Are Any of Us Good Enough for Logan Roy?

Heedless in some cases of even their own cries to smash the patriarchy, millions of Americans are poised to gather around large televisions to celebrate the return of the biggest and best 21st-century patriarch this side of Tony Soprano: Logan Roy. We’ll forget the calls to tax the rich and fight right-wing propaganda (or whatever) to root for our favorite spoiled-child sibling (or all of them) to win control of Fake Fox News. We’ll suppress any discomfort we have with personal machiavellianism and amorality, set aside, at least for the moment, current societal prohibitions on open ambition, as we reunite with Tom Wambsgans and Cousin Greg, our hearts unabashedly warmed by the most wonderful on-screen bromance since Superbad. Sunday night at 9 pm – where else but HBO? – airs the final season premiere of what is, hands down, the best drama and indeed the funniest show currently on the air.  

Throughout its three prior seasons, Succession has been as much described as a biting satire of the ruling class as it has been dismissed as a guilty pleasure, a mere soap opera dressed up with top-notch HBO writing and acting and production. To be sure, both are to some degree true and not particularly difficult to argue, even as each misses the point; the true value and appeal in the story of aging megarich media mogul Logan Roy’s inevitable succession lies in our recognition, conscious or otherwise, of this struggle as intimately familiar. If history proves Succession to be The Show of the 2020s – and I think the odds are good – it will be because the struggle it depicts is The Struggle of our times. Or at least one of the big ones. 

But the show itself plays a bit coy, preferring to obscure whatever its true point of view might be, and this is in large part what opens the door for the soap opera allegation. Certainly, a large subset – maybe even a majority – of fans are watching for the palpable aspect of pseudo-melodrama: who’s up, who’s down, what’s gonna happen next, are they in love or splitting up, what twist are they gonna throw at us now, etc. Being an intentionally dramatic and serious (though still hilarious) family-and-empire epic, of course people are grabbed by the drama of the plot. But “presence of exciting drama and plot twists” is not the only attribute of the soap opera form, which also includes things like thousands of daily episodes presented over many years, superficiality of characterization, frivolity with the plot, full on melodrama, etc., which are absent from Succession. There’s nothing frivolous about the machinations and moves made by the characters – more often than not, any assessment an astute viewer makes about the actions of any of the characters requires us to ask ourselves what we really believe, even what we’d really do in a given situation. Often, we’re surprised by the answers we don’t know. And though we’ve experienced plenty of emotional moments throughout the 29 episodes we’ve had to date, the show lacks the truly gooey sentimentality of a proper soap. 

But if perhaps many viewers nonetheless tune in for soap opera reasons – I’ve said as much myself once or twice – the classification of the show as satire lacks this advantage and is a weaker argument than commonly thought. Much of the show’s humor can be said to be at the expense of the wealthy, but just as many laughs come from our shock and jealousy at what the rich can get away with. Undeniably, the struggles and problems and ambitions of the upper class are depicted as petty, meaningless, and utterly empty. But nobody, and I mean nobody, watches Succession because it makes important points about “the hellscape of late stage capitalism” (LOL); if anything, we watch for the opposite reason, and for the same reason the rich and powerful in every age get to be the main characters in stories. We prefer stories about people we want to be over stories about ourselves, and we moreover crave stories about people with real agency to move and act about the world, which is always to say those at the top.

Much more significantly, however, the satire label will remain perpetually insufficient in the face of the fact that Succession’s real merit lies not in any exaggerated rich-man foibles or finger-wagging about inequality (particularly since it doesn’t possess either!) or indeed any ostensible winks and nods – it lies in the ways the show is at heart as deeply earnest as Kendall Roy himself. 

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Because I prefer not to invest in even prestige TV shows before they’ve been around a little while and proven themselves, I managed somehow to avoid or ignore Succession until I binged the first two seasons prior to the airing of the third – at which time, predictably, I fell in love. I enjoyed the third season one episode at a time, never agreeing with the vocal faction of professional and amateur critics who felt the season was weaker than the first two. I rewatched all three seasons after the live episodes concluded, with maybe ¾ of my original attention, then maybe once more, mostly as a background or fall-asleep show. 

Again, obviously the quality of the writing, acting, directing, and overall production would probably be sufficient on its own for me to keep watching. But these are such wonderful characters. Throughout this time period I found myself at various points relating to (or also loathing) Kendall, Shiv, Roman, Tom, Greg, Logan, Gerri, and even occasionally Frank or Karl. I was enthralled by the silent menace of Logan’s body-man Collin, the subtle detail found in the personal assistant and support staff characters and their roles as well-dressed servants, and I’m always a sucker for a good power struggle.

But after that I let a lot of months go by before, realizing the imminent arrival of the final season, I began a new three-season binge, giving it more of my attention this time than I had since my first viewing. This time, I didn’t sympathize with or relate to as many of the characters, but found myself unreservedly in support of both Tom Wambsgans, corporate executive and beleaguered husband to Shiv Roy, and sort-of-eldest-son-and-heir-apparent Kendall Roy. It was in the unabashed sincerity and earnestness of the latter that I saw the same characteristics at the heart of the show. 

