The world burned, but the Roys mostly came out unscathed. Their fortunes insulated them from the real-world consequences of their actions, whether it was Kendall's role in the drowning death of a waiter at Shiv's wedding or the chaos that followed after the family's right-wing news network, ATN, prematurely called a presidential election for a Nazi-admiring demagogue. The main characters were obscenely rich, their lives a procession of gleaming skyscrapers and Italian villas. In the course of 39 episodes, "Succession" revealed itself as a moral tale for an age of extreme inequality, concentrated wealth and media consolidation. Yes, "Succession" revolved in part around the question of who would take over for Logan Roy (Brian Cox), an ailing tycoon clearly modeled on Fox News chief Rupert Murdoch, but its thematic concerns went far beyond palace intrigue. Yet the similarities between the two were arguably superficial at best. When the series premiered in June 2018, the second summer of Donald Trump's presidency, some viewers saw it as a spin on the smash hit "Game of Thrones," a fantasy about the fight to rule the Seven Kingdoms.
The final minutes of the finale show Shiv and Tom in the back of a chauffeured SUV, blankly staring ahead and not quite holding hands. Shiv, brutally iced out of the CEO gig and always working the angles, ultimately decided to throw in her lot with her spouse, a sycophantic "empty suit" (her words!) who all but offered himself up to Matsson as a feckless puppet. The final shot: Kendall, bleary-eyed and gutted, solemnly staring out at the rolling waves off Manhattan - adrift in nearly every sense of the term. In an emotional confrontation that devolved into a brawl, Shiv sided with the buyer, Nordic tech bro Lukas Matsson (Alexander Skarsgård), and helped install her estranged husband, Tom Wambsgans (Matthew Macfadyen), as the new CEO of Waystar Royco. The final episode of the HBO tragicomedy "Succession" culminated with perhaps the most stunning betrayal in the show's four-season run: Shiv (Sarah Snook), who had vowed to back her older brother Kendall (Jeremy Strong) and block the sale of their late father's media empire, pulled a last-minute 180.
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