‘Succession’ Season Finale Recap: Crash and Burn

You know the bit in Monty Python and the Holy Grail where between the coconut jokes there’s a historian narrator who gets killed by a knight, and then there’s a modern-day police investigation, and then King Arthur gets arrested for murder? Succession is like that but for serious.

Unable to cope with the stress of launching a hostile takeover against his father’s company on his sister’s wedding day, Kendall Roy — the only even halfway decent person in the entire family — goes on an inebriated ride with a one of the reception’s waiters in search of cocaine. When a deer appears in the middle of the road, the cater waiter seizes the wheel and the car drives right off a bridge. The show follows with it. After nine and three-quarters episodes of jokes about rich people’s dicks, Succession suddenly decided it’s about Chappaquiddick instead.

It’s not that Jeremy Strong does anything wrong in this sequence or the protracted final reel of fallout that follows. On the contrary! Like I said earlier in the season, he plays Kendall like a Deadwood character in a Petticoat Junction world. So long as he’s the sole person on screen — diving back in the water to search for his passenger, giving up in horror, staggering home in shock, reeling as celebratory fireworks go off nearby as if it’s the Fourth of Irony July, breaking back into his room, methodically cleaning himself up, powering through, heading back to Shiv and Tom’s reception, slowly starting to smile as if everything’s going to be alright after all, glad-handing guests, hugging and dancing with his kids and his estranged wife, waking up the next morning and immediately looking at the cut he sustained on his wrist and realizing it wasn’t all some horrible nightmare at all, poorly playing dumb at breakfast the next morning when the dead waiter is the buzz of the room — he brings that Deadwood world with him. He can even pressgang other people along with him, elevating them into something truly sinister and monstrous, as he does when he’s summoned to a meeting with his father and at first endures and then breaks down in childlike sobs as Logan, his wife Marcia, her son Amir, and Logan’s henchman Colin arrange a coverup predicated, or rather extorted, on Kendall’s abandonment of the takeover plan. Christ, he can even overcome how ridiculous that handheld-camera jitter looks in the context of a guy cleaning up after committing manslaughter.

No, Strong isn’t the problem. Kendall isn’t the problem. You wanna know what the problem is? Prior to the car crash, the show’s standout sequence was the series of jokes in the bachelor party episode about Tom Wamsgans swallowing his own load.

Plenty of shows, great ones even, have suffered through shaky first seasons, but turned things around toward the finale and launched themselves into greatness afterwards. Halt and Catch Fire did it. Billions didn’t have a great first season-ender, but there was strong stuff toward the back end that became the baseline for the terrific seasons that followed. As for Succession, “Strong pilot / inconsistent-to-infuriating bulk of the season / ‘hey, now we’re getting somewhere’ penultimate and antepenultimate episodes / killer season finale / onward to immortality” is a familiar pattern from The Leftovers that it seemed to be following to the letter.

But who the fuck thought this show could sustain this serious an event?

In this episode alone, the possibility that Roman’s eagerness to rush his pet satellite launch in order to impress people at Shiv’s wedding got potentially dozens of people killed was played for laughs, repeatedly. It may have only cost a couple of people their thumbs in the end, but neither Roman nor we knew that when we were guffawing at the explosion as he watched it silently on his cellphone in the men’s room.

And that’s fair, that’s a valid choice, that’s just black comedy. It’s fine to do that, the same way it’s fine to allude to the right-wing poison Logan’s news network keeps pumping into the body politic primarily as a joke about his deep-rooted shittiness without suddenly requiring the show to turn into season six of The Wire and examine his propaganda’s effects in real time. It’s okay to show the family terrorizing or taunting the help. It’s okay to watch Shiv join a left-wing politician’s campaign because it’ll make her look like a winner and get her laid, and then undermine his idealism from within, and then come clean about the getting-laid part on her wedding night and pivot to “we should have an open marriage because love is meaningless garbage except insofar as it gives me what I want without requiring anything in return,” and Tom basically getting turned on by it.

It’s okay to laugh at Conner’s megalomaniacal (and, I’m guessing, eventually successful) presidential ambitions despite the fact that he seems actually insane, or at Greg treating his secret cache of documents implicating the company in a massive cover-up of sex crimes and murders like it’s a winning hand in a Magic: The Gathering tournament.

This is all fine. Good, even! Succession became a good black comedy!

But Christ, what a shitty tragedy it’s gonna make.

How can we titter and chortle about the Roy clan’s latest snafu and faux pas when one of them left the scene of a fatal accident for which he was largely responsible and was blackmailed into continued silence by his father with the implicit threat that it’ll all come out should he step out of line ever again? There’s nothing, nothing about this show that can sustain that level of moral and emotional intensity, and now we’re stuck with it forever! For the duration of the series!

That’s the difference between Succession and the other shows I mentioned, the thing that makes me not only bearish on the chances it’ll find its voice for real come Season Two, but convinced that such a thing is not possible. None of those shows had a main character do something so radically out of step with the overall tone of the show, and had that something be so irrevocable, unforgivable, and inevitably resonant in every single thing we’ll ever see that character do ever again.

This is not a weight this show can bear. No amount of great comedic acting by Matthew Macfadyen and Nicholas Braun as Tom and Greg, or entertaining rich-kid schtick by Kieran Culkin, or great acting period by Jeremy Strong, can undo it. Succession failed.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.

Watch Succession Season 1 Finale ("Nobody Is Ever Missing") on HBO Go