WASHINGTON (AP) — With the end of the critically acclaimed drama's fourth and final season, dedicated fans of “Succession” now know the answer to the series' central question: Which of the Murdoch-esque Roy family siblings will prevail?
Oh, and — for those who haven’t yet watched, here’s the spoiler alert.
The whopping 88-minute finale on Sunday evening, which concluded HBO’s hit series chronicling a billionaire media mogul and his children’s struggles to take over the family company, left viewers reeling — because none of the Roy siblings won.
In the episode, Shiv Roy took one final turn against her brother Kendall, blowing up his plans to keep their late father’s company and become CEO by voting to let their media empire be acquired by a Swedish tech giant.
The series-long tussles between the three key siblings turned into an actual tussle, as a screaming match descended into a wrestling match, with the nihilistic Roman declaring the trio “nothing” in the end. And Shiv’s no-longer-estranged husband and soon-to-be-baby-daddy, Tom Wambsgans, triumphed as the new chief executive, with Cousin Greg by his side despite last-minute treachery.
In the finale's closing shot, Kendall stares in despair toward the water. And the credits roll.
“I put my marker down on Tom and Greg,” said Jennifer Gould, an Oregon-based trusts and estates lawyer, minutes after she finished watching the show, “and I was right.”
“Succession” always has been about the membership of its audience, not its size, and its popularity among the coastal media and agenda-setting groups that the show depicts and attracts means the finale will likely leave a cultural mark.
The show even permeated the discussion around the debt limit in Washington on Sunday when a deal was reached just hours before the finale aired. A White House official ended a call with reporters by telling them to have a wonderful evening and “enjoy Succession.”
More recent prestige TV finales are a better analogue for “Succession” than those of the network behemoths of decades past. For example, “The Sopranos” suddenly cutting to black to the song "Don’t Stop Believin’” in 2007 set the standard for both talkability and inscrutability.
But “Succession” left its own unanswered questions, like did far-right presidential candidate Jeryd Mencken — who the Roys’ network questionably declared the winner — actually ascend to the White House?
“I will be thinking about this for a while,” Gould said.
Pamela Soin, a management consultant in New York City, said the end of the monumental New Jersey mob saga was the only finale generating more excitement than “Succession” for her “because that was after seven years of investment.”
Soin and a group of friends have watched every “Succession” episode this season with a serious ritual.
“We turn off all the lights, cinema style, put on the surround sound and watch in complete silence,” Soin said. “Then we have a debrief.”
But Soin only watched the final episode with her father — a new convert to the show — because of the Memorial Day holiday weekend in the U.S.
On social media platforms including Twitter, Reddit and the chatting app Discord, popular among gamers, “Succession” fans shared countless memes and swirling theories about which of the Roy family members, corporate executives and hangers-on would prevail in the finale.
Fans searched for clues in past episodes, characters' names, the show's opening sequence and elsewhere. The finale, titled “With Open Eyes,” had critics poring through the John Berryman poem that has been used for each season finale’s title.
Show creator Jesse Armstrong told The New Yorker earlier this year “there’s a promise in the title of ‘Succession,’” which some took as a sign that the show's central question would be answered.
Conclusions to hit TV series can be hit-or-miss. The bloody 2013 ending of Walter White’s story on “Breaking Bad,” and Don Draper’s more zen ending on “Mad Men” in 2015 generally satisfied their finicky fans. The 2019 conclusion of “Game of Thrones” — the last big finish for an HBO show — generally did not. Endings are hard to pull off, and disappointment tends to be the norm, to which the makers of “Seinfeld” and “Lost” can attest.
HBO ratcheted up suspense ahead of Sunday's “Succession” finale in part by airing only one episode per week, a decision that fans who grew up in the streaming age may be too young to remember was once the norm for TV series.
Suraj Nandy, a 20-year-old college student from Bengaluru, India, said he was counting down the hours until Sunday's finale. While the episode aired at 6:30 a.m. local time, Nandy won't be able to tune in for a few hours because he had to take his sick cat to the veterinarian.
An economics student at Canada’s University of Western Ontario, Nandy said he was disappointed by the “Game of Thrones” conclusion and had watched all of “Breaking Bad,” too, but considers “Succession” “easily, by far, my favorite show of the bunch.”
While he's tending to his pet, Nandy said he hopes he won't come across any spoilers in the meantime.
“I'm completely avoiding every social media platform until I get to watching it,” he wrote in a Whatsapp message a half-hour before the episode aired. “Taking no chances!”
___
Dalton and Dazio reported from Los Angeles.