As the final season debut of HBO’s masterful dynastic drama Succession approaches on Sunday — when the culmination of all the family back-stabbing will presumably settle the question of Waystar Royco’s fate once and for all — I find myself thinking back to a line that media mogul and family patriarch Logan Roy practically snarled at his daughter Shiv last season. A few lines, actually.
The Rupert Murdoch-like Roy has, at this point, survived multiple family-instigated coups and threats to his business. During this particular encounter with Shiv that I’m referring to, the irascible titan gave his daughter a window into his thinking and his transactional approach to life when she expressed some dissatisfaction to him thus:
“…Okay, dad, but if you give in to Karl, then everyone starts to carve me out. There’s a line –“
“Nothing is a line,” he snaps back, cutting her off. “Everything, everywhere, is always moving forever. Get used to it.”
Succession Season 4
You don’t need a crystal ball to surmise that kind of do-whatever-it-takes, everything-is-negotiable thinking will surely come into play as Succession moves into its endgame — in a strong-enough run of 10 episodes, by the way, that critics have already blessed the final season of the show with a perfect 100% score as of this writing on Rotten Tomatoes.
“The minutiae barely matters,” opines a reviewer for The Observer. “We’re here for the backstabbing, the internal conflict, and the long strings of obscenity that remind us that if Shakespeare were writing today, he’d probably be writing Succession.”
If Season 3 of the hit HBO drama was, in the words of the eldest Roy child Kendall, Succession going “full beast mode,” then the fourth and final batch of episodes is all about the fallout from what Papa Roy chillingly describes in the trailer as a “night of the long knives.”
From HBO’s Season 4 logline:
“The sale of media conglomerate Waystar Royco to tech visionary Lukas Matsson moves ever closer. The prospect of this seismic sale provokes existential angst and familial division among the Roys as they anticipate what their lives will look like once the deal is complete. A power struggle ensues as the family weighs up a future where their cultural and political weight is severely curtailed.”
Sneak-peek images
The series — the first three seasons of which racked up 48 Emmy nominations and 13 wins — returns for its final run of episodes on March 26 at 9 pm ET on HBO. It will also be available to stream on HBO Max.
Below, check out some new images from the new season courtesy of HBO.
