Culture Crash: A Triumphant End to a Brilliant Show

For four seasons, audiences were able to watch Succession, a hilarious but truly devastating Shakespearean saga about the Roy family. The patriarch, Logan Roy, was owner and CEO of a huge, right-leaning media conglomerate headlined by a cable news channel not dissimilar to FOX News. And his children were simply desperate for his approval… and one day his job.

Succession is notable for a lot of things, but the two areas it soared above the rest of contemporary TV are easy to pick out: Its writing was remarkable and its acting was the strongest I’ve maybe ever seen on television. Lead writer Jesse Armstrong and his team put together 40 hours of tense, funny social commentary and political satire that showed the faults of the American ruling class, the desperation of strivers in a late capitalistic society, and just how daunting it can be to fill the shoes of an icon.

From there, actors Jeremy Strong, Sarah Snook, Keiran Culkin, Brian Cox, Matthew Macfayden, and the entire cast shaped performances that show off how greed and an unloving father can spoil generations of a family tree, and leave nothing but broken people in its wake.

Succession had already cemented its place in TV history with its first 3 seasons – it has already won Best Drama at the Emmys twice, along with a slew of acting and writing awards. But its fourth and final season really drove the show’s point home and put it in conversation with those all-timers like Breaking Bad, The Wire, and The Sopranos as a document worth studying and examining as one of the great works of art of our times.