SUCCESSION and the Collapse of American Capitalism
The party is over and the Roy kids don't know it.
This contains complete spoilers for the entire series of Succession.
The ending of Succession was one of inevitability. This was always where it was going, this was always how these characters were going to end up. Character, as they say, is destiny, and the minute you understood who Kendall was, was the minute you understood Kendall had to end broken, defeated and diminished. (Also very rich; at the end of the final episode the Roy kids have made billions of dollars, but money doesn’t buy happiness)
When Jesse Arnstrong began Succession it was going to be a movie about the Murdoch family, the Australians who have perhaps done more to diminish the quality of life on Earth over the past forty years than anyone else, He was driven by the story of this family, but over time his interest in 20th century capitalist media tycoons expanded. The reality-based movie morphed into a fully fictional TV series, and he pulled in as inspiration all sorts of moguls and their horrible families - Sumner Redstone, Conrad Black, Justin Sinclair Smith. And along the way it morphed into an American story, despite having its roots in Murdoch’s British media empire.
The show, brilliant and wonderful and necessary viewing, was many things but perhaps what Succession was best at was being a satire of the sorry state of American capitalism. This wasn’t a show that traded in old-fashioned views of corporate raiders and telecom titans; rather Succession was very much of the moment, and what Armstrong and his writers captured perfectly was the decline and fall of American capitalism. That is what we see at the very end of the series.
Logan Roy was an immigrant, but he embodied a certain kind of rapacious 20th century capitalism, a brutal and relentless grab at money and power. In the eulogy he could not deliver son Roman described Logan as a great man, and he’s right. But he’s right in the older use of great; today we assign value judgments to words like great or awesome, but in their purest form they’re valueless. Great is describing the enormity of Logan, and the way he strode the Earth like a Titan of old. In fact there’s probably a line to be drawn between Cronus, father of the gods who devoured his own offspring to prevent them from ever overthrowing him. In the Succession scriptbook Armstrong mentions that Sumner Redstone’s succession plan was simply “never die.”
Logan represented the kind of unstoppable force of American capitalism, an all-consuming malignancy that destroys everything it touches and also fails to bring any satisfaction to those it enriches. He was monolithic in his influence, a man before whom presidents and kings genuflected. He is from the era when America dominated the world, when he was able to end the foreign wars he started. He, and American capitalism, weren’t pretty, but they were dominant. And they got what they wanted.
But Logan dies, and after three seasons the title of the show really comes into play. It becomes quickly clear that while there may be elements of Logan in his three kids, none of them equal him. 20th century American capitalism is dead, and the 21st century flavor isn’t up to the task.
The kids have no sense of what it means to work. Logan comes from the era of the industrialist, and he almost certainly knew how a newspaper printing plant worked. The kids don’t know a thing; they’re all about buzzwords and forcing their underlings to make numbers work even when they don’t work. In Logan’s day capitalism was based on capital you owned, something you could hold in your hands, something that made things. In the world of Kendall, Roman and Shiv it’s just electronic numbers that represent money. I always found it interesting that the most physical elements of the Waystar-Royco empire, cruises and parks, were the things that least interested these kids.
One of the show’s themes is how women are continuously marginalized in this capitalist culture - the one thing the old school Logan and the new school Mattson have in common is treating women terribly - and it’s behind this that Shiv hides the fact that she is perhaps the epitome of the kids knowing nothing. She wants to be CEO with absolutely no experience; she wasn’t even in the family business until Logan got sick in season one. But this is the sense of entitlement in the next generation; where Logan fought his way to the top his children see themselves as princes and princesses, owed the throne as their birthright. In many hereditary monarchies this becomes a weak point leading to collapse - just because someone is the child of a king does not mean they’re king material themselves.
