Succession’s Brilliant Final Season Veers Into Uncharted Waters: Review
The stakes, if anything, are even higher this time.
Brian Cox’s Logan Roy, stalking his newsroom.
Photographer: Macall Polay/HBOWhen HBO’s Succession first aired in 2018, it was billed as a modern day King Lear. Patriarch Logan Roy, played by Brian Cox as a thinly veiled Rupert Murdoch, slowly lost his mind while his children and staff jockeyed for power. Throne rooms were replaced by boardrooms, and Gulfstream G650s stood in for horses, but the basic structure of alliances, treachery and internecine bickering was much as Shakespeare wrote it.
I haven’t read Lear since high school, but I’m pretty sure the show veered off-script well before the end of its third season. I don’t recall, for instance, the king’s children finally setting aside their squabbles to topple their father, and I definitely can’t remember the kids’ palace coup being thwarted by their mother.