Spoiler Alert! Look away now if you don’t want a shock… CHRISTOPHER STEVENS gives Succession five stars as the saga about the in-fighting family has its most dramatic twist so far
Succession
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No one saw that coming – a group hug between the three bilious billionaire siblings, the perpetually in-fighting Kendall, Shiv and Roman Roy.
But the event that triggered this rare moment of sentimentality has been coming a long time. Don’t read on if you’re still waiting to watch the momentous third episode but… here’s the spoiler… patriarch Logan Roy is dead.
The media mogul (Brian Cox) collapsed from a suspected heart attack in the toilet of his private jet. He died like Elvis, surrounded by obsequious hangers-on with no medical training.
Back on the ground, his children were on a yacht circling the Statue of Liberty, for the wedding of oldest son Connor (Alan Ruck) – a wedding Logan couldn’t be bothered to attend.
The episode evoked all the confusion that starts to swirl when bad news breaks. Chief lackey Tom (the superbly oily Matthew Macfadyen) called Roman (Kieran Culkin) to say, ‘Hey. Uh, your dad is very sick. It’s very bad. So, he was short of breath… they’re doing chest compressions.’
Jaw-dropper: Brian Cox as Logan Roy and Matthew Macfadyen as Tom in the latest episode
No one saw that coming: A group hug between the three bilious billionaire siblings, Kendall (Jeremy Strong), Shiv (Sarah Snook) and Roman Roy (Kieran Culkin)
Old man Logan was such a manipulative sadist that at first it seemed entirely likely this was just his cruel joke, a game invented to see how his children would react as he whiled away a transatlantic flight with his board of directors.
We didn’t see him collapse, and every time the camera cut back to the body in the floor, one of the crew obscured our view.
But gradually the reality sank in. Logan was dead, and Tom knew it but couldn’t bring himself to say the words.
The younger Roys reacted in ways that defined their characters. Kendall (Jeremy Strong) made futile attempts to take charge, demanding to speak to the pilot and ordering his assistant to get ‘the best heart doctor in the world’ on the phone ‘in the next two minutes’.
Shiv (Sarah Snook) made wounded animal noises and pleaded for the plane to be kept circling, so that she wouldn’t have to face whatever came next. Connor wallowed in self-pity, lamenting that he hadn’t won the approval of a father who never loved him.
Manbaby Roman’s reaction was the most visceral, an extended tantrum. Succession is an Oedipal drama, and the youngest of the Roys is sexually obsessed with a mother figure, his father’s long-serving female lieutenant, Gerri (J. Smith-Cameron).
‘The episode evoked all the confusion that starts to swirl when bad news breaks’
That led to an excruciating encounter, minutes before Roman realised his father was dead. Reporters sensed the news even before the plane had returned, perhaps because the flight was tracked on Twitter.
Kendall tried to dictate the next public steps: ‘We’ll get a funeral off the rack. We’ll do Reagan’s, with tweaks.’ As the initial shock wore off, everyone started jockeying for power. The board made moves to exclude the Roy family, and they huddled together for protection – hence that group hug on the airport tarmac.
For all of the show’s five-year run, the central question of Succession has been which of the siblings will seize power. But now the throne is empty, we can see that without their family ties to the emperor, all of them might now be irrelevant.
The Roys are no longer fighting for dominance but for their lives. Succession becomes Survival.
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