Succession

Who Are Succession's The Hundred? · Finn Wolfhard · Jason Calacanis · JK Rowling · Thoren Bradley · Salma Hayek · Mohammed bin Salman · Pamela Paul · Brené Brown ...

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The Roy family is back for a fourth and final season, and everyone came out swinging. Let the humiliations begin.

I’m “Substack meets Masterclass meets the Economist meets The New Yorker.”) Connor Roy (Alan Ruck) is in a funk all episode because he has been told he needs to spend another $100 million on his presidential campaign just to maintain his current 1 percent in the polls. Bridget is “a firecracker” and “crunchy peanut butter,” who at one point sneaks off with him and has “a bit of a rummage” in his pants. It is “like a private members club but for everyone.” It is “an indispensable bespoke information hub” with “high-calorie info-snacks.” It “has the ethos of a nonprofit but the path to crazy margins.” (Tag yourself! brand that Logan would never honor (despite Tom’s promise to the Pierces of “a little tummy-tickle on culture”). (Who is also possibly his lover and the future mother of his child? (“I don’t want to be restricted to my favorites,” she says, a tossed-off remark that says a lot about Shiv’s whole vibe.) They bicker a bit about how Tom and Cousin Greg ( She insists there is no way to back out of her tentative deal with Logan and groans that she is tired of hearing about numbers, while sneakily steering her new suitors toward an offer well beyond the $7 billion Waystar was planning to spend. Shiv wants primarily to be taken seriously so that Nan will stop thinking of the Roy kids as “fake fruit for display purposes only.” The younger Roys know that they can offer Nan assurances about preserving the P.G.M. What eventually rouses Logan on this deeply depressing evening is what is happening across the country in Los Angeles, where Shiv, Kendall (Jeremy Strong) and Roman (Kieran Culkin) are plotting revenge for the vicious way Logan blocked their recent coup attempt. After betraying his wife and allying with Logan Roy (Brian Cox), Tom is starting to realize that his father-in-law perhaps values him mainly as a way to keep tabs on his rebellious kids. Everyone always needs to iron out a few more details, get a few more stragglers from the board into the fold, toss in a few more sweeteners for the major shareholders, et cetera.

The HBO dramedy's final season kicked off with a devastating moment for a couple at war.

Shiv was raised on this philosophy, so it’s no wonder that she chooses to cut her losses with Tom instead of enduring, as she so tellingly frames his suggestion that they have an open conversation, “a whole lot of bullsh-t for no profit.” Unwilling to cede any ground to Tom, she refuses his pitiful offer to “see if I can make love to you” but insists on staying put until morning. But together they form a market”—like a “job market, marriage market, money market, market of ideas” (emphasis mine). These days, he’s so cozy with his ambitious personal assistant, Kerry (Zoë Winters)—now introducing herself as his “friend, assistant, and adviser”—that his kids are suspicious he’s trying to sire yet another heir. Even Greg’s dating has become transactional; in Italy, he tried to trade up from Ken’s publicist Comfry (Dasha Nekrasova), and now he’s hooking up in Logan’s guest room with a woman glued to social media, who may or may not be engaged in corporate espionage. (Yes, the linchpins in the Pierce bidding war are two feuding couples.) Meanwhile, the siblings’ elder half-brother Connor (Alan Ruck) is days away from marrying a woman (Justine Lupe) he met in her capacity as an escort, who panics upon hearing that he might spend $100 million on his pathetic presidential campaign, until he assures her that after doing so he’d still be rich. “What are people?” Logan asks his security guard and “best pal” Colin (Scott Nicholson), in Sunday’s episode, after leaving his depressing birthday party to mix with commoners at a diner. When she suggests it’s time for them to “move on,” Tom simply replies: “That makes me sad.” Succession creator Jesse Armstrong chooses his words, and plots out his character arcs, carefully, so it doesn’t feel like a stretch to read this as a callback to Tom’s memorable line from the season 2 finale: “I just wonder if the sad I’d be without you is less than the sad I get from being with you.” After a day of bidding against one another in an interfamilial war to purchase the liberal news empire Pierce Global Media—she as a representative of her siblings, he on behalf of their mogul father, Logan (Brian Cox)—Shiv sneaks into their cold, modern home at night, rousing Tom and ending their marriage. Instead of firing back with any zingers of his own, he simply reminds her: “We agreed that we could have a look around while we had a think, right?” When he wants to have the “big talk” they’ve been planning about the future of their marriage, she shuts him down. Sunday’s premiere showed us Ken—already divorced with two kids he rarely sees—taken aback to learn that his sometime girlfriend, Naomi Pierce (Annabelle Dexter-Jones), was spending time with Tom. Tom knows better than to make a big emotional scene—or, for that matter, to point out that his wife isn’t holding her head high so much as she’s holding back tears. First, she makes fun of Tom for palling around with Cousin Greg (Nicholas Braun) as “the disgusting brothers” and sleeping with models.

