This article includes spoilers for the series finale of “Succession.”
For nearly five years now, certain homes and offices and the punchier corners of social media have dilated around a billion-dollar question: Which wounded nepo baby would succeed Logan Roy, the founder and chief executive of Waystar Royco, as the head of a baleful empire that includes cruise ships, theme parks and ATN, a scaremongering media conglomerate? Turns out: None of them. On Sunday night, with the second son, Kendall, poised to take it all, his younger sister, Shiv, betrayed him. The