The Children of Succession
or, a character study in six parts
I’m e rathke, the author of a number of books. Learn more about what you signed up for here. Go here to manage your email notifications.
First, before we go on, I have only one thing to say:
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We watched all of Succession in a few weeks about a month after it ended, which put us in that sort of funny state where you want to google how people reacted to some big event but can’t because everyone else has already seen the whole show.
My opinion of the show is that it’s impeccably made trash1.
I love it.
My assumption for the reader is that they’ve watched the show to the end. So if you haven’t finished yet but plan to, it may be a good idea to hold off on this one until later.
Or not. Who cares.
Roman
Roman is the most broken of the children. He’s also often the most cutting and the most inclined towards cruelty. Beneath all of it though is not merely a broken man, but a pathetic one.
I think this is what keeps the audience from despising him to the degree that he deserves. He has the presence and aura of a kicked puppy. Despite his sometimes heartless lashing out or his incredibly perverse forms of harassment, he fundamentally wants his family to get along, to find harmony. I think this is why he’s so often resistant to saying anything negative about his father or working against him. Even when he does work against his father, his heart is never in it.
He is the child most desperate for his father’s love. He wants Logan to like him. Needs Logan to love him. And so he’ll grovel and debase himself if only he’ll receive a compliment, a kind word.
But he’s also too proud to admit any of this. Too proud to learn from Frank and so instead he attempts merely to undermine others in hopes that his father will eventually pass the baton to him.
Logan’s death also shatters him. Completely. While the other kids grieved and will remember that year as one of the worst of their lives, Roman, I think, will remember it as the center moment of his life. It’s why he gives up. Throws it all away. Doesn’t care.
He can never hear the three simple words he always needed to hear from Logan. He can never have Logan look at him and know that he’s proud.
Logan is dead.
And Roman will never in life find what he needs.
Connor
Many children of successful people react to it the way Connor did. Rather than try to live up to his father’s legacy or become who his father wants him to be, he turns his back entirely on it.
Because he can never find approval from his father, he instead uses his father’s immense wealth to create for himself a fantasy world where he matters, where he is the center of the universe rather than a forgotten son to a powerful man who shaped nations.
I think his love life is most telling of all the children. None of them can have healthy sexual relationships but neither can they have normal healthy interpersonal relationships. While I think it’s clear Willa genuinely likes Connor, she also clearly does not love him. A former call girl, they began their relationship with Connor paying her for sex and companionship. In a sense, he continues to do that even when they’re married.
Connor flails and fails at various enterprises and goals, but he is ultimately just surrounding himself in a cultivated reality where he does matter, even though he so obviously does not.
Even his half-siblings seem to forget he exists at various times.
Siobhan (Shiv)
Shiv is her father’s daughter. To explain this, I need to make a bit of a digression, so bear with me.
the Logan principle
Logan, despite becoming one of the most powerful media titans in the world, began his life humbly. He grew up with nothing. With no one but his brother. He fought and he scrounged and he found a way to survive and he found a way to turn that into money, into power, into influence.
But fundamentally, Logan understands people. He sees them for who and what they are. He sees what they want, their motivations, and he finds a way to turn that into his advantage. He’s a sociopath in this way, but he is extremely astute. He has made a study of humanity and dissected his discoveries and developed systems all to dole out what we want while drudging us for what he wants.
You see this over and over again, but it’s most important, here, for how it shaped who he chooses for his successor. While Logan knew people, he was also ruthless. A killer instinct bordering on vicious and rapacious.
The life he gave to his children kept them too far removed from humanity to ever be what he was. The fundamental issue portrayed again and again throughout the series is that the Roy children simply cannot relate to other people, don’t know how to relate, and are captive to the alienation of the own cultivated realities. Logan sees this and comments on it regularly.
But he figures someone can learn this. His kids can learn to understand people by rubbing shoulders with them.