In the final season we see the collapse of American capitalism. The kids get fundamentally rolled by a foreigner who has the kind of bloodlust that motivated Logan. He’s the next generation of capitalist - he doesn’t have physical assets like Logan did, but he has still built something (although the show does make it clear that maybe he didn’t build it so much as become the face of it, a very common story in tech). All of the scrambling and back and forth in season four is about trying to outsmart Mattson, trying to keep Waystar in the family. But they can’t do it. And in the end Tom comes out on top (as much as one can in this situation) and his role is being the pain sponge for the foreign overlord. The American is reduced to a lap dog, a convenient pawn to be disposed of at any time. It used to be the other way around.
The Roy kids represent America now; they’re petulant and childish and they’re sliding into obscurity. In the final episode we get two scenes that code the trio as absolute children - the Meal Fit For A King sequence where they recapture some kind of childhood camaraderie, and the fight in the office. The fight where Kendall screams “I’m the eldest boy!” The fight where all of the adults look at these kids in the aquarium, dumbfounded as they wrestle on the floor.
Where Logan used the right wing to bolster his position (I would argue that one of the most interesting things about Succession is that it shows how much these elites have no real political interests beyond what makes them the most money, and Logan knows that “pro-business” right wingers make his life easier), Roman and Kendall get bulldozed by the rising fascist tide.
This is maybe the most interesting part of the fourth season. While politics have always played a role in the show the realities of it were never important. “Who’s our guy? Who will help us the most?” was as deep as it got, and in some ways that was still how deep Roman and Kendall were playing the Mencken campaign. Could he help them kill the GoJo deal? But the monster that Logan Roy created was uncontrollable after his death, and in the end Mencken turned on the Roys without a second thought.
But more than that, his politics mattered. The show has taken us around the globe to the dens of the rich and the powerful, the playgrounds of the masters of the universe, but it has always felt detached from the world. These people were, in their own petty and shitty ways, making decisions that would impact millions, but we never saw the millions. Our view was their view - nothing mattered except their own immediate needs and desires. Season four dragged them down to the street level, though. We have the scene of Greg firing a whole gaggle of employees, and it doesn’t happen offscreen or cleanly - we see their horror and we get a sense of their rage in the chat.
And then there’s Roman on the street during the protest. The slowly growing awareness that Mencken is a fascist and that people were going to get hurt by him - really, immediately hurt - had haunted the season, leading up to the sickening tension of America Decides, the election episode. But it was during Logan’s funeral - when he was officially and truly gone, as noted by Frank - that we actually began to see the hoi polloi. We began to really get a sense of how the stakes had changed, seemingly overnight after Logan died.
Roman goes to the protest and yells at people and then gets pummeled, something that would be unthinkable for a Logan Roy. Logan would never reduce himself to going to the protesters, he was ensconced miles above them. But Roman, a true weakling who is trying to overcompensate and who has no real understanding of consequences, throws himself right in the path of these people who are angry at him and his kind for ushering real fascism into power.
This is the state of American capitalism today. We are seeing it right now with the Target and Bud Light “controversies;” American business has supported fascists and crypto-Nazis to the point that the fascists and crypto-Nazis have gotten powerful. And while American capitalism may have though it had an understanding with these monsters, it didn’t. The fascists don’t think they owe capitalism anything, and in fact they are violently turning on it. You think Target has LGBTQ displays because the company cares about gay people? Fuck no. They care about making money, and market research has shown them that this is where the money is. This is capitalism - they will exploit whatever they can to make a buck.
But the fascists don’t care. Mencken doesn’t give a shit about ATN, no matter how much ATN debases itself for him. He is willing to simply lie to Roman before the election to get his support, and it’s hard to imagine Logan being bamboozled as badly. No, the Roy children don’t know what they’re doing; they’ve inherited this power they don’t understand or know how to wield.
This is the fall of the American empire - as the cruel and evil men who built things die off the consequences of their nastiness come home to roost, and the children of these industrialists are ill-equipped to deal with it. They are weak, they are puerile, they are sniveling jackasses who have never known the kind of adversity that twisted Logan Roy and turned him into the man he was. This is America, a nation of bickering children standing in the ruins of what our forefathers built with blood and slavery, bickering children too obsessed with the quotidian and meaningless bullshit of their lives and desires and outrages to realize that the game is over and they lost, and they took us all down with them.