In the premiere of its fourth and final season, the HBO show offered familiar beats but also a hint of a new direction.

The [script](https://assets.scriptslug.com/live/pdf/scripts/succession-101-celebration-2018.pdf) for the show’s Season 1 premiere, “Celebration,” at one point describes Logan’s entrance into a room as changing its “center of gravity.” He simply is the game—not just the nucleus but also the force by which every other character is defined. Is Nan Pierce, the neutrals-clad, left-leaning matriarch of Pierce, also the ghost of Shiv future? Not in the least; it’s too early in the season for that kind of thing. [weighed his mortality](https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2021/11/succession-season-3-episode-5/620701/), taking a lonely walk in the park while flanked by his “best pal” and fixer, Colin. This is not to be uncharitable about a show that’s consistently more watchable, more bleakly pleasurable than almost any of its peers. In tonight’s episode, a scene that could have been a devastating autopsy of Shiv and Tom’s marriage was cut off at the head by Shiv’s refusal to participate. I can appreciate the layers of societal critique within this approach, the show’s clear indictment of how the outsized influence of a few emotionally stunted men can contaminate not just their own families but also the entire world. It directly restaged a number of events from the show’s pilot: Logan again reluctantly celebrated a birthday and Kendall again overbid on a media property in order to prove his business acumen to himself and his father. “Tom, I think we could talk things to death, but actually, we both just made some mistakes, and I think a whole lot of crying and bullshit is not gonna help that,” she said. Narratively, Succession is also as circular as a sitcom: It has a tendency to reset itself rather than shake things up in unexpected fashion. (Ask yourself whether Kendall, an adorable dodo princeling, would really use internecine in a sentence, or whether you’ve ever actually heard a person say that word out loud.)

The first episode of Succession season four sees Kendall (Jeremy Strong), Shiv (Sarah Snook), and Roman (Kieran Culkin) aligned in their quest to take down ...

In non-business dealings, Tom and Shiv seem to be at the end of the road when it comes to their marriage. But will the end of Tom and Shiv's union affect Tom's standing with Logan? “What was the disaster in Maine?” wonders Lawson. Lawson appreciated the scene in which they appear to call it quits. For your own questions, comments, and final season theories, please email [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]). “It fails ten minutes into the episode,” Lawson notes, while pointing out it's shrewd satire of “Rather than deal with any of the way more pressing issues in their lives, they're like ‘Oh, let's start a made-up, fake, bullshit company that has no way of going anywhere,” notes Murphy. “Did she run over one of the Bushes in Kennebunkport on her wood-sided motor boat?” The abandoned business also servers as table setting for the rest of the season. The first episode of Succession season four sees Kendall (Jeremy Strong), Shiv (Sarah Snook), and Roman (Kieran Culkin) aligned in their quest to take down Logan (Brian Cox), delivering the one-two punch of skipping Logan's birthday party and scooping Pierce Media Group up under his very nose. “It's such a rich people thing to be like, 'Oh, I don't care about money. Either way, it seems Nan Pierce needs the money if only to help cover “Anne's disaster in Maine”—whatever that may be.

With the Roy siblings (sans Connor) finally working together for once, Logan's unwelcome birthday party goes from bad to worse.

