Streaming on: Sky Atlantic / NOW

Episodes viewed: 4 of 10

The last season of Succession begins with an echo of the first: a birthday party. In the original 2018 pilot — an hour of television that only coyly hinted at the stunning shit-shows-at -fuck-factories yet to come — Logan Roy (Brian Cox) celebrates his 80th with a get-together only the Roys know how to throw: ill-tempered, uncomfortable and largely profit-driven. In the first episode of this fourth, final ten-hour run, Logan is once again marking awkward convivialities — only this time, his foul-mouthed, obnoxious family are nowhere to be seen.

It’s interesting to reflect on the intervening years between birthday bashes. For the Roys, there have been more back-stabbings and double-crosses than an Ancient Roman history book; the show itself, meanwhile, has slowly evolved from a glossy, under-the-radar HBO comedy-drama to being one of the most lauded, awarded shows on the small screen — true appointment viewing in a never-more crowded marketplace.

If pressure was felt by showrunner Jesse Armstrong and his mostly British writers’ room to stick the landing, it isn’t felt in these opening four episodes, which confidently confront the question baked into the very title of the show. Who, in fact, will succeed Logan? Who “ends up king potato”, as Tom (Matthew Macfadyen) memorably put it? The ultimate answer, we suspect, may be heavily caveated, but it’s thrilling to see the chess pieces finally lining up.

Set some time after the extraordinary failed coup of Season 3’s finale, the Roy family is simultaneously more fractured and more unified than ever before. The three youngest kids (pity Alan Ruck’s poor Connor, forever sidelined) are now operating as a team for the first time, working on a new media venture described as “Substack meets Masterclass meets The Economist meets The New Yorker”. Waystar Royco’s takeover deal with mercurial tech billionaire Lukas Matsson (Alexander Skarsgård) is nearing completion. There is also a big election coming up, with echoes of the 2020 US Presidential race (“It’s fucking 1933 and I want to have a say”, Shiv darkly alludes). Meanwhile, Tom and Greg (Nicholas Braun) — now going by the nickname ‘The Disgusting Brothers’ — are fully committed to each other, despite Greg’s incurable, impossibly cringeworthy foot-in-mouth syndrome.

Many wheels are spinning, then — and yet it all still ultimately boils down to a family drama, the Roys still locked in a Sisyphean battle with each other, all unable to escape the orbit of Logan’s terrifying, all-encompassing gravity. There are hints that Logan is feeling his age — in strange late night tableaus, he grumpily complains about what’s on his TV, in true old-man-yells-at-cloud fashion — but in Cox’s hands, he has never been more powerful, a tempest of lonely, monarchical fury. In a show rightly lauded for its writing, it’s notable how much a single withering look of his can summon; every interaction with his estranged children feels supercharged with tension.

Indeed, the whole show remains as riveting as it’s ever been. Nobody can do frantic conference-call-chaos like Succession, and even in these first four hours of the season, the show doesn’t hold back its cards, frontloading the run with astonishing, utterly heart-fluttering drama. Impeccably scripted as ever, it is still rare to watch television so dense, so richly layered that watching it again immediately seems the only sensible option. Each sentence feels loaded with craft, from its delicious saltiness (there are at least three c-bombs in the first episode alone) right down to its marrow-deep character work.

It’s the underlying tragedy of these characters that ultimately makes Succession so addictively compelling: their deep, complex dysfunction with one another, the lure of capital and power and status which permanently keeps them at arm’s length from the successful, prosperous lives they so desperately crave. You can read all manner of Murdochian metaphors into this — and the show has always been an ugly mirror image of America’s greasy, super-rich capitalism — but it’s really just an ensemble character study, of which there are few equals. For us, the biggest tragedy will be when the Roys are no longer on our screens, to gasp and gawk at, in horror and awe.