This article contains major spoilers for the final season of Succession.
Autumn light filters through the treetops of Central Park West, streaming into Jean-Georges, giving the grey banquettes a matte, silver gleam. The space is plain, severe in its neutrality, undeniably grand and hushed. Each table, though in clear view
It’s the ideal place, really, for the Roy children — the scions of the Waystar Royco media empire on HBO’s Succession — to discuss their father’s funeral arrangements.
The conversation is brisk, and though they chose Jean-Georges as their meeting spot, they don’t eat the food. They leave the pastries — the dark, oversize canelés and fruit-studded buns — along with the platter of fanned, cut fruit, completely untouched. They get up from their seats without so much as unravelling a napkin or dirtying a plate. The slight, feathered mark of Shiv’s nude lipstick on a coffee cup is the only trace of their presence.
It’s not unusual for the Roys to avoid eating. From Logan’s humiliating game of “Boar on the Floor” to the menacing box of doughnuts he sends his children when they try to meet in secret, the food on Succession has always been deliciously toxic, dissonant and loaded — a clear line into the family’s trauma and power dynamics.
But in the final season, things are especially warped and grim. It’s as if the show has stepped into its Ozempic era and real power can only be found in the total absence of appetite. For those with meaningful status in Succession, food doesn’t exist for pleasure or nourishment — it barely exists at all. If a character does have a nibble, no matter how small, it tends to be a red flag.
Tom Wambsgans, Siobhan Roy’s husband, didn’t come from money, but married into this super-rich family, and has carefully studied their patterns and prerogatives. He is hyper-aware of the contradictions and intricacies of America’s unspoken upper-class etiquette — and often the first to criticise a faux pas.
“She’s wolfing all the canapés like a famished warthog,” Tom tells cousin Greg, clocking the inappropriate date Greg brought along to Logan’s birthday lunch. Because what could be more plebeian, what could signify her being any more out of place, than actually eating the food?
Not long after, at Logan’s wake, Tom misjudges his position and nominates himself to take over as interim CEO for the company. If it wasn’t already clear he’d made a terrible mistake, it is when Tom pops a fish taco into his mouth. As he’s powerless, chewing, Karl imagines how the board might see him: “You’re a clumsy interloper and no one trusts you. The only guy pulling for you is dead, and now you’re just married to the ex-boss’s daughter, who doesn’t even like you.”
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By the time the Waystar team flies to Norway to finalise the sale of the company to Lukas Matsson, the billionaire CEO of GoJo, Tom sees hospitality as pure gastro-hostility. As Waystar’s senior executives pile their plates with food at a buffet, he’s careful not to be seen eating breakfast at all. “Ambush!” he calls out cheerfully to his colleagues. “You took the bait, fattened for the kill.”
And Tom’s not wrong. A GoJo executive comments on the portion size, too: “Hey, easy buddy, leave some for us.” The Waystar team’s desire for breakfast pastries isn’t the only thing that now feels embarrassing — the Americans are overdressed for the countryside, anxious for the deal to go through, fearful of losing their jobs. Their hunger, their appetite, their keenness, it’s a squishy surplus of vulnerability.
As Season 4 opens, Logan is competing with his children to buy Pierce Global Media, and escapes his own birthday party in a huff to visit Nectar, a Greek-owned coffee shop on Madison Avenue. (For Town & Country, Charlotte Druckman wrote about this excursion as its own kind of power move.)
In a rare moment of vulnerability, we see Logan eating. But first, he insists to his bodyguard, Colin, who is on the clock, that Colin is his best friend, that human beings are merely economic units in the market, that he isn’t sure what happens when we die. Emotionally, he’s a mess.
“Nothing tastes like it used to, does it?” Logan says wistfully. “Nothing’s the same as it was.”
In Episode 8, the family reaches the heights of both their incompetence and their power. Election Day in the newsroom was already tense for Tom without the Roy siblings stomping around, sliding notes directly to TV anchors, pushing their agendas on his top voting analyst, scrolling through Twitter, reframing the headlines because, well, the right-wing candidate asked them to. Tom loses his temper when Greg approves cheap sushi as his lunch.
It’s not much of a power move — it is not, for example, Logan telling the staff to scrape an entire over-the-top steak and lobster dinner for the family into the trash, then order pizza instead — but it’s the only move that Tom, who has lost control of the newsroom, who never had any control over it in the first place, has left. He will allow the election results to be nudged and massaged, the newsroom to be compromised and swayed. He will allow the world to burn, but look, he is above the sushi. He will not touch the sushi.
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Advertise with NZME.Greg, on the other hand, is happy to dig into his “bodega sushi” as the siblings pressure Darwin, ATN’s election analyst, to call the election before he’s ready. It’s a devastating and hilarious sequence. “This isn’t actually a numbers thing,” says Roman. “I’m just going to say we’re good and that’s on me.” “You can’t make the call ‘til I make the call,” says Darwin, angrily.
But a moment later, Darwin has given up all sense of editorial integrity and is punished for it, as he accidentally smears wasabi from Greg’s sushi into his own eyes. Greg, in a bumbling, misguided effort to help, pours stinging, lemon-flavoured LaCroix right into the wound.
It’s as if he didn’t know there’s no making things better with food — there is only making things worse.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times. Succession is available to watch on Neon.
Written by: Tejal Rao
©2023 THE NEW YORK TIMES
