Warning: major spoilers for Succession season 4
Four series in and the show finally has its succession with Kendall and Roman crowned the new heads of Waystar Royco. But will they prove captains of industry or corporate Chuckle Brothers? Have a guess.
Episode five opens with Kendall on top of the world, being chauffeur-driven to the Waystar headquarters as Jay-Z’s Takeover blares over the soundtrack. Arriving in the office, he’s smooth and in control, barking orders, making decisions.
Yet, one glance at his dead father’s empty chair is enough to knock him off kilter. And from there, his and Roman’s control starts seeping away, slowly at first, before the dam bursts completely.
With the internal wranglings (supposedly) put to bed, this episode sees the old guard and the siblings – “the Boomers versus the Zoomers” as Shiv puts it – head to the verdant, misty peaks of Norway, as they look to negotiate the sale of Waystar to the fantastically weird Lukas Matsson, the billionaire chief executive of tech streaming giant GoJo.
They’re out of their comfort zone and in Matsson’s territory to negotiate a deal that will change the media landscape, make them even more wealthy than they were before and potentially rewrite their father’s legacy.
Once again – and stop me if you’ve heard this one – there really is nothing to touch the sheer quality of Succession. The writing is pitch perfect, with the characters so gloriously, grotesquely drawn – and indeed performed – and plotting that consistently wrongfoots the viewer. This is helped by the gatling gun peppering of punchlines throughout. It’s hard to guess what’s coming next while desperately trying to remember yet another cyanide-sharp line to quote.
Most of the best zingers come from characters trading blows. From Roman calling the arrival of Karl, Frank and Gerri “the march of the amber penguins” to Shiv dubbing her siblings the “b-roll brothers” – and then there’s Tom. For such a beleaguered character, now largely on the outside looking in, he gets some of the best one-liners.
When Greg asks if he’s worried for his job after the deal goes through, Tom says “I’m not worried about Matsson,” then pointing to the siblings getting onto a private jet, “I’m worried about being whacked by the cast of Bugsy Malone.”
The scriptwriters know that people don’t really speak like this – when Kendall describes trying to comprehend the company’ s financials as “We’re death-wrestling with ogres” he’s shot down by Shiv, “You’re reading documents, is what you’re doing” – but this is the world of Succession and it’s worth suspending disbelief for quips this glorious, for the sadly few episodes we have left.
Matsson is a difficult adversary, and Alexander Skarsgård brilliantly pulls off this abrasive, self-possessed yet damaged character – we learn a number of surprising and unusual things about the character in this episode, relating to trauma in his past and potential problems coming down the track. He’s a power player – he sends a list of Waystar names he wants in Norway for a “cultural compatibility check” which translates, according to Hugo, as “musical electric chairs” which will ascertain who gets fired after the deal – a master negotiator, he keeps wrongfooting the siblings.
Despite the sweeping surroundings, the negotiations – on the surface friendly and relaxed – are claustrophobic and tense. The privileged brothers, born into wealth and handed a company on the basis of blood and a few dubious scribbles on a piece of paper, versus the self-made tech billionaire. It’s no match.
Matsson throws the brothers (negotiating alone, without their sister or the rest of the team, all of whom are left anxiously outside) again by saying he wants the whole company, including news arm ATN, which previously they were to keep, and raising his bid. It plays into issues of legacy, of what their father wanted for the deal and the news company, and the two sides negotiating couldn’t think more differently about the future of the media.
Whereas the Roys see the future of news as high end – remember their planned venture The Hundred: Substack meets Masterclass meets The Economist meets The New Yorker? – Matsson wants to take the news arm and make it “simple, cheap, huge. Ikea-d to f**k.” Long term, he says, “I don’t think news for angry old people works.”
All of this adds up to Kendall attempting to tank the deal completely so he and Roman can run Waystar themselves. And it’s here that the corporate Chuckle Brothers really come to the fore as they set about leaking stories of in-fighting between the negotiators, and suggesting to Matsson that there are huge issues at the company and he’s buying a pup.
In the 1967 black comedy The Producers, fraudulent theatre producer Max Bialystock and accountant Leo Bloom come up with a scheme to create a massive Broadway flop, so they can scam investors out of money when it inevitably closed on opening night. Except the show, Springtime for Hitler, becomes a huge hit.
The Roys may as well have had Bialystock and Bloom in on their negotiations with Matsson, who sees right through them (“you’re a tribute band”). Not only do their nefarious machinations not tank the deal, but Matsson lifts his price way over what he intially offered. Everyone on the Waystar team is jubilant. Everyone except the glum-faced brothers whose scheme has spectacularly backfired.
There is, of course, the usual comic relief of Greg barrelling around annoying everybody, while Connor has found himself in charge of what Logan should be dressed in for the viewing of the body. He’s appalled that Marcia wants him in a kilt “like a f**king Bay City Roller”.
As it has progressed, reviewing this series of Succession at times has turned into an exercise of trying to tone down the superlatives for fear of sounding slavish, but what the hell... This is prestige drama at its absolute finest.
There are simply too many lines to quote that underline the point, but this pep talk from Gerri left me breathless “They’re young and they’re fit, but they’re European,” she says to her colleagues as they prepare to face the GoJo negotiators. “They’re soft; hammocked in their social security safety net, sick on vacation mania and free healthcare. They may think they’re Vikings but we’ve been raised by wolves, exposed to a pathogen that goes by the name of Logan Roy, and they have no idea what’s coming to them.” Now that is writing.
