It is a good ending and it should remain as a definitive ending. I can’t see Armstrong picking this up again.
There really isn’t any more we need to know about this world.
I’m was looking forward to seeing levels upon levels of multi-order schemeing unravel but…nope. not to be. Nothing so clever at all.
A straighforward and pragmatic shafting of Shiv by Mattson. A momentary period of sibling harmony torpedoed by the realisation that none of them could ultimately bear the supremacy of one individual.
Tom was the least objectionable and most biddable. He won’t scare the horses, will do pretty much anything for money and, in this last season at least, has shown himself to be a serious hard worker.
He is a sensible choice, the “serious” choice, the least troublesome.
Kendall, Roman and Connor seem destined to be back where they started. Massively rich but not actually competent enough or trusted enough to maintain any real power or loyalty for long.
Shiv and Tom? Christ knows. The final scene in the car reminds of the wordless end scene in “The Long Good Friday”. Harold Shand being driven away to his fate. We know what is coming, so does he and nothing needs to be said.
In this case the outcome has many more options and is going to be far less bloody but just as unhappy I’m sure.
I liked the ending. I predicted Mattson would back-stab Shiv in favor of Tom. It seemed the most logical progression. In fact IMO it was the only predictable part of the episode, and then Greg nearly wrecked it, so that was a fun emotional roller-coaster.
Other satisfying bits about the ending:
Roman has always been a nihilistic about everything, and completes his arc when he embraces it (“we’re bullshit”). Good chance he works all this out in therapy.
Ken was always a “there’s nothing there” guy, so it’s fitting he ends with nothing. Of course his talent is for whipping up something out of nothing, so it’s not exactly an end for him.
Shiv plays her last card (she’s carrying the baby of the American CEO). Makes you wonder if she gamed out the entire event tree and had prepared for this eventuality (as others). She’s not necessarily finished here, but the paved path of “matriarch” is there, and it will hold simultaneous appeal and revulsion. There could be a “Shiv” spinoff. I’d watch that.
I think her reaction to Mattson’s betrayal suggested that she had not planned for it.
She perhaps should’ve foreseen that possibility but it fits with a pattern of her being a little blind to such behaviours being applied to her (e.g. by her dad, by her siblings, by Tom, by Mattson etc,)
At the end she looked almost revolted by what she was now doing. (linking back up with Tom) and I don’t know how that plays out. I really hope they don’t do a spin-off of any kind.
This is true, but I think it’s 100% consistent to who these characters are and a necessary part of telling their story. They occupy a level of power where every whim they have becomes a big deal and things that would be massive to anybody else just come and go.
It makes total sense to me that these characters would put together a proposal for a huge new media undertaking, then drop it completely to make a $10B deal to take over another giant media empire, then lose interest in that when another thing comes along.
They’re all driven in the moment, but they’re wildly inconsistent as to what they’re driven about, because their positions just afford them too many options. If that weren’t the case they’d be at very different places in their lives.
Yeah, but in the real world they would be facing a 9, 10 figure lawsuit for breaking the Pierce deal. We saw how Elmo was forced to buy Twitter, after all.
Which, I believe, was the only reference to the election in the past 2 episodes. There could have been a gripping and engrossing 6-episode mini series on the election fallout: what happened in Milwaukee, the legal and political machinations, what’s happening in the streets…all through the lens of the biased and corrupt management of ATN. Ideally, written by Aaron Sorkin.
Vastly over-rated. On the list of best TV of all time, I don’t think it cracks the top 50.
I’ve put my finger on what bugs me the most: the dialog. Everyone stutters, and stammers, and speaks in sentence fragments and talk over each other. They use pronouns with no antecedents, but then fill in with obscure metaphors and liberal sprinklings of profanity.
It’s all supposed to be naturalistic and Robert Altman-esque, but nobody talks that way. Anybody in real life would constantly be interrupted with “What do you mean? Who are you talking about?”
Nobody’s confusing this with a hidden-camera documentary, so I want my dialog to sound like it was written by a professional, and that it impart meaning and advance the story.
This is the key. None of them could bear one of the others coming up on top. But the only way one of them wins is if the other two go along, so there is no way for any of them to win. Shiv doesn’t pick Tom by voting yes to the acquisition, she doesn’t pick Kendell. She doesn’t need Tom for money, she is the one with billions. Tom just has his CEO salary.
The GoJo deal was half cash and half stock, so all three are substantial shareholders in the combined corporation. They can be real thorns in Mattson’s/Tom’s side if they choose.
I am also not that interested in a dramatic spinoff, but how about a comedy - “The Disgusting Brothers”?
Nailed it. We watched it all because we had committed time in the first few seasons. It got really old after that, and I pretty much hated the last season. At least the jerky camera work settled down, but didn’t completely go away.
I’m agree with the majority here that the show ended fairly predictably and it ended at the right time and was overall very good but not great. I wonder if the ending had some sort of insane twist that everyone loved that it would have been considered one of the greats.
I would be very happy with an annual special, themed around Kendall’s birthday party for that year. His 40th was breathtakingly appalling, but he’s got billions to go even more over the top to make himself feel a bit better for his 41st.
