Succession: The Current Game of Power
The following review is a translation of an article from 2022 for the newspaper El Comercio. It contains spoilers up to Season 3 of Succession.
This Monday, the HBO series Succession won four Emmys, including Best Drama Series. It tells the story of the power struggle between Logan Roy (Brian Cox), CEO of an international media conglomerate, and three of his sons. This tragicomedy is perfect for Shakespeare fans, whether for the crude betrayals or its parallel to King Lear.
The third season closes with Logan pulling his sons out of the company, Waystar Royco. “I won,” he tells them, “build your own pile”. The problem is that he tells them this after promising them for years that the company would be theirs. Kendall (Jeremy Strong) even prepared his entire professional life for the CEO position. And Shiv (Sarah Snook) was indeed building his own life in politics, but, after advising a candidate politically unaligned with Logan, he dragged her into his game, manipulated her, and used her gender to maneuver through the cruise crisis, then dumped her. Likewise, he discarded Roman (Kieran Culkin) after using him to get close to Lukas Mattson (Alexander Skarsgård), whom he wants to secretly sell the company to.
Logan’s bully profile is highly complex: he wants his kids to act out against him – to learn to be “killers” – but is furious when they do. He belittles them when they lose, sabotages them when he thinks they can win, and manipulates them back into the game when they walk away. It’s an abusive cycle. He makes them dependent. As the kids’ mother Caroline (Harriet Walter) said, “he kicks you like a dog to see how many times you come back”. Remember how Logan offered to buy Kendall’s shares in the company, but then rescinds his offer and says, “What if I want to keep you around?”
He likes to watch them from above, fighting for position, while he controls them secretly. It is heartbreaking to see they have been manipulated their whole lives, otherwise why don’t they go live on a private island and enjoy their millions outside of this lethal power struggle? Their misery is almost self-inflicted. Most of them don’t have the knowledge or experience to be CEO, but they want to, desperately.
“You’re jealous of what you’ve given your kids and now you want to take it all away from them,” Kendall told Logan in the first season, a great foreshadowing to the third. The kids aren’t the brightest bulbs in the business world, but they did some things right: Kendall saved the company from massive debt and tried to modernize it, and Shiv saved it with a deal for board seats. But Logan is furious that those ideas were not his. To top it off, every time the company is on the verge of going under, it’s Logan’s fault. In fact, if he had listened to Kendall about Vaulter and the need to modernize, or adopted some of Shiv’s liberal values, he wouldn’t have been outmaneuvered by Mattson. But his narcissism makes him think he is invincible.
And now he commands them to “build their own pile”. This patriarch has not passed on to his children the spirit of making something of themselves, but foul play and insatiable greed. He resents them, not realizing the role he has played in creating their dark side. In the fourth and final season, we will see what will become of the future of Waystar Royco and the Roy family.
9/10