Greg blames the entire incident on Bridget for being insatiably horny and possibly indulging in some “wacky tobacky.” As a result, Colin is assigned to kick her out of the party, and while Greg originally plans to accompany Colin, he chickens out at the last minute. In fact, Greg is such a Disgusting Brother™ that, midway through the party, he tells Tom that he and Bridget hooked up in one of Logan’s guest bedrooms. (“He says he finds me disgusting and despicable, but he kinda smiled,” Greg tells Tom about the conversation with Logan, which, tragically, occurred off-screen.) But just because Greg is still in Logan’s good graces after he sullied his home and roasted him on request, that doesn’t mean Bridget will come away unscathed. “I saw from the calendar update that you’re back in the city tonight,” Tom tells Shiv at the beginning of the episode, which is all the audience needs to know about the sad state of their relationship. At least when Mike Bloomberg [wasted a bunch of his own money](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/20/us/politics/bloomberg-campaign-900-million.html) on a failed presidential bid, his net worth was in the tens of billions. “You could take it camping, you could slide it across the floor after a bank job,” Tom says. No shade to Roman, but when he’s the voice of reason in a multibillion-dollar bidding war, that’s when you know things have gotten out of hand. Based on what we’ve seen in “The Munsters,” the splintering of the Roy family has been a welcome development for the kids. (Or, at least, for one episode; my money’s on one of them eventually being a turncoat.) For Logan, that means one of his only remaining confidants is Colin, his loyal fixer and security guard, who has covered up all kinds of sketchy shit on his behalf, including Kendall’s involvement with the cater waiter’s death in the Season 1 finale. He’ll never be mistaken for a cheerful individual, but I’ve never seen more disdain in someone who was serenaded with “Happy Birthday” by a bunch of people invited to his party: “Congratulations on saying the biggest number, you fucking morons,” Logan tells the trio over the phone, the only words he exchanges with the group all episode. [explosive events](https://www.theringer.com/succession/2021/12/13/22831617/succession-season-3-finale-recap-logan-wins-tom-shiv) of the Season 3 finale, while Connor is focused on maintaining the literal 1 percent share of voters supporting his presidential bid.

We first met the Pierce family in season two of Succession, when the Roys arrive at Tern Haven, the estate of the Pierces on Long Island.

Even the New York Times [observes](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/04/business/media/hbo-succession-business.html) that the Pierces "seems to be a mash-up of the Sulzbergers and the Bancrofts." Before joining T&C, she was the deputy managing editor at [Hey Alma](https://www.heyalma.com/), a Jewish culture site. has an estate in Southampton and had " [Hillandale](https://www.businessinsider.com/hillandale-estate-connecticut-new-york-mansion-2020-7)," an estate in Connecticut. The Sulzberger family is the publishers of the New York Times. Follow her @emburack on [Twitter ](https://twitter.com/emburack)and His son, Norman Chandler, took the reins next, then Norman's son, Otis Chandler, was the fourth and final Chandler to run the Los Angeles Times. Katharine Graham led The Washington Post from 1963 to 1991; her father, Eugene Meyer, bought the Post in 1933 at a bankruptcy auction. [there are many real-life families that could've inspired the Roys](https://www.townandcountrymag.com/leisure/arts-and-culture/g20977169/succession-hbo-real-life-families-inspiration/), the Pierces, too, draw on reality. Beginning with Adolph Simon Ochs, who bought the paper as it was facing bankruptcy, the publisher job passed to his son-in-law, Arthur Sulzberger (who married Adolph's only daughter, Iphigene Bertha Ochs Sulzberger), then onto their son-in-law Orvil Eugene Dryfoos, then through generations: Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Sr., Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., and now, A.G. The Bancrofts, notably, sold Dow Jones (owner of the Wall Street Journal) to NewsCrop in 2007. [have a Jewish history](https://www.jta.org/2017/12/18/united-states/the-sulzberger-family-a-complicated-jewish-legacy-at-the-new-york-times), but Sulzberger Jr. We first met the Pierce family in season two of Succession, when the Roys arrive at Tern Haven, the estate of the Pierces on Long Island.

Shiv, Kendall, and Roman convene at a modern mountainside home in the 'Succession' season four premiere.

Lest we forget, these are the children of fictional media mogul [Logan Roy](https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/succession-season-3-all-about-that-hamptons-mansion), who [Forbes](https://www.forbes.com/web-stories/how-rich-is-the-roy-family-on-succession/) estimates is worth a whopping (fictional) $18 billion. At 20,000 square feet, this over-the-top property encompasses an owner’s suite that could serve as its own apartment, plus five guest suites, countless amenities, and a striking silhouette. In real life, the six bedroom, 18 bathroom house known as the San Onofre estate was built by real estate developer [beyond wealthy](https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/succession-filming-locations-you-can-visit). Inside, fan favorite character Roman Roy (Kieran Culkin) is yelling at a Zoom meeting on the television, in a living room surrounded by high glass walls, some fully open to the outdoors, looking out on an infinity pool and sweeping mountain views beyond that. [the hit HBO drama](https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/how-the-high-powered-worlds-of-hbos-succession-are-mastered).

A lot happened in the season premiere of "Succession," kicking off the two-time Emmy-winning HBO show's final flight of episodes, including the ongoing feud ...

