Poor cousin Greg. Comically tall and awkward, he negotiates his status as a Roy dynasty poor relation and useful idiot with almost touching hopefulness. It’s Succession’s wildly anticipated – well, I’m excited – fourth, final season. Carnivorous media mogul Logan Roy is celebrating a birthday. Cousin Greg finds himselfstill having to present his credentials to his great uncle’s latest “friend assistant”, Kerry. “I’m a cousin. I’m like an honorary kid.”
For all his pratfalls Greg, scrambling for his place in the razor-beaked Roy pecking order, has proved a wily player. As we’ve seen here with the odd past Prime Minister, goofiness can be a shrewd strategy.
If he had any sense Greg wouldn’t yearn to be one of Logan’s madly entertaining but largely pointless offspring. This is the sort of family in which Roman greets his sister, Shiv, with, “Your face gives me a headache.”
They spend their lives plotting for control of the Iron Throne, in this case known as the family media conglomerate, Waystar Royco. Here, too, be dragons. You wouldn’t trust any of them. None trust each other. Neoliberalism as a batch of dysfunctional DNA.
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Contemporary comparisons for the Roys have included Murdochs, Trumps and, dear Lord, the British Royal Family. Troubled sibling Kendall, craving purpose and Logan’s unavailable affirmation, has his Prince-Harry-in-exile moments.
Nicholas Braun stars as Cousin Greg in Succession.
Now Logan proposes yet another comparison. Surveying his loveless birthday party, he snarls, “Meet the f***ing Munsters.” Three of his children haven’t bothered to show. How sharper than a serpent’s tooth ...
People have lost faith in corporate media. We know. This series shows that when that happens it means a worrying number of people have lost faith in most institutions. Oldest, most entitled son, the dim-witted Connor, is trying to buy the presidency. It’s an indictment of our age that he looks preferable to some of the spectres rising ahead of the real-life US elections.
We’re living through a terrifying lolly scramble in which fortune favours those who can lie with the most conviction, sow the most chaos. There’s an absurd, chilling, near-medieval scene from season two when Logan makes up a game – Boar on the Floor – at a dinner. In a scene of cannibalistic humiliation, hapless family and associates who give the wrong answer to Logan’s poison-tipped questions must crawl on the floor making pig noises while sausages are thrown at them. A parlour version of Lord of the Flies. Cousin Greg is a victim. But he told the truth, Greg pleads. He obeyed the rules. “Oh, there are rules?” sneers Logan. “Do you know something, Greg? There are no f***ing rules.”
Scary. But even Logan, raging on his blasted heath, clinging to his reign of terror and privilege, knows he is circling the drain like a Succession story arc: endless deals on the table, none being made. He flees his awful party, taking his “best pal” – tragically, his bodyguard – for a diner dinner. He frets about his religion – the market – and what happens to its disciples after death. “I have my f***ing suspicions,” he muses darkly.
This season will show if anything better might rise out of his ashes. It’s not looking good. His kids have already abandoned an idea for a supposedly revolutionary new media platform - “an indispensable bespoke information hub”; “like a private members club but for everyone” – for a return to Roy business as usual. As potential saviours of anything, they are majestically unlikeable. Can we afford to feel superior? We cannot. That’s what Married at First Sight Australia is for. Succession is about collusion with power structures, in politics, the workplace, the family. What people do to survive in the jungle. The uncomfortable truth is that, to a degree – “Oink, oink” - we can all have our Cousin Greg moments. It’s ridiculous to look to a television series, even a towering text for the age with the best theme music actually ever, for signs of a way out. But here I find myself, desperately hoping the finale will not be just another deal undone, left lying on the table.