Definitely is going through a recency bias bump, isn’t it? I found the show compelling, no doubt, but I had a hard time buying the initial premise - this is a publicly traded American corporation, none of the kids had a realistic shot of being the CEO. The closest may have been Kendall, but he shot his wad with a drug addiction that put him in recovery, killing the waiter, and generally being a bad executive with how flighty he was. Shiv? Zero experience, wouldn’t even make her a director of a whole division much less CEO… maybe director of sales, something more functional and not strategic. Roman? Could never generate the political support needed, not even close (as well as lack of experience).
The entire premise was flawed, iow. And then there’s the fact that they never talked about business. No “whoa, looks like our debt to equity ratio is too high”, no “we need more dividends, Dad”, nothing. These kids have extravagant lifestyles paid for either by (a) stock sales, (b) dividends, or (c) loans, and none of this - like Shiv’s jet - is discussed. It is like the creator, a British citizen, thinks that publically traded American companies can be handed down to the kids, that the kids can spend company resources at whim, and that’s not even close*.
I don’t consider them serious people either, to be frank.
*Exceptions
Henry Ford II, installed in place by the US government in 1944, they literally pulled him out of the army and placed him in charge of Ford. I think he was 26.
Thomas Watson Jr: son of the man who made IBM a big company, Jr made it into a behemoth and got it into computers.
I don’t think you can blame the British show creator for those flaws, as everything you said would be true for a UK company (or one from any other country).
The series had a tendency to write plot lines into dead ends that were never heard from again. Remember when Kendall had a drug addiction? Remember when Logan had a stroke, and was so debilitated he was pissing on the carpet of his office? Remember when Tom was going to jail for the cruise line scandal?
I thought it was a relatively strong series finale. Succession has been kind of a hate-watch for me from the very beginning, given how horrible the major characters are, so I’m frankly a little relieved to have it over, at least for now.
When Shiv and Roman were half-jokingly talking about murdering Kendall, I actually thought they might go through with it. That would have taken the finale in an unexpected direction!
That’s an interesting take on it; I’m not so sure. It seemed essentially irrational of her, a spur-of-the-moment change of heart. She had rightly been pissed at Matsson for betraying her in favor of Tom as American CEO. She had already agreed to back Kendall. She had had that bonding moment in the kitchen at her mom’s house with her brothers. She had made a million calls to line up support for her brothers and her. She had shown up and been seated at the table for the all-important board meeting that she had known about for a long time… and then I think she just sort of freaked out.
Yes. Agreed as to both of these.
I was wondering about that. They’ll still be messed up, but they’ll be rich(er)!
Yes, unfortunately true. It also kind of underlined Logan’s point about his kids not being serious people. They’ve got the attention span of hummingbirds.
Yes. A very ambiguous gesture. Not ignoring him… but definitely not giving his hand a warm squeeze.
Matsson said he had the hots for her, and Tom showed how utterly spineless he is by practically saying he wouldn’t object if Matsson slept with his wife/the mother of his child - he just wants to stay at (or near) the top of the corporate ladder. Shiv now has every reason to hate them both, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if she eventually ends up in bed with Matsson.
I took Matsson’s ‘I’m going to fuck Shiv’ in the other sense of destroying her, and that was the signal for Tom to understand that she was no longer going to be a threat to him for the CEO position in the future.
To be fair I always need to rewatch to get all the dialogue, body language and background context.
I think you and I watched this series from similar perspectives. I found nothing to love about any of the characters and struggled to feel sympathy for them, but some of the lines/dialogue were true diamonds (“… and I have Cyd running around town, spitting poison like a fucking King Cobra with an iphone…”) and I did actually want to learn the resolutions of some of the story lines.
I wasn’t expecting much, so I wasn’t disappointed.
I didn’t find Shiv’s decision all that irrational, however. She had earlier made it clear to Tom that things would resolve rather neatly if only she and he could find a way back to their marriage. He didn’t say no, only that he didn’t know. She saw a way to force the issue, provide a father for their child and guarantee that she would always, always have a seat at the “grownups” table – however behind the scenes her seat would be.
Her brothers were going to brush her back no matter how many times they assured her they wouldn’t. She’d already seen their willingness to do it. Much harder for Tom to do to her. Or Matsson, for that matter.
And I can’t see her debasing herself by sleeping with Matsson at some point in the future. Not after a betrayal like the one he visited on her.
I’m glad you did! Honestly, I might have faded out of watching the series without these 2 characters, along with Alexander Skarsgård. MacFadyen has always been a favorite of mine, Nicholas Braun showed his chops in this series, too.
Skarsgård reminded me of a coiled snake in all his scenes. He knew exactly what he was doing, keeping everyone off balance and made his move when the Roys were at their most vulnerable. Worked great.
I think the show and the finale were brilliant. It’s a takedown of the fetishization of the Great Man theory that runs like a cancer through America. These people aren’t special, they’re lucky and venal.
The AV Club sums it up nicely:
“It is not—despite the incredible con job that Jesse Armstrong has done with his beautiful scripts, and that Mark Mylod, and all of the show’s incredible crew, have done to present these gorgeous worlds of opulence and influence—a prestige drama about the terrible things people do for power. No: It is, and always has been, a show about idiots, fucking up.”