Things are so strained as the season begins that Logan’s assistant and now out-of-the-closet girlfriend, Kerry (Zoe Winters), tried to arrange a birthday call between the trio and their dad, only to trigger an awkward negotiation about whether him texting an interest in talking to them would be sufficient. Because to paraphrase Logan, when “Succession’s” good, it’s good. If that wasn’t wildly eventful other than the Shiv-Tom marital strife, stay tuned.

If CEOs didn't define themselves so completely by their work, retirement would be less frightening.

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'The Munsters,' the fourth and final-season premiere of 'Succession,' is full of maneuvering among the Roy family, Nan Pierce's many headaches, ...

Yet in “The Munsters,” his kids finally got one over on him, to the degree that he is the one who calls them on his birthday, instead of the reverse. [the very best](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_gHzyalSwI) to ever have pulled this trick.) And some of it is just mirroring a pilot that featured Logan nearly dying. only for the episode to reveal that Logan stays up late at night watching ATN and calling poor Cyd to complain about what’s on his television. And the episode brings it up enough times to remind you the election is imminent. It adds to the feel of a production of King Lear that’s both funnier and more horrible than you expected. The scene where he’s trying to hype himself up to tell Logan he slept with a girl in the guest bedroom while Logan grows ever-more-fucking furious at the rapidly degenerating Pierce deal is probably the funniest of the episode. I have a case of the vapors!” The world is ending, and Connor and Willa just found out. So for the moment, Tom is riding high, even getting a cryptic reassurance from Logan that his position within ATN might possibly, sort of, kind of in a way remain the same if he and Shiv split up. (Whoever the newly mentioned Jimenez is, they seem to be the Democratic nominee for president.) And the idea the Siblings Roy abandoned in favor of purchasing Pierce was originally hers. As such, in this episode, Kendall and Roman largely cede the floor to their sister when it comes time to make the Pierce deal. The obvious question to ask at the end of season three was: Just how long can the alliance among Kendall, Roman, and Shiv hold?

Dennis King a traversé la pandémie de la COVID-19, deux ouragans et une crise agricole.

Avant de faire carrière en politique, Dennis King a évolué dans le domaine des communications. Il demande maintenant aux électeurs de lui faire encore confiance pour les quatre prochaines années. Le Conseil de la pomme de terre de l'île a toujours soutenu, quant à lui, que les La crise de la COVID-19 La crise de la gale verruqueuse Le chef progressiste-conservateur, Dennis King a traversé la pandémie de la COVID-19 en tant que premier ministre de l’île, tout comme bien d’autres crises dans les quatre dernières années.

As the Roy family's fleet of helicopters land for their final outing, there's no point in resisting this sumptuous programme. There really is nothing else ...

Based on the glimmering episodes I’ve seen so far, Succession intends to go out on a peak that people will still be talking about in 20 or 30 years. Yes, I can see that it is sumptuous, dense and brilliant, and that at its best it has some of the finest dialogue not just on TV now but on TV ever. It’s great that it’s a lot of quite nasty, unlikable people being funny. It feels clever in the same way that putting your hand up and saying the right answer in a classroom is clever: in a smug and self-satisfied way. But, sometimes, watching it I feel as if I’m being cornered at a party by someone telling me about a non-fiction book I “have to read” while I watch other people laughing and having fun. I know it’s a thinly veiled portrait of the Murdochs and it’s whip-smart and Machiavellian.

The final season of 'Succession' airs Sunday with new footage added to the title sequence. We examine the headlines and chyrons for details about Season ...

[Succession Club](https://www.vulture.com/2023/03/join-succession-club-and-watch-the-final-season-with-us.html), our subscriber-exclusive newsletter obsessively chronicling all the biggest twists of the final season. Or does it suggest that Kendall will find himself in another tragic car crash, mirroring the events of the [season one finale](https://www.vulture.com/article/succession-season-1-ep-10-recap-nobody-is-ever-missing.html)? If you’re not a subscriber yet, [click here to get started](https://subs.nymag.com/magazine/subscribe/official-subscription.html?utm_source=editorial&utm_medium=article_inline&utm_campaign=succession_vulturearticles#/). Season three focused on the upcoming presidential election, and Logan Roy’s kingmaker status as the head of a major media company. It’s the HBO drama equivalent of when a photographer says, “Now let’s do a silly one!” The fictional headlines and broadcasts shown throughout the credits are littered with Easter eggs that change every season, satirical chyrons that poke fun at the lobotomy-core state of mass media under corporate owners like Waystar Royco. The contents of these aren’t just Fox News parodies; they hint at action to come in the season. In later seasons, they retrofit the older boys to be Connor and Kendall and add a younger brother with a very Romanesque smirk. And in the final shot, there are two girls and two boys at the table. Does the toddler signify a new heir threatening the Roy kids’ claim to the throne, [Succession](https://www.vulture.com/article/succession-final-season-4-review.html) theme song will go down in history as one of the greatest of all time. [Nicholas Britell](https://www.vulture.com/article/nicholas-britell-andor-score-interview.html) was on some other plane when he came up with that track, and its beat-drop every week has had fans in a Pavlovian chokehold since 2018. My theory is that the one who would later be identified as wrong-Connor was meant to be Kendall in season one.

