Succession - This Be The Show

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.   

    They may not mean to, but they do.

They fill you with the faults they had

    And add some extra, just for you.

Philip Larkin, 'This Be The Verse'

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As Philip Larkin pointedly wrote, ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad’. And watching the latest incredible episode of the peerless Succession, those words rattle around my head, noisier than ever.

Over the past few seasons we’ve seen all four Roy siblings play out this dictum. Shiv and the desire to show her father that a woman – this woman – can head the company; Kendall, a man who obsessively craved Logan’s approval and simultaneously tried to destroy him; and Connor, the side-lined son, a libertine who impotently runs for President, and throws a tantrum when he sees his wedding cake (it reminded him of the Victoria sponge that Logan fed him for a week after his mother was put in a mental institution). But in this episode, most of all, it’s Roman who is damaged. With a performance so good it should win a Nobel Prize, never mind an Emmy, Kieron Culkin plays the youngest son, stepping up to the plate to deliver the note-perfect eulogy, confident that he has ‘pre-grieved’, and then falling apart so spectacularly that he has to be helped back to his seat. Roman never recovers in this episode, sheepishly standing outside of the family mausoleum and remarking of his dad “He made me breathe funny!” Proof that love all too often doesn’t negate fear.  

It wouldn’t matter half as much if there was a competent matriarch to hand. But no: here comes the scene-stealing Harriet Walter as Lady Caroline – the effortlessly detached mother to Shiv, Kendall and Roman – dialling in her performance, but only because she’s playing a mother who is dialling in motherhood.  

Kieron Culkin as Roman Roy

And so now, with just under a week to go to the grand finale, all the talk is of who will come out on top. Reviews and blog posts and commentaries repeatedly mention that the clue is in the title of the show: someone is to be crowned as Logan Roy’s successor. Yet ‘succession’ is a slippery word, and as I listened to Ewan Roy deliver his own impromptu and scathing eulogy to his younger brother, its definition escaped its more orthodox shackles, finding its way to a far darker place, and one that caused Larkin’s casual yet devastating lines to ring down through the generations. Ewan sheds light on the mystery of dead sister Rose, revealing that Logan was haunted by the guilt of bringing home the polio that killed her. His aunt and uncle did nothing to disabuse him of this. “They let it lie with him,” as Ewan remarked. These parents – or those who surrogate for them – will fuck you up, and in the final analysis, this show may ultimately be about the succession of flaws, mistakes, cruelties - casual, deliberate and accidental - and the indifferences that are handed down from generation to generation. We’ve seen the vivid welt of scars that adorn Logan’s back, the product of that abusive uncle, and now, seeing a pregnant Shiv grab a glass of fizz in order to goad Tom, you know that the damage is wired into that blood. And Kendall, so willing to put his own child at risk and in the way of the rioting genie that he's helped unleash from the bottle.            

Philip Larkin knows the drill, though, and, with an uncharacteristic kindness, gives all parents a pass. 

 
But they were fucked up in their turn
    By fools in old-style hats and coats,   
Who half the time were soppy-stern
    And half at one another’s throats.
 
Man hands on misery to man.
    It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
    And don’t have any kids yourself.

Maybe Roman, Shiv, Kendall and Connor, are indeed, better off out of it.