What they cannot be taught is that vicious ruthlessness that he believes is fundamental to his success. And he sees this instinct for cruelty in only one of his children.
back to Shiv
In all honesty, Shiv is possibly the cruelest person I’ve ever encountered in a TV show. Yes, she’s not a murderer or rapist, which is obviously worse, but her willingness and propensity for cruelty often took my breath away.
Her relationship with Tom is a continual example and explication of this. Near the end of season three, she tells Tom that she doesn’t love him. This was during a sort of foreplay(?) but it clearly bothered Tom enough to ask about it the next day where she mostly admonishes him without ever affirming her love for him.
We as the audience also clearly see that she wasn’t playing around but speaking honestly, perhaps, for the only time in the show. I mean, this is the woman who told Tom that she wanted an open relationship hours after they got married, while her sideguy is literally at the wedding.
But Shiv, if nothing else, has that relentless viciousness that Logan looked for. It’s why he believed she was the person for the job. He believed she could learn the business, and probably she could have, but her own egotism keeps her from learning anything.
We’re told in various ways after she enters the business that she is astoundingly bad at it. This should be obvious to anyone watching it since her first suggestion is to tell her dad to DROP THE NEWS.
Like, their entire empire is built upon being THE news for a large portion of the American people. Billionaires spend fortunes trying to buy up newspapers and news stations.
Why?
To gain fucking influence!
And her first suggestion for this media giant who shakes hands with popes and presidents is to tell him that all this influence he has is actually bad for business.
Like, this moment blew the top of my head clean off. I sat their, mouth agape, and turned to my wife and couldn’t help but say, that’s the dumbest fucking thing I’ve ever heard.
But that was a tell, as the kids say.
Shiv is not good at this business. She is just cruel. That Logan confuses one for the other also says unpleasant things about him.
But, again, his goal was for her to learn the business at an accelerated rate so that she could use that cruel, killer instinct to grow the business, to keep the jackals at bay.
I find Shiv both fascinating and utterly despicable. I really have rarely disliked a character so much in my long life of hating fictional people. But I think the reason she comes off so much more unpleasantly than her brothers is because of her performance of indifference which contrasts unpleasantly with their patheticness.
Roman is vicious but he’s so pathetic it’s hard to take it seriously. Hard to even feel hurt by him because the brokenness is so loudly rattling in his lungs. The same is true of Kendall, who is rarely cruel but always cringe inducing. Same goes for Connor.
The Roy boys are all so pathetic and broken.
Shiv is broken too, of course, but she has made of her heart a stone in order to survive her father. Her studied indifference to everything, to everyone makes her even more unpleasant. When she’s confronted with her cruelty, her reaction is to put up a wall or try to twist the blame back on the other person. But she cannot say she’s sorry.
She cannot be vulnerable.
There’s a moment in season four that I still think about. It’s so harrowingly sad and so perfectly encompasses who she is.
Her and Tom are split up at this point and she’s pregnant but Tom doesn’t know. They’re having a conversation almost like old times. She so clearly wants him to love her. Needs him to love her. Needs someone to care about her.
But rather than be vulnerable even for a moment with the man who has loved her most in life, she feigns indifference and asks if he wants to get back together more as a flippant convenience.
And Tom, being Tom, is both vulnerable and honest. He says he doesn’t know if he can.
And we, the audience, see how this shatters her. But only for a moment before the wall is back in place and the indifference overpowers all else.
But had she simply said, Tom, I want to try again. I’m sorry and I know I hurt you but I want to try again. I’m pregnant with your baby and maybe we can make it work this time.
I think Tom, being Tom, would have taken her back. And everything that followed would have been different.
I do think she ultimately chooses Tom, perhaps, because she thinks of her child. Their relationship is horrifically shattered, but Tom is a good man. Or at least will likely be a good and gentle and kind father.
That may not seem like much, but it is quite a lot.
Too, I think she did the calculus and saw that she had a closer proximity to power through Tom than she did through Kendall.
Kendall
I think Kendall is the obvious successor to Logan for the simple reason that he understands the business and seems to at least be decent at it. He has good enough instincts for what needs to be done. Yes, he’s often hoodwinked by the tech sector and chases flash way too often, but I think he’d do an all right job of it.