What also struck me this time around was that the characters universally are lacking in love and desperately craving it. Tom wants his wife to love him. The Roy children aren’t just competing for Logan’s love but are coldly denied love by their mother as well. They also want to love one another, but often even when they seem to or try to, they’re interrupted or thwarted by the struggle for power – itself inextricably entangled with the struggle for their father’s love and approval. All of them, including semi-bastard eldest son Connor Roy (who himself can only seemingly find “love” through direct purchase), seek to prove their worthiness for Logan’s love (which he withholds except to use as a manipulative tool) and, simultaneously, their worthiness for taking over the family empire. 

This is where the show is at its most interesting – and where the succession struggle is most familiar to us, if only in that nagging, can’t-quite-place-it way.

Three quarters of the way through this show, we don’t know if any of the children are capable of filling Logan’s shoes. Logan himself, unless one believes his frequently deceptive and contradictory statements, doesn’t seem to think so. But what often looms unspoken is that Logan’s assessment of his children actually comes in a very distant second to his primary inclination, which is to hold onto the reins of power forever and ever. Like Hyman Roth, he lives without exception as a man who “thinks he’s going to live forever.” If perhaps he doesn’t believe himself immortal, he has no desire to turn things over while still living and doesn’t care much for what happens after his death. His reply, late in the third season, to tech mogul Mattson’s question about whether he really looks forward to the future, is at once hilarious and dark and revealing: “Well, that’s just a thing we say, isn’t it?”

But until Logan does turn over control to a successor or, more likely, dies, his children remain frozen in that state of childhood – craving, at least most of the time, ascension to maturity and adulthood, but always kept from attaining it in ways that both they and we know Logan himself never had to deal with. 

This, at last, is what’s familiar. The Baby Boom generation, like Logan, is huge, monstrous, enjoyed unprecedented privilege and good luck, has had an iron grip on society and power for a ridiculous number of decades, is far too old, and won’t retire or hand over control. And, until they do, their Millennial children are and will be excluded from full adulthood. Like Kendall himself, the oldest among us are arriving at 40, and we’ve been allowed to do very little outside the shadows of our parents, who have stayed healthy and in their homes and in their jobs far too long. We know, like Kendall, that the day will come when we have no choice but to step up and take charge, but we’re also all continually baffled and confounded by the fact that all that still remains somehow just out of reach. 

And, like the Roy children, if we’re being honest, we don’t really know if we measure up to Daddy: can we actually take over from our parents? Regardless of whether it’s “fair” that they all had basically the best timing of any humans ever born on the planet, the question of whether we are capable of rising to the needs presented by the world Logan Roy and the Boomers can’t live to see is very much open. 

Our story is right there among the strivers. Forget Connor – he’s the Gen Xer, and like all Gen Xers, he’s born to be forgotten. Kendall is sharp and sincere and the least ashamed out of everyone to really try, to really go for it, but he’s done little in life but execute the orders of his father, and won’t know if he’s able to until given the opportunity. When Logan won’t give it, he tries to take it, but his repeated attempts at rebellion and patricide are half baked and fall flat. Middle-sister Shiv has spent several years carving out a niche for herself as the professional liberal of the family, but often fails to hide the fact that she has no convictions whatsoever, no values, no loyalties, not even to love or family; she flails as so many of us flail, trying to make our way by free-floating in a sea in which old values and traditions have been destroyed and new ones have yet to arrive, if they ever will. And Roman, gifted with instincts and intuition and people skills, whether owing to psychological damage or simply playing the role of the “second son” in any royal family, isn’t quite right in the head. I shouldn’t have to go into detail about why that’s familiar. 

In Tom and Cousin Greg, our Bromance Boys, we are confronted with choices that might actually be most relevant to the majority of us who also lack the advantage of being born into the royal line. Greg, thrust into the deep end by his own loveless mother and ordered to survive and provide, is quickly molded by circumstances into TV’s most goofy, lovable sociopath. Tom learned similar lessons climbing the Waystar Royco corporate ladder on his own, but it was Shiv’s contempt for and continuous willingness to sacrifice her husband at a moment’s notice that led him – perhaps against his will and nature – to make loveless choices less for the sake of his advancement than for that of his survival. Here lies perhaps the darkest generational question we have to ask ourselves: can we, reared as we have been in many ways to distrust and avoid naked ambition and self-interest, actually survive in the world of today or tomorrow without making The 49 Laws of Power our de facto scripture? 

Still, in the same way that we can never fully hate our parents or even their generation, and in the same way that all people in all times naturally defer and submit in the face of true, overwhelming power and authority, we cannot fully disavow Logan Roy even if we want to. When his final death-blow machinations are revealed in the third season finale’s gut-punch of a conclusion, we are shocked and awed: Logan is a monster, not the goofy dismissable kind, but the awesome, insurmountable one. Why even try, we wonder, to rise, or to resist, in the face of such unrelenting refusal to yield? 

But, ultimately, neither monstrous patriarchs nor vast, stubborn, hydra-headed generations that think they grew their own luck and have a right to never let go are still bound by certain laws of the universe. In both cases, something will give. With respect to the latter, none among us can say when or how that day will come. Fortunately for us, doomed maybe forever to take only the morsels we can get, we will at least find out much sooner about the former. 

Succession’s answers begin their grand arrival Sunday night. Here’s to once again having a show to watch, here’s more to having a show to talk about, and thank God for prestige television and HBO.