Succession season 4 review: Connor’s Wedding is a television masterpiece

Succession's Logan Roy.

Greg and Zanna watch an episode of television they will never forget.

SCORES

Number of weddings: 1

Number of episodes of better television: 0

SHE SAW

When the credits rolled, I applauded. I don’t think I’ve ever done that before but episode three of Succession, season four is a perfect episode of television. It’s so good, it makes you feel bad about yourself. Afterwards, I felt compelled to google Jesse Armstrong, the creator and presumed genius, to learn everything about him and how he came to write the single best scripted hour in the history of the world. Am I speaking in hyperbole? I don’t think so.

If you haven’t watched Succession yet or you’re not up to date, this review is going to ruin your future experience with it, so stop now if that’s something you care about.

Before this episode, I was only vaguely following what was going on story-wise this season - it’s an amazingly fast-talking show - but I was enjoying the characters and their relationships with each other. The comedy had been turned up a notch with siblings Kendall, Shiv and Roman teaming up to take down their dad, media mogul Logan Roy. The sibling banter was at an all-time high and we were all braced for another brilliantly quick-witted episode surrounding the performatively patriotic wedding of Connor Roy and his bought bride, Willa.

The episode opens with tensions high between the siblings and their father as he hops on a plane to Sweden to secure a deal that the children oppose. Logan is as ruthless as ever and making big company decisions that look certain to cause chaos. It’s all very juicy and it seems like things are really about to come to a head with the Roys. Then there’s a phone call that no one expected: Logan has collapsed on the plane, isn’t breathing and doesn’t have a heartbeat. The rug has been pulled out from underneath all of us.

The following 40 or so minutes are emotionally raw and an incredibly realistic representation of the hours after someone unexpectedly dies - shock, denial, regret, guilt, numbness, other indescribable feelings. The performances of Sarah Snook, Kieran Culkin and Jeremy Strong are masterful. This family is so flawed, so self-important and so deplorable in so many ways and yet, in this moment, they are just three adult children who’ve lost their dad at a time when they least expected it.

Given that Succession started with Logan Roy being gravely ill and the children all vying to take over as the head of Waystar, his death in this final season was predictable - we all should’ve seen it coming - and yet Armstrong managed to completely blindside us. I couldn’t sleep after watching it. I was so hopped up on the power of good storytelling, I lay awake, synapses firing in all directions, and pondering how it was possible that such a perfect hour of TV existed. Hyperbole? I don’t think so.

HE SAW

When a full and final accounting is made of the greatest TV episodes of all time, there will be this week’s episode of Succession followed by pages of empty space. A few people might sputter: “But what about The Wire, The Sopranos, etc?” and, yes, those were great shows that had great episodes of their own but, when asked to suggest which of those rose above “Connor’s Wedding”, people will be at a loss, their minds bedazzled by the bright flash of art that exploded across the darkening skies of peak TV this week.

It was greatness beyond rationality. You felt the gathering of the greatness inside you, sustaining you, taking you over, until eventually your body was at least two-thirds Succession. One way to judge the quality of a work of art is to measure the length of time you stand or sit before it with your mouth open. In the case of Connor’s Wedding, mine opened 10 minutes or so in and, if I closed it before I went to sleep that night, I don’t remember.

Succession is effectively an enormously long movie divided into hour-long segments. From the show’s beginning in 2018 – from the moment we read the title – we knew the end we were moving toward, and last night we reached it. That we knew this moment was coming, and was coming this season, and that we had been waiting for it for several years, but were still so struck by it, was testament not just to the creative genius at the show’s heart but to the management of the show’s enormous number of storylines, emotional arcs, jeopardies, redemptions, loyalties and – most importantly – disloyalties. To keep hold of all these moving parts over dozens of hours of television, while bringing regular emotional payoffs within each episode, is challenging enough. To take all that and elevate it to a climactic episode of operatic high art – with seven episodes still to run! – was an act so audacious as to be laughable. What do they do next, without it being anticlimactic?

Given that the episode was about a death, the thing that struck me was how funny it was. Much of the humour was uncomfortable, the result of emotionally stunted people trying to deal with the unwanted overflowing of their emotions, but the humour of discomfort is a powerful force, and I laughed throughout. On the other hand, I looked over at Zanna many times during the episode and every time she was in tears. This demonstrates two things: the complete mastery of viewer management that went into this episode and the fact we can never know what’s going on in the minds of others, even those closest to us.

Succession is now streaming on Neon.