The empire Logan Roy amassed in Succession dwarfs past TV fortunes and could have more malign effects on the larger world. Photo / HBO
This article does not contain spoilers for the final episode.
The HBO drama updates past rich-people soaps like Dallas. But unlike those series, it argues that the problems of the hyper-wealthy inevitably become ours too.
On November 21, 1980, more than 83 million people — over three-quarters of the entire American TV viewership — watched Who Done It?, the episode of Dallas that revealed who shot the love-to-hate-him oil magnate J.R. Ewing. The mystery, which CBS milked for eight solid months, was a consuming obsession, a Texas-sized example of the power of 20th century TV to focus the world on one thing.
On Monday, HBO’s Succession will answer the question (or not) of who inherits the media empire of the late tyrant Logan Roy in front of a viewership of — well, a lot less than 83 million. (The show’s final season premiere had 2.3 million same-day viewers; delayed viewing on streaming brings the total average audience to over 8 million.)
Airing its finale to a much more dispersed audience is a fitting end to the saga of a family that got rich off the modern media market, whose final episodes are set against the backdrop of a country that is coming apart.
But numbers aside, Succession is in many ways the premium-cable, late-capitalist heir to Dallas, a prime-time saga that uses delicious dialogue and sibling rivalries to explore the particular nature of wealth in its time. It’s Dallas after 40-plus years of wealth concentration and media fragmentation.
The Who Shot J.R.? sensation was, in retrospect, the high-water mark of mass media’s reach. In 1980, three networks still controlled the entire TV audience, which they would soon have to share with cable. It was also a cultural turning point; prime time was becoming fascinated with the rich just as the Reagan Revolution was beginning.
Succession is very different from Dallas in the details. There are no twangy accents, assassination attempts, cliffhangers or season-long dreams. Its plot turns are simply, devastatingly inevitable: The show sets up conditions, gives its characters motivations and lets them act in their interests. (Yellowstone is a closer heir to Dallas in both cowboy hats and murder plots.)
And if the Succession audience is smaller, the money is, pointedly, bigger. Rewatched in 2023, the idea of luxury in Dallas looks quaint, almost dowdy. The aesthetic is Texan country club; the Ewing homestead, the size of a decent suburban McMansion, is a toolshed next to the Manhattan aeries, Hamptons manors and Italian villas that the Roys flitter among.
Some of this is a matter of modern premium-cable budgets vs. the grind of old-school network-TV production, of course. But it also reflects the changed, distorting nature of modern riches. In 1980, American wealth inequality was still near its postwar lows. Since then, the wealth of the top 0.01 per cent has grown at a rate roughly five times as much as that of the population overall. Today, the very rich are very, very, very richer.
The holdings of Waystar Royco — Hollywood studios, cruise lines, newspapers, amusement parks, a king-making right-wing news channel — make Ewing Oil look like a franchise gas station. We know only vaguely how Logan Roy built his empire, but it was enabled partly by the media-consolidation and antitrust deregulation, beginning in the Dallas/Reagan era, that allowed his real-life analogues like Rupert Murdoch to make their own piles.
Meanwhile, the smaller TV audiences of the cable and streaming age have allowed Succession to thrive as a more specific and more niche entertainment. A series in the three-network era had to appeal to tens of millions of people just to stay on the air — Dallas needed to serve a crowd-pleasing spread of barbecue. Succession can afford to be a rarefied, decadent pleasure, like an ortolan, the deep-fried songbird, eaten whole, that was featured in a memorable Season 1 meal.
Dallas, like its followers from Dynasty through Empire, was in the populist soap-opera tradition of letting the audience delight in the woes of rich people. Its characters were like us — jealous, envious, heartbroken — just with more money and less happiness.
Succession has its crowd-pleasing and universal elements too. Logan was an irresistible brute, able to pack a Shakespeare soliloquy’s worth of emotion into a two-word curse. The Roy children — Kendall, Roman, Shiv and their half brother, Connor — have developed a survivors’ bond and survivalist cutthroat instincts; one arm joins the group hug, the other holds a dagger. At root, the series’ family themes are talk-show simple: Hurt people hurt people.
