Tag: succession

Congratulations, Tom Wambsgans.

After 90 blistering minutes of wheeling, dealing, begging, borrowing, and pleading, Succession’s series finale closed out with a new sheriff in town: Matthew Macfadyen’s opportunistic exec, officially anointed as the CEO of Waystar Royco. Tom beat the odds to win the chair with a last-minute assist from his estranged wife, Sarah Snook’s Shiv, who made a dramatic eleventh-hour decision to vote against her brother Kendall. 

“I love you, I really, I love you—but I can’t fucking stomach you,” she tells Jeremy Strong’s character, shortly after walking away from the episode’s climactic board meeting.

Up until the finale’s last minutes, it looks like Kendall may have finally found a way to whip up enough votes to win back the company he believes to be his birthright. (As we all know, promises made at the Candy Kitchen in Bridgehampton are binding.) He has a sometimes-wavering Roman (Kieran Culkin) on his side; he has Arian Moayed’s Stewy, making a triumphant return to Succession in its final hour; he has Shiv, once she discovers that Alexander Skarsgard’s Lukas Mattson has only been using her, and is planning to name someone else as Waystar’s American CEO after the Gojo deal. (His pick, as we learn halfway through the episode? Tom, largely because Mattson is a sexist nightmare. “I can’t deal with the mess of that” Mattson tells Tom, speaking about Shiv. “So if I can have anyone in the world, why don’t i have the guy who put the baby inside her instead of the baby lady.”)

Except, when it counts, Kendall doesn’t have Shiv. Just as she’s about to cast her all-important vote, she stalks out of the boardroom, claiming she needs a minute to think. When she comes up for air, she tells Roman and Kendall that she just can’t go through with voting Kendall in—because, she says clearly casting about for a reason, he killed someone. She’s speaking, of course, about Kendall’s season one Chappaquiddick moment—something Kendall confessed to his siblings at the end of season three.

Ironically enough, it’s Kendall’s impulse to cover his own ass that seems to doom him in the end. He tells Shiv and Roman that he was lying about the waiter’s death; his move instantly backfires, convincing Roman and Shiv that Kendall can’t be trusted. As Shiv’s resolve stiffens, Kendall’s increasingly desperate pleas fall on deaf ears.  “It doesn’t even make any sense!” he howls, before fully regressing into a spoiled kid, perhaps throwing a tantrum at the Candy Kitchen: “I’m the eldest boy! I am the eldest boy.”

He’s actually not, says Shiv—somewhere, Alan Ruck’s Connor is thanking her—before going to seal Kendall’s fate. 

And, after nearly 90 minutes of buildup, the episode and series end with a rather muted sequence indicating that regardless of the outcome, everybody on this show is and will remain miserable. We last see Roman having a drink alone, the stitches Kendall opened up during the boardroom fight gently bleeding; Shiv and Tom together again, holding hands but looking in opposite directions, like the one-percenter version of Ben and Elaine; and Kendall, poor, lost Kendall, drawn to the edge of Battery Park.

Kendall was undone by water when he accidentally drowned a man; he nearly drowned himself near the end of Succession season three. Just hours before that fateful board meeting, we see him triumphantly convincing his siblings to go for a midnight swim with him, then emerging from the surf believing he’s been reborn as Logan’s true heir. In the end, he faces water once more, flanked only by Logan’s ex body man and best pal, Colin. This, it seems, will be the last of his inheritance—and we’ll never know if, in the end, he wound up drowning for real.

Every season finale of HBO’s Succession is titled after a line from John Berryman’s “Dream Song 29,” a poem from the literary icon’s Pulitzer Prize–winning 1964  collection, 77 Dream Songs. The poems follow a tragicomic character named Henry—“a white American in early middle age…who has suffered an irreversible loss,” in Berryman’s words—whose roots appear autobiographical: When Berryman was 11 years old, his father was found outside their home, apparently having taken his own life. Berryman spent his life grappling with this grief in his work. His broad connection to Succession, then, is ostensibly clear: The HBO drama follows the Roy siblings, who are all stunted by their father’s abuse. They are comically, cyclically either at war with him or cozying up to his empire—even after his death. 

“Dream Song 29,” though, is particularly revealing as a thematic twin to Succession. The poem’s initial stanza alludes to an ambiguous “thing” weighing on Henry’s heart—something that, even if he were crying in atonement for 100 years, he could “not make good” on. The guilt, or “thing,” evolves from private sensations—a “cough,” an “odour,” a “chime”—into a visceral image of his sin, described as the “grave Sienese face,” likely referencing austere religious painters such as Duccio or Simone Martini. Henry yearns for absolution, yet “all the bells say” that he is too late to get it. The concluding stanza reads as a paranoid inventory of his sin; his guilt becomes consequential, as Henry reflects on hacking a woman up. The final line, “Nobody is ever missing,” represents a delusional self-assurance that Henry has done nothing wrong. 

