“Hey, we’re bullshit. You’re bullshit…I’m fucking bullshit. Shiv’s bullshit. It’s all fucking nothing. I’m telling you this because I know it. We’re nothing.” - Roman Roy
It wasn’t a New Jersey diner with “Don’t Stop Believin” blasting on the jukebox. It wasn’t a guy lying in a deserted island field with a plane flying overhead. It wasn’t “Goodbye” written in rocks in the last remnants of the Korean War. It wasn’t a kid driving his El Camino off into the proverbial Arizona sunset. It wasn’t those Boston bar lights being flicked off one last time.
No, it was just a New York City Park bench with Kendall Roy sitting all by his lonesome, perfectly timed, perfectly contemplative, perfectly tragic. The Eldest Boy finally coming to grips that his life goal, given to him at seven years old by a corporate behemoth monster of a father wasn’t going to come to fruition (though now he’s doomed to have Colin follow him forever). It really couldn’t have happened any other way and it acted as a reminder that great television is still very much possible.
It’s a testament to the always enduring market efficiency behind character development and storytelling, the high-level understanding that good stories and complicated characters can mean a deep connection (or at least fascination) when it comes to the general viewership.
Whether it’s a Garden State mafia boss, desert suburbs meth cookers, White Walker-fighting dragon riders, or sitting in the corporate ivory tower, we don’t need full comprehension or experience in these worlds to fully love what’s being thrown at us. We’ll learn soon enough everything we need to know. And we’ll have characters there to take us through the full-on exploration. Hell, by the end we’ll feel like the experts because we’ve been dropped so fully into their reality.
Succession did this as well as any series has ever done it, wrapping itself in the story of three (kind of four if you count Conner) epically screwed-up “kids” in their own little (huge) fiefdom. Vying for the throne of a bazillion-dollar company that was some perverse version of Fox News/ Disney/ Carnival Cruises, a mutated medley of things the general naysayer might view as “everything wrong with America.”
If you already disliked these institutions on a macro level then it was probably easy to never really like any of the main characters; even if they proved almost endlessly funny with almost endless brutal tragedy sandwiched in between.
While Succession dealt with seemingly executive corporate structures, palace intrigue, and market scheming, the story was remarkably simple. There are three spoiled, fucked up, entitled brats who want to run WayStar Royco when their dad eventually vacates the big chair. And then there are the hangers-on, yes men and women, love interests, and societal angle shooters who are “happy” to wait for the scraps to fall to the floor. Hell, they’ll boar on the floor each other just for a taste.
That’s it, that’s pretty much the whole show. But within this structure was a look at the depressingly sad state of family affairs which come about when the only real love is the love of power and status. When your life revolves solely and without fail around the corporately patriarchal megastar. When the only real juice is the C-suite title and everything else kind of means fuck-all because, well, nothing else really matters.
The Succession series finale “With Open Eyes” effectively told its last story in three parts, in three distinct sections focused on Kendall, Shiv, and Roman. The first part was standard, Succession-esque table-setting to get the kids under one roof one last time. For a show that bent over backward thinking of new and creative ways to get everyone under one roof, this one played at least realistically.
But it was the second and third parts that told the entire tale of the series. The three come to a begrudging agreement about Kendall’s new CEO status, replete with forbidden, stepdad cheese and a disgusting king drink initiation, the kumbaya feelings of sibling love momentarily placating the overwhelming sense of hatred that always flits around the Roy edges. It almost seemed like this was going to be how it wrapped. Keyword being “almost”.
The key to Succession’s brilliance, in my opinion, is the show’s willingness to make you like (or feel) for the characters for a few seconds at a time, just enough to make it seem like something was really going to change. That is until two seconds later they yank the rug and remind you that, no, nothing with these folks ever changes. And it never will. No amount of cheese-licking hilarity was going to change that.
And it was the final act, that really hammered home the whole twisted point of the show. The reminder that Logan had it right all along when he said his last words to the kids at the karaoke bar the night before his death. He said simply, “You’re not serious people.” It could have been the name of the series - Succession: Not Serious People.
The final boardroom sidebar throwdown between the three kids was basically the moment the entire show built towards: this juvenile display of pettiness, anger, self-loathing, and immaturity. One that had Kendall backtrack the admission of killing the kid, two brothers wrestling, Roman realizing it’s all bullshit anyway, and Shiv nuking the whole deal because, well, why the hell not, she hates these dudes.
The screaming, the crying, the tantrum-throwing, the lying, had a juvenile quality that only wasn’t cringely hilarious because you know these characters so well. It couldn’t have ended any other way.
Some shows will purposefully have you wonder, after the closing credits, what would happen next. Even series that tie a tidy bow on the proceedings often leave a couple of doors open just in case. Not Succession. That’s a wrap because, after this, there really isn’t any more story to tell.
They understood the assignment. In this particular Game of Thrones, there really wasn’t going to be a winner at all. Everyone of note has been pulverized. The bodies aren’t lying on the floor, but they might as well be. Kendall dead. Shiv dead. Roman, pretty much dead. Conner and Willa dead. Tom dead. Greg dead. Their hearts (functionally speaking) are beating, but nah, they’re all cooked.
We didn’t need to see Kendall leap from the top floor past the boardroom window or anything else overtly tragic. These folks died a long time ago. This was just the final chapter.
In the pantheon of television series finales, this individual episode won’t rank up there iconically (I don’t think) but the series in totality most definitely does. It was tutorial in taking the machinations of complex structure and world and boiling it down into the egos of a few. From a character development standpoint, it hit every tragic beat hard as hell. And it ended much like it started, with no character all that close to any particular finish line.
So Roman’s words in the penultimate scene, the non-tacit understanding that it’s all just “bullshit” comes landing like a gut punch but also as close to a handshake with the audience as you’ll ever see. He understands what we knew all along. It’s the reason we loved it all so much. The characters were all bullshit, but the story was superb.