But its voice, as set by the creator, Jesse Armstrong, is arch and referential; its details demand a range of knowledge or at least the willingness to Google. As Logan is laid to rest in a mausoleum that he bought for $5 million from a dot-com pet-supply mogul — one last cold and expensive residence — Shiv jokes, “Cat food Ozymandias.”
Like Mad Men before it, Succession is a drama that also happens to be the funniest thing on TV any given week. (Its earliest episodes tilted the other way, with the rhythms of a comedy disguised as a premium-TV drama.)
But its showmanship is informed by a caustic clarity about the toxic business culture Logan Roy built. “He fed a certain kind of meagerness in men,” Logan’s brother, Ewan, says in a tender and damning eulogy at his funeral. Waystar’s offerings — mass entertainment and right-wing propaganda — have had America on a sugar and poison binge.
Now, it’s time for the purge. I once wrote that Succession viewers “can enjoy it knowing that we have no stake, except for the tiny fact that people like the Roys run the world.” This final season has emphasised that that is a very big “except.”
Succession has long hinted at the Roys’ willingness to play footsie with dark political forces for ratings and influence. Waystar’s right-wing news network, ATN, leaves a popular commentator on the air despite his Nazi sympathies. The family backs a far-right presidential candidate, Jeryd Mencken, who voices openness to the ideas of Adolf Hitler and Francisco Franco. (Mencken fittingly shares a surname with the American writer who said, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.”)
Late in the final season, the close presidential election is disrupted by a fire, apparently started by Mencken supporters, that incinerates thousands of ballots for his opponent in liberal Milwaukee. In exchange for Mencken’s regulatory cooperation in a struggle over control of the company, ATN declares the handsome fascist the winner, legitimising his claim to power amid a legal challenge. The result leads to riots. But it’s great for ratings.
As for American democracy — well, good luck! Part of the fantasy of past rich-family sagas was that none of the drama affected you, even by implication. When Ewings did each other dirty in the oil business, you were never asked to imagine yourself, somewhere offscreen, seeing your gas prices go up.
Succession, on the other hand, argues that the problems of today’s hyper-rich inevitably become ours because they have so much influence and so little sense of responsibility. (Its main exception is the Pierce family, the owners of a rival media empire, whose blue-blood noblesse oblige comes across as patronising and ineffectual.) We are swamped in the wake of their yachts and chopped up by the propeller blades, even if the billionaires, sitting on the top deck, scarcely feel a bump.
And while the damaged characters are fascinating, even pitiable, there’s no one among the Roys or their enablers worth rooting for. As with Game of Thrones, if you think the important thing is who finally ends up in the big chair, you’re missing the point.
There are no heroes on the horizon. Mencken’s election opponent is a bloodless centrist who mewls about “process” while the country burns. (The election episode and its aftermath felt like a vicious inversion of a West Wing good-government fantasy.) In the streets, people are taking action, but all they can do is rage.
Throughout the series, the constant has been that however the Roys might suffer, emotionally or on the corporate org chart, they never faced true material consequences. They might be more calculated than F. Scott Fitzgerald’s careless Tom and Daisy Buchanan, but they still smashed up things and creatures and retreated into their money.
Up to now, at least. But the penultimate episode suggests that things could take a turn.
As Logan is laid to rest, in a Manhattan funeral befitting a president, the streets are choked with crowds protesting Mencken’s smoke-scented victory. The menace circles closer: sirens in the distance, protesters banging on a limo, explosions rattling guests arriving at the St. Regis for a post-funeral reception. The Roys’ force field holds, but it quivers.
In the final scene, Roman, having botched his shot at CEO by having a breakdown at Logan’s funeral and misjudging Mencken’s loyalty, wanders outside, where a throng of demonstrators are coming up the street. He hops the barricade to pick a fight, gets hit in the face and is nearly trampled.
The scene is disorienting after four seasons inside the protective bubble of wealth. It suggests that the Roys, fumbling to seize their father’s legacy, may have unleashed something beyond their control, capable of hurting even them.
I still doubt that Succession, being Succession, will end with any true, proportional comeuppance. But it might just yet leave a mark.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: James Poniewozik
©2023 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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