It’s strange to reach the end of something you’ve relished with a sense of relief. HBO’s Succession has given me and many others lashings of pleasure, but I was glad as the credits rolled on the final episode. Fascinating though they were, it was satisfying to wave goodbye to the Roys, every one of them both great viewing and utterly repulsive.
One of the many great things about Succession, which makes it almost unique in our stultifying didactic age, is that it didn’t tell the viewer what to think
Like The Iliad, which stops when its stated theme, the anger of Achilles, is over, and never gets to the fall of Troy, Succession ended when the matter of the succession was resolved. We never found out who definitively won the presidential election, if Roman would ever form a functional relationship, if Connor would get his reward, etc. When Shiv made her fateful decision to refuse to crown Kendall as successor, the shutters came down, leaving the viewer reflecting that it couldn’t have ended any other way.
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