“Nobody Is Ever Missing” is also the title of Succession’s first season finale, which culminates in a real death and directly links Henry to one of the Roy siblings, Kendall. As the episode opens, Kendall has partnered with investors to purchase his father’s conservative media conglomerate. Logan interrogates Kendall about the reason behind his betrayal, and Kendall cobbles together a fragmented, Henry-esque reply: he wants to “do some good things.” But he is shaken. That evening, Kendall tries to procure hard drugs at his sister’s wedding from a teenage cater-waiter, only to find himself culpable for the young man’s death when their car plunges into a lake. Kendall manages to escape, leaving the young man behind, then behaves as though nothing has transpired—an act of self-delusion. His father winds up covering for him.

Succession’s next season finale, “This is Not for Tears,” builds to Kendall pulling off the betrayal he’d merely promised a season prior. It centers on the Roys’ attempts to determine the “blood sacrifice” who will take the blame for a scandal engulfing the company. The choice is ultimately Kendall, who’s been manipulated by his father in return for covering up the waiter’s death. Resigned to his fate, Kendall asks Logan if he ever could have risen to CEO. His father responds that Kendall couldn’t, because he’s not a killer, and “you have to be a killer.” Kendall subsequently rejects the sentimentality he displayed in season one—weeping into Logan’s arms, like a child—when he faces the press and accuses his father of being a “malignant presence.” The Berryman line quoted in the episode’s title, “This is not for tears,” also indicates Henry’s rejection of self-pity. 

Kendall’s journey of rebellion in season three proves to be cripplingly lonely. The weight of his depression inspires him to confess his season one sin in that year’s finale, “All the Bells Say.” “I’m not a good person,” Kendall tells his siblings, Roman and Shiv. His vulnerability unites them as they join forces to take down Logan. As they drive to see him, Shiv asks who’s ready to murder their father. Kendall responds, “Pass me the fucking shotgun”—a line explicitly evoking Berryman. But as the siblings are about to pull the trigger, they discover their father is, again, one step ahead of them—“too late,” as the bells tell Henry in “Dream Song 29.”

This oedipal spectacle operates alongside the misogynistic violence that has undergirded Succession from the beginning—and Berryman, too, writes of misogyny unflinchingly in his dream songs. The poet wanted to “pry” himself open for all the world to see, as he says in the poem that opens the book. Despite being an exceptional literature student, he struggled with alcoholism and symptoms of bipolar disorder throughout his adult life. He was a notorious womanizer, and his wife and children endured his neglect and vitriol. 

In the latest episode of Succession, “America Decides,” a right-wing group has torched a voting center on Election Day, giving Roman and Kendall—the newly appointed CEOs in the wake of Logan’s death—an opportunity to call the election early for a fascist candidate and gain his favor. The dialogue, as usual, is colored by male ennui and crude sexism, encapsulated by a blasé Roman declaring, “Dad is dead and America is just a big pussy waiting to get fucked.” Meanwhile, Shiv’s secret plotting against Kendall and Roman’s company takeover is exposed. She’s humiliated before her brothers, Kendall insulting her like Logan would (“You’re a piece of dirt”) and Roman barraging her with sexist insults; she fights back, and he tells her to leave if she’s going to be “hysterical.” Most witheringly, he then tells Shiv she’s “ boring,” an adjective to which Succession returns often—and one that mirrors the sentiment of Berryman’s “Life, friends, is Boring” (“Dream Song 14”).

It’s a testament to both Berryman’s and the show’s genius that this language so expertly tracks how violent, unresolved feelings can shape our perspectives and destroy our closest relationships—and eventually, maybe democracy itself. As Kendall and Roman force their network to prematurely call the election, Kendall emulates Logan just as Berryman followed in his father’s footsteps. 

The episode’s climactic scene holds on a close-up of Shiv staring at her brothers in horror. It’s an ominous detail, particularly knowing that the Succession series finale will be titled “With Open Eyes”—taken from a line from “Dream Songs 29” wherein Henry faces the “grave Sienese face,” the embodiment of his misdeeds. Even as Henry’s eyes are open at this moment in the poem, Berryman describes him as “blind” and “ghastly.” Succession’s visual language and close read of Berryman’s misogynistic motif implies it may be Shiv who must confront the stark reality of the role she’s played in a corrupt, male-dominated family system. 

She’s been effectively expelled from this sphere, and has vowed revenge. But each of the Roy siblings, in the wake of their father’s death, are grappling with what he’s left behind—the guilt they’ve carried and repressed over decades. Succession’s incisive portrait of white male blindness suggests a reckoning is coming. The big question remaining is who’s staring it in the face.

Warning: Spoilers for Succession season four, episode seven to follow.

