Succession Season 3 review: Great modern epic that's as revolting as fascinating

Language: English

In the first episode of the third season of HBO’s Succession, Logan Roy (Brian Cox) tells Karl, who has just volunteered to fill in as CEO, “Karl, if your hands are clean, it’s only because your whorehouse also does manicures.” In the last episode, after he is offered help, Roy tells his youngest son Roman, “No, stay here and play with your dick."

Roy is the poisonous core of a show that often feels like a hive, swarming with deathly, uncouth wasps. Every inch of Succession’s time-space feels like a whirring punch, holding still at the base of the jaw, waiting for the moment you will look in either direction. Succession is not just the elite on steroidal self-effacing rants, it is both biblical and epic in its construction, a comedy and tragedy moulded into the unlikely fabric of a show about capitalism, corruption, and family. The third season only establishes it as one of great modern epics, a show as revolting as it is fascinating.

The third season begins in the aftermath of Kendall’s betrayal of his father. On a high from his perceptively noble act of mutiny, Kendall, played by the mercurial Jeremy Strong, looks to take down his father the caustically oppressive Logan and his entitled team of kids – Connor, Roman, and Siobhan. Under attack, this fathership (not the mother’s mind you) is beset by politicking, legal tussles, and wanton acts of cowardice. By the middle of the third season, Kendall’s revolution has somewhat slowed to the tune of the family patriarch’s powers.

By the end of the season, he has become a Hamlet-like figure, melancholic and astray. A late twist in the finale is well within Succession’s natural curve, and whatever tension it releases after a season full of half-twists and painful gestation feels just and rewarding. But this show has become much more than corporate margin calls, and high-brow diplomacy.  

Succession is not the first series to exorcise the ineptness of the elite, nor the first to use the density of language to bring out their depravity – Veep and pretty much everything Armando Iannuci has been involved in ticks that box.

But Succession is perhaps that rare show that clobbers the idea of empathy, that characters ought to be likeable to be watchable. The show is teeming with opportunists, despots, the ungrateful and the intellectually ungainly. And yet its witticisms, its retorts are spiteful and blissful in equal measure.

Nobody, not one person in Succession knows the idea of graceful defence. It is all offence, all the time, as if egotism fuels this jungle full of clown cats. Maybe that is the point, the decadence of a tumbledown farce that is also a metaphor for elitism’s brushed corporate front. That people are just as inane as they are, in a certain selfish sense, competent.  

A couple of weeks ago, Jeremy Strong made headlines – after a New Yorker profile -  being criticised for his extreme acting methods. But the results of whatever extremity he chooses to normalise is for everyone to see. Kendall’s exuberance about his ideas is somewhat tragic, his failure to be incisive, almost hilarious. He believes in mission, possibly for the sake of believing in something. At one point in the third season, he calls Logan ‘evil’ to his face, to which the patriarch reacts with all but a wink. It takes some doing to become both a mogul and evil in the same life, and Logan has lived that life a hundred times over.

Every actor of the ensemble pulls their weight but what stands out in this third season is the somewhat unfettered camaraderie between Greg (Nichlaus Brawn) and Tom (Matthew Macfadyen) as the Beta-men of this vicious, alpha dog world. The two are like gypsies who tattoo themselves all over the body so it toughens them as a matter of expression rather than a matter of effect.  

Though Kendall’s mutiny occupies most of this season, there is also the tacit need for survival, and of course, ‘succession.’ Roman, played with a sense of tortuous menace by Kieran Culkin, remains a spiky, risqué presence, cracking eggshells wherever he goes with the nonchalance of a cold-blooded despot. Connor remains woefully delusional as he continues to chase the idea of prestige with the privilege he continues to hunger more for.

As far as evolutions go, it is Siobhan’s (Sarah Snook) that stands out in this season, from the deliquescent woman who can absorb the toxicity of the men she is surrounded by to the woman who subsequently becomes them, if not an impossibly more vicious iteration. But Succession isn’t your average third-act show that rewards transformations, but carries within  its DNA the humbling qualities of sociological inevitabilities, embodied by the greatest survivor-cum-overlord of them all, Logan.

Succession is often dumbed down for people as a show about some very bad people. It is kind of true because it feels like a sped-up highlights reel of a break-up from hell, so transient is its view of qualities like kindness and love. Even lust, which manifests as the risible, naughty doppelganger of human fallibility, is made to succumb to the bastardly ammunition of corporate adulthood. Peace is a petting afterthought here. It is almost as if you are watching a time bomb articulate its ideas of literary chaos, of what it thinks an explosion must sound and read like.

To which effect, Succession is a writer’s show, in that it delights even in its ability to rewrite the insult, its origin and purpose. It is gnarly, on fire all the time, can potentially gut your morality, and remains unmissable still.

Succession is streaming in India on Disney+ Hotstar.

Manik Sharma writes on art and culture, cinema, books, and everything in between.