a set of generally despicable characters who are each broken in their own way, but are all incapable of communicating sincerity or even expressing human emotions in any way.
Beneath all the drama, Succession is a bitterly funny depiction of people so incredibly rich that they don’t speak or behave like normal people. So used to living lives without consequence, common decency is an alien language to these characters.
In an ideal world, they will face some sort of comeuppance, but being very much set in the real world, that seems incredibly unlikely.
* New episodes debut every Monday on HBO (Astro Ch 411) and HBO Go
BY Haikal Fernandez
source – The Vibes