But he doesn’t have that killer instinct.
I think he’s a fundamentally good person. Or at least someone who wants to be a good person. We see this in his remorse for the death of that young man. We see it when the sexual harassment comes to light. We see it many times. It’s this genuine kind nature that causes Logan to see him as a failure.
Which, you know, says maybe all that needs to be said about Logan.
But I’ll say this one thing more:
At their mother’s wedding, Shiv talks to her mom and she says this about Kendall: Logan would kick a dog just to see if it would come back.
It so clearly speaks to the heart of who Logan is, but we then get this demonstrated a few scenes later when Kendall meets with Logan to tell him that he gives up. He’s out. He won’t fight Logan for control of the company anymore. He wants to sell all his shares to Logan and cash out.
Now, Logan entered this interaction expecting a fight. He wanted a fight. In many ways, he needs Kendall to fight him. To keep trying.
So when Kendall tells him that he won, Logan begins kicking. Viciously. Ruthlessly. Cruelly.
His dog didn’t come back and so he chooses instead to beat the fucking shit out of it.
When Kendall is cruel—he’s not immune to this—it is often at his father’s direction. But we see how unnaturally this suit hangs from him. He wants to be liked. He wants to be cool.
This is also what makes him pathetic and so cringe inducing I sometimes thought that I was going to blackout from secondhand embarrassment.
Kendall is Michael Scott, except somehow more so. Everything he does is embarrassing and cringey. I found certain episodes hard to watch. Like, I may someday rewatch Succession, but I will never rewatch Kendall’s birthday party.
While Logan’s death is the moment that will forever be at the center of Roman’s life, losing the company will forever define Kendall’s life.
He cannot move past that moment. He never will. His life hinged on Shiv and Roman voting for him to retain power.
Losing that, he has lost himself. Cast adrift, he will forever be collapsing through time to that single moment.
Greg
I love Greg! He’s the best.
We see how this world of bitter, cruel sociopaths turns this gentle, sweet boy into a feelingless shell. He is forced to do cruel things but is also so enmeshed in this casual viciousness that it begins to shape him too.
In some ways, he begins as the audience surrogate but ends as another hollow man.
But what I think I appreciate most about Greg is how clever he is. In some ways, he’s like a political cockroach. He’s always doing just enough to survive without rubbing anyone the wrong way too much.
The brokenness of the Roys also allows for him to slide effortlessly into their life. They’re all mean to him and say terrible things but he just kind of persists like a buoy in the ocean. His gentle kindness keeps him afloat.
And this simple kindness pulls him in deeper and deeper.
What I mean by this is that the Roys are so unused to anyone being nice to them that they become very attached to Greg. They like him and that act of liking him makes him seem competent, in part, because the Roy children have never had to be competent.
The exact same dynamic played out with Rhea. She so quickly moves from literal outsider to possible successor because she’s simply kind and likeable, which makes all the Roy children feel that she maybe is the right person for the job.
They’re all so starved for kindness that any amount of it changes their life.
And so Greg, just through persistent kindness—which I think is clearly just a genuine characteristic—begins to feel essential.
And he does help each of the siblings in various ways. They berate treat him the way Logan insults them, but he still continues to treat them as family.
Of course, the only person who is ever truly kind to him, the only person who looks out for him and tries to guide him, to help him, is Tom.
Tom
I also love Tom. I think what’s perhaps most interesting about him is that you can see he’s just a nice guy who wants to fit in. Of course, fitting in at Waystar and with the Roys means being an absolute maniac level asshole. And so Tom often plays that part, but it always feels so ill-suited to him.
Tom is, at his core, just a kind bighearted boy surrounded by people who want to kill all that is good within him. What we most often see from Tom is sort of the performance of Tom, which is why I think he seems like a joke to many of the other characters.
