How does a show as complex as “Succession” end? A better question to start with might be, why is creator Jesse Armstrong bringing in his Emmy juggernaut for a landing when it seems to be at the peak of its cultural and critical popularity? At the start of the fourth and now final season, it seems easy to answer that part of the dynamic in that it does feel like the drama between Logan Roy (Brian Cox) and his children could start to get repetitive. This HBO hit has been such a breakneck-paced drama that the worst thing that could happen to it would be an inevitable decline by familiarity. How many times can we watch the Roys stab each other in the back? However, everything shifts in the third episode of this season, which, without spoiling a thing, truly feels like the climax of the entire series. It’s what so much of this drama has been building to over the first three seasons, a collision of deeply personal and ruthless business interests fueled by perfect writing and acting. The Roys will be missed, but it’s here in which the decision to make this a final act feels so right. In a chapter that will be included on any worthwhile list of the best hours of TV this year, everything comes together, and watching these characters navigate new waters for the final seven episodes of this show’s existence is going to be a joy to behold.
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The season starts with the clearly defined battle lines left by the action of the last episode. After the betrayal that ended season three, Kendall (Jeremy Strong), Shiv (Sarah Snook), and Roman (Kieran Culkin) have formed their own company, directly competing with Waystar Royco with a news product called The Hundred. The season opens at Logan’s birthday party, as the show did years ago, but his children aren’t there this time. They’re across town trying to do their best impressions of their vicious father. In a sense, they’re trying to beat Logan at the game he taught them. This is a true, old-fashioned succession—the successor who knows the weaknesses of the enemy because that enemy raised them.
While three of the Roy kids are one side, Connor (Alan Ruck), as usual, remains mostly in the middle, but seems to favor Logan and his newest loyal soldiers, Tom (Matthew Macfadyen) and Greg (Nicholas Braun). Stabbing Shiv in the back at the end of last season has understandably driven a wedge between Tom and his wife, leading to a separation at the start of season four that seems to be heading toward divorce. There’s a stunning scene at the end of the season premiere between Tom and Shiv that reveals how their business decisions have forever warped their relationship. After all, that’s at the core of “Succession,” how professional and personal needs are symbiotic in a sense. They can’t be untangled, and they feed off each other, but they also destroy one another. Everything in this world is transactional, and the final season leans into that fact in a way that’s so cleverly structured on the macro/season level and sharply written from scene to scene.
Speaking of sharp writing, “Succession” remains one of the best shows on TV in terms of dialogue. Jesse Armstrong and his team know these characters so well by now that they can place them in intense situations and make their interplay feel believable in every single scene. The writing has never been better, with the team behind the show clearly inspired by knowing they’re headed to a finish line. Supporting characters like Frank (Peter Friedman), Gerri (J. Smith-Cameron), Karl (David Rasche), and Hugo (Fisher Stevens) are strongly sketched, but this season feels like it leans into the central figures of the Roy family more than the show has since season one. The end run will be about Logan, Kendall, Shiv, and Roman. As it should be. (Don’t worry. There’s still some hysterical Tom/Greg material, including a regrettable new nickname for the pair and a phone call from Greg to Tom at the start of episode two that’s unforgettably hysterical.)
As for performances, the final season feels like it’s allowing the spotlight to shift a bit at the beginning away from the power couple of Strong and Cox, who have won most of the awards. They’re typically great, and it feels like the season will move back to Strong more as the season progresses, but a word of praise is in order for what Snook and Culkin do in these early-season episodes. They’ve never been better. Snook captures an aspect of Shiv that’s unmoored after the drama with Tom without being melodramatic. She took his support for granted, and Snook subtly finds that decline in confidence now that her position has been weakened. Culkin has always nailed how Roman uses over-confidence to hide his insecurities, but that’s amplified in a world in which he’s being asked to go to war with his own father. Roman doesn’t know how to feel about his father, but there’s a part of him that knows he needs his father. It’s a warped dependence that’s common with abusive parents, and Culkin portrays it perfectly.
That aspect of “Succession” has been a driving force behind it since the beginning—How do the abused children of one of the most powerful men in the world find a way to succeed him without losing his support? How do they earn his business respect and keep his personal affection, if he has any of that to give at all? There’s an incredible scene in the second episode in which Logan reunites with his estranged children in an unusual setting, a karaoke bar. Logan needs them on their side but doesn’t respect them. He sees them as karaoke performers, reading the lyrics off a screen but never coming up with something original. But he can’t succeed without them. “Succession” is a show about co-dependence, a drama about a family that is too powerful to divide and too dysfunctional to work. In the end, the members of the Roy family may have no choice but to figure out how to make it on their own. The state of television drama will be a little weaker when they do. [A]  
The ten-episode season debut of “Succession” airs Sunday, March 26 on HBO and HBO Max.