The final season of 'Succession' kicks off with a grim birthday party for Logan and a rash decision by Kendall, Shiv and Roman.

The premiere sets up a host of potential avenues for Succession to explore over its final run, including the (almost certainly doomed) Pierce acquisition by the kids, Logan’s re-engagement with the ATN news channel (as teased in the season four trailer) and Connor’s extremely quixotic presidential bid (and wedding, also part of the trailer). The family back-and-forth wraps with about 10 minutes left in the episode, paving the way for a quietly devastating scene where Shiv returns to her apartment to pick up some clothes and runs into Tom. [Kendall is Kendall](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-features/succession-season-4-jeremy-strong-kendall-roy-interview-1235359231/) — when Tom (Matthew Macfadyen) calls Shiv to tell her that he had a drink or a meeting or a date or something with Naomi Pierce, Kendall’s ex-girlfriend and a member of the Pierce media dynasty. Alexander Skarsgard’s Lukas Mattson is lurking somewhere, too, and Kendall’s involvement in death of the waiter from the season one finale is ever-present. A few months have passed since Logan’s maneuvers in the season three finale iced out Kendall ( [Jeremy Strong](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-features/succession-season-4-jeremy-strong-kendall-roy-interview-1235359231/)), Shiv (Sarah Snook) and Roman (Kieran Culkin) from taking control of Waystar Royco. That single phone call, plus another Pierce kid getting tagged on Instagram by Greg’s (Nicholas Braun) unvetted date to Logan’s party, sets the three off on a quixotic effort to buy Pierce out from under their father. He wants to talk about their dissolving marriage, and it looks like she does, too, but she can’t let her guard down enough to bring herself to do it. He’s two days out from closing the GoJo deal that will make him even more obscenely rich (at the expense of giving up day-to-day control of his company), but what he really wants is to see his kids (besides Alan Ruck’s Connor, who’s in attendance). “They’re just sort of addicted to this thing,” Kieran Culkin told THR about the three siblings. Yes, it’s the world they’ve known their whole lives, but still. He’d be a lot happier if he didn’t love these kids, if he actually just really treated them with the contempt that I think at times they deserve, and he doesn’t do that. [fourth and last season](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-features/succession-recap-season-4-premiere-1235353506/) opens with another party — it’s Logan’s ( [Brian Cox](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/t/brian-cox-2/)) birthday — but it has a distinctly different vibe than parties from seasons past.

Succession star Jeremy Strong warns about dark storms ahead for Kendall Roy in season 4 and why he advocated for his character's story to end.

I actually feel like, in the beginning of this season, Kendall is a bit in the back seat of the car, and happy to be in a band. There’s something about the allure of newspapers that he both wants to compete with his father and dominate his father, but he also wants to be in his father’s footsteps. This is a nice moment of connection with his brother and sister, and the moment in the river where things are sort of placid and calm… I went to my house directly from the airport, took a long walk, sat on the beach, watched Kendall go down with the sun, and said, “Adios.” But he’s still coming back from the ropes of what happened in Italy, and happy to be along for this ride with his brother and sister. Kendall is aware that he has a sort of bottomless hole inside of him that he needs to fill, that in the past, he’s filled with drug use and substance abuse. What was it like to tap into that moment of victory for the siblings? There’s a lot of room for it to spiral, but for now, it’s a solid position. He’s going to continue trying to fill it that way, which I see as a sort of tragedy. There’s very little left of him to put the crown on. They sort of do a fireman’s carry out of that scene, and it continues into the beginning of this next season, where he’s leaning on them. For his part, Strong loves the premiere’s subtle use of Kendall — especially since it’s not going to last for long as the final season chugs along.