Alexander Skarsgård’s antagonistic tech bro Lukas Matsson has spent the last season-plus of Succession splintering the Roy family. Late in the show’s third season, his GoJo offer essentially severed Logan Roy’s (Brian Cox) relationships with his children, Kendall (Jeremy Strong), Shiv (Sarah Snook), and Roman (Kieran Culkin), and demolished any trust left in Shiv’s marriage to Tom (Matthew Macfadyen). This season, he’s again disrupting the Roy family’s toxic status quo—needling a grief-ridden Roman into a mountaintop breakdown, belittling Kendall in person and in ill-advised Tweets, and courting Shiv into betraying her brothers by aligning with him. 

In the show’s latest episode, “Tailgate Party,” Matsson wreaks more havoc on the Roys’ home turf—sweeping into Shiv and Tom’s tony triplex on election eve, behaving erratically in front of a powerful crowd, and eventually revealing that GoJo is kind of a fraud. Though his company’s bogus numbers alarm Shiv–who has backstabbed her brothers and “nailed [her]self on the Matsson cross” for this alliance—Matsson doesn’t seem too bothered by that detail. 

“He’s got these terrible numbers, and he just charges forward with this ‘move fast and break things’ approach,” Skarsgård tells Vanity Fair in a recent phone call. “He’s relentless—it’s like, ‘We’ll figure it out. It’s nothing.’ He leans into the chaos of it all and thrives on it.”

Skarsgård says he didn’t know of this Matsson plot twist until season four was well under way. When Succession creator Jesse Armstrong initially reached out to him about playing Matsson, the character was only slated to appear in two episodes. “I was such an admirer of Jesse’s work—from Peep Show, his old show back in the UK—and I thought Succession was brilliant. To come on and do two episodes, I was beyond excited to do that.” When Succession wrapped its third season, Skarsgård believed that he was hanging up his tech-bro sweatpants. 

But in early 2022, Armstrong rang Skarsgård “to ask if I would be interested in revisiting Matsson.” The Succession creator gave the actor a rough idea where Matsson would pick up in the new season—“not that he had to convince me, because I had the most amazing time on those few episodes I did last year,” Skarsgård says. Armstrong talked about “the broader business ideas of the season and how Matsson would come into this storyline with the siblings.” Armstrong set up Matsson’s broad arc, but did not mention anything about GoJo’s hinky numbers. 

Armstrong did, however, make “a little weird side note, that potentially there was a girl whom Matsson was seeing. It’s kind of over, but he’s sending her blood bricks.” Skarsgård interrupted Armstrong. “I was like, ‘I’m sorry, Jesse, what was that?’ He said, ‘Frozen bricks of blood, as kind of a joke.’”

Says Skarsgård, “There was something so delicious about that. It was so deeply disturbing but also funny and weird. I was thrilled to hear that.” (The detail was so fascinating that The New York Times recently covered it: “According to Natalie Jones, a psychotherapist in California who specializes in relationships and narcissism, the type of person, like Matsson, who would send ‘bizarre things,’ especially in a nonconsensual manner, is calculated, disruptive and willing to go to extremes to influence or seek sympathy.”)

The actor didn’t know of GoJo’s whack numbers until filming was underway, but that didn’t fluster him. “I thought it added to the eccentricities of the character—the fact that he’s so confident and such a bulldozer in many ways,” says Skarsgård. “Jesse obviously knew how he wanted to wrap it up, but there’s an incredible fluidity to the show. There are a lot changes from day one to day 97—Jesse and the other writers are very nimble. If they see something on the day that they respond to and find interesting, they might lean into that more. Something that might have looked great on paper and is not as exciting in front of the camera, they’ll pull back. There would often be quite significant script changes late because they would constantly tweak stuff—get excited about something and then explore that storyline a bit deeper.”

Skarsgård confirms that the Swedish-born Matsson “is an amalgamation of…[Spotify co-founder] Daniel Ek and a little bit of Elon Musk. He’s inspired by several real-life people, but then there’s a lot of creative freedom and some idiosyncratic details that are unique to Matsson.” 

There’s the blood brick thing, for starters. (Neither Ek nor Musk have been known to send ex-lovers blood.) And Skarsgård has had a hand in his character’s wardrobe—making sure that Matsson pops against everyone around him in smart power suits. As the actor told VF earlier this week, he wore his own T-shirt, casual pants, and slides for a high-stakes season three meeting with Logan and Roman at his character’s Lake Como villa. During the meeting, Matsson suggested GoJo acquire Royco rather than the other way around—and Skarsgård liked the idea of the character being underdressed as “a bit of a power move. There’s something quite eccentric and weird about him talking about one of the potentially biggest mergers or deals in the history of the business” clad in worn leisurewear. “I thought it added a lot to who I pictured Matsson was.”