A final bonfire of the vanities for ‘Succession’

Over four seasons and 39 hours of unbearably coruscating television, Succession creator Jesse Armstrong and his writing team managed to pull off one of the greatest confidence tricks in screen drama history.

Now as the show has ended, with what is arguably one of the most heartbreaking and depressing finales in recent memory, the fog has begun to lift and reveal to us the nature of Armstrong’s masterful deception.

You see, Armstrong, whose previous writing experience was in the world of black situation comedy, made us believe that the Shakespearean machinations of the Roy family and their battle to take over Waystar Royco were the stuff of great, sweeping narrative drama, when in fact they were merely the background to what is finally a long-form, globe-trotting, high-luxury set sitcom.

That’s because the basic rule of all sitcoms is that no matter what the creators throw in the path of their characters, the characters must ultimately always react in the same way and not change their core nature. Succession convinced both its characters and its audience that the Roys might just be able to change and get what they want, even though history and the Rolling Stones have given plenty of forewarning that at best you’re more likely to get what you need.

In the case of the Roy children — and if you haven’t watched the finale then you should stop reading now — it turned out that what they needed was to realise as Roman told his older brother, Kendall, in the final episode’s cringey and depressingly suitable climax, that it was “all f**king nothing, man ... We’re nothing!”

It was no accident that the set-up for the finale mirrored that in the first episode of the first season — a do or die board meeting and the battle for votes needed to secure the succession of Kendall Roy. Insanity as the famous saying wrongly attributed to Albert Einstein reminds us, is “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”, and while this time there was no Logan Roy to plant himself in the way of Kendall’s ambitions, his vicious betrayal by his siblings at the final moment should really not have come as a surprise to Kendall or to the audience.

Throughout the show’s four seasons Armstrong has constantly but subtly reminded us that just when you think you can have faith in the humanity of a Roy and convince yourself that they may indeed have the ability to change, their core emptiness and ambitions for money they don’t actually need and power they don’t have the capacity to deal with, will resurface to bite them in their psychic posteriors.

In the heartbreakingly difficult to stomach boardroom confrontation and subsequent punch-up between the Roy siblings — after Shiv’s last-minute change of heart — they reverted to what the show’s iconic-scored title sequence has always shown them to be. Lonely, privileged rich kids whose daddy never really loved them anyway and who don’t have the emotional tools necessary for adults.

They were born damaged, they entered our consciousness damaged and they left the canvas of the show damaged beyond repair. For a few moments, and particularly in the light of the daring removal of Logan from the picture in the third episode of the final season, they and we briefly believed that whoever could mould themselves into the best imitation of their father would be rewarded with his crown.

The reality was that as Alexander Skarsgård’s arch-villain Lukas Matsson had already told Logan while he was alive, the Roy paterfamilias and his business practices were dinosaurs and the winner of the show’s ultimate prize turned out to be the man who was most willing to be a puppet rather than pull the strings.

Tom Wambsgans — the striving middle-class Midwesterner who had always demonstrated an uncanny ability to find himself on the right side of the power-struggles within the Roy dynasty — succeeded because he knew that his greatest ability was to do what he was told and not rock the boat in a vainglorious attempt to emulate his father-in-law. Perhaps it helped that Tom was always the one character for whom the trappings of the one percent life brought some sort of joy and admiration because he hadn’t grown up in an environment where they were taken for granted.

What had begun as a modern take on King Lear ended up as a cross between Macbeth and Dynasty and for a minute we all convinced ourselves that as Hemingway is supposed to have said to his friend F Scott Fitzgerald, “the only difference between the rich and everyone else is that they have more money than we do”.

What Succession demonstrated on a narrative level was that if the stakes of a drama are only that those with more money than they could spend in a lifetime wish to obtain even more money by any means necessary, then those stakes are really not high enough to see them change in any meaningful way.

Succession’s genius was to wrap this simple and crushing truism within a memorable veil of unforgettable insults and one-liners and dedicatedly compelling performances that made us care about its terrible characters and believe that their dynastic drama was worthy of our intense attention and minute analysis before bringing us all crashing down to earth with the soul-crushing final realisation that it wasn’t and never had been.

It’s the laughs that will remain with us as we return to the mundanity of our ordinary lives where we can smile knowingly each morning as we drink coffee from branded mugs that remind us: “You can’t make a Tomlette without breaking some Gregs.”