He had to learn to be cruel. The Roys were born to it, baby. Comes natural as breathing. And they can spot it right away. Same with the other execs at Waystar. This big Minnesotan ain’t ready for the Big City and they’re gonna chew him up and vomit him back out.
Now, I’m not going to pretend like I knew he’d end as the head of the company, but once we got to the fourth season, it seemed like the most sensible path towards an ending. Even so, I was still surprised by the direction the show took, even if, in retrospect, it was all inevitable.
Tom is most often portrayed as competent. More than competent, he seems good at his job. Yes, his job is essentially making Tucker Carlson types palatable and famous, but Tom sees this simply as his job. And he will do his job—whatever it is—as well as it can be done.
This is in contrast to Shiv and Roman who are often shown to be quite bad at their jobs.
I think this, in particular, is why Shiv so often demeans Tom for doing his job. Never once is she proud of him. Never once does she even say something nice about what he’s managed with his career. Instead she’s always snide and cutting and flippant and dismissive2.
And so when Tom betrays her by choosing Logan over the Roy siblings coup, I didn’t really feel it as a betrayal. Surprise: absolutely.
But this is hours after Shiv tells him that she doesn’t love him, that she never loved him, that she’s too good for him3, that she might consider having children with him. In that moment, you see how his heart breaks, but you also see him take the next five steps at once.
There is no future with her. She does not want a family with him. She, in all likelihood, thought he was going to prison. Possibly even wished he was going to prison.
And he saw that too. Felt it in the way she suggested he be the one to go to prison.
Season four really does see the cruelty come to the fore with Tom. But I find this turn the most understandable. Shiv seems to hate him. The other brothers have never been kind to him, never seen him as a brother. Not really. And so he chose his career because the alternative was to remain in a loveless marriage with a cruel woman who wanted nothing to do with him.
And, in the end, he saves Greg too. He wants Greg with him. Perhaps needs Greg. The only one in Waystar who was ever really a friend or family to him. The only one who treated him kindly, who liked him.
What of his reunion with Shiv?
I don’t know. He wants a family and whether he likes it or not, she’s carrying his child. I think he still loves Shiv and is willing to give it all another chance.
Sadly, I think that story ends in disaster for all three of them. But that story is not ours to see or tell.
My novels, whose paperbacks are all $9.99 for the month of September:
Glossolalia - A Le Guinian fantasy novel about an anarchic community dealing with a disaster
Sing, Behemoth, Sing - Deadwood meets Neon Genesis Evangelion
Howl - Vampire Hunter D meets The Book of the New Sun in this lofi cyberpunk/solarpunk monster hunting adventure
Colony Collapse - Star Trek meets Firefly in the opening episode of this space opera
The Blood Dancers - The standalone sequel to Colony Collapse.
Iron Wolf - Sequel to Howl.
Some free books for your trouble:
Long time readers may understand what I mean when I say trash but maybe not! Either way, I’ll leave you to speculate wildly on what this means as a review.
You could argue that her politics keep her from considering Tom’s work as anything but loathsome, but I think Shiv’s politics are quite clearly a performance without any conviction or even backbone.
lmao
This is the best thing I have read on Succession, full stop. I'm especially impressed by the understanding and even compassion you show for characters who are cringe at best and psychopaths at worst. I say that even though your discussion of Connor and the fantasy world he has created for himself undermines the hope I had for him at the end of the show.
I'm not sure I agree that Greg starts out good, though. I think he is always a bit of a craven idiot, but he was also young at the start of the series, and in the right hands he could have turned into a decent person. What if Ewan had taken Greg under his wing and reinforced what was good in Greg's nature? That was a moral failure on Ewan's part, in my opinion, because he blames Greg for becoming a contemptible person, when he could have done something about that.
Also, am I the only person who thinks Kendall's rap is actually kind of good? Did the same composer who wrote the show's theme write the rap? I recognize similarities in style, in particular the combination of classical music with hip hop.
I really enjoyed this! Thanks for taking me back - the show is absolutely brilliant and I think your assessments of each character are spot on.