Spoiler alert: this article mentions the plot of Succession season four, episode eight.
This season of Succession, there has only been one true star. As Jesse Armstrong’s impeccable drama approaches its last ever episode, Logan Roy’s only daughter has pant-suited up to rush the field of stale pale males – and audiences have responded gleefully. Every week when Succession airs, #Shiv regularly trends, her talents for duplicitousness and spousal evisceration drawing wolf whistles of admiration online. Shiv, played by Sarah Snook, isn’t just Succession’s four-letter leading lady; she’s a flame-haired weapon of mass destruction.
Shiv’s no hero – she doesn’t even pass for an antihero – but she is turbocharging Succession’s last act with something that is far too rarely seen on TV: a complete portrait of a power-hungry woman. She shares her brothers’ pathological drive for power. She wants the crown, too. But unlike them, she is propelled by far more primitive vulnerabilities.
Her fire has been fuelled by a third-degree psyche-burn she endured in season three: a crushing patriarchal double-tackle, with her father and her husband allying to screw her over. That has driven her to light the fuse on every plot point since. It was Shiv who initiated the plan to take Pierce from Logan, and who ginned up a back-door scheme to jam the GoJo deal – machinations that led to Logan’s doomed flight to Sweden sans compression socks. She went on to execute a double fratricide, buddying up with sadistic techbro Lukas Matsson to undermine Kendall and Roman’s plans. And she’s done all this while concealing a pregnancy.
Shiv’s scorched-earth arc reaches its apotheosis in the series’ latest episode, America Decides, in which the series brings its presidential election storyline to a dramatic climax. When push comes to Shiv, the series’ centrist chooses personal ambition over the fate of the republic. As her brothers lean toward handing dark prince presidential candidate Jeryd Mencken the narrative of victory on election night – if not victory itself – because it suits their petty power moves, a wavering Kendall asks Shiv to reach out to the Jiménez team to broker a deal. Rather than make the call, which may threaten her plans to ascend to power with Matsson, she mimes it. It’s a neat way for the writers to subtly reveal the fraud of centrism among rising fascism. But it’s also a comic act of self-interest that provides the finishing touch to a female characterisation that feels utterly novel.
Succession is a sparkling tale of contemporary corruption. From carnivorous media barons to private equity vultures, the show has carved out its own Vanity Fair, tracing intersecting lines between media, politics and Wall Street, populating each with recognisable scoundrels. Even minor characters amplify the grim view: the Roy siblings’ new stepdad, Peter Munion, grinds the bones of seniors in long-term care.
As a scriptwriters’ archetype, Shiv is the mercenary girl boss, the corporate liberal who stands on the footstool of feminist-ish sloganeering only to kick it away as she ascends to the Mount Olympus of the C-suite. But she is so much more than that. She has not only given flesh to a marketing cipher denoting a noxious form of go, girl! rot, but her conflicted relationship to her status as daughter, wife and now mum-to-be reveals a merciless truth behind the hype that attends these tropes. Shiv has always rejected playing conventional feminine roles, because women wield no power in the world in which she lives.
Logan’s DNA made her the CEO of her marriage to Tom, power she wielded like a club. On their wedding night, Shiv revealed to her bridegroom that she wanted flexibility not monogamy, a truth grenade that detonated in his honeymoony face. Shiv understands that money is a superpower, while marriage is an existential threat to a woman’s personal autonomy.
Motherhood has been similarly fraught, with Shiv withholding it and Tom demanding it. As Tom faced the prospect of jail, he obsessed over Shiv’s reproductive status, horny to lock her down before they locked him up. Pregnancy as a prison sentence to shore up male insecurity – it doesn’t get starker than that as a metaphor, particularly in a climate where reproductive rights are state property. Shiv rejects the inherent powerlessness of wifedom and motherhood, concealing her pregnancy, ageing her secret like the dubious wine from their spoiled vineyard – until she throws it into Tom’s face.
As Kendall says, the poison drips through. For Shiv, there is slightly more poison to absorb. She has wrung out the girl-boss trope, revealing there is no “good power” over others, as well as exposing the inherent impotence of being labelled a wife and mother. And she’s done it all with a baby on board.
It’s not just those election ballots in Milwaukee burning at the end of America Decides. Shiv’s on fire, too. As she leaves ATN, having incinerated that tenuous “family thing” she’d developed with her brothers, she calls Matsson to put another revenge plot in motion. She shouts that they’re going to release their own rotten narrative to combat the one ATN is brewing in a last-ditch attempt to salvage its plot. The writers might be about to call time on the show’s endless revenge reset, but the last word may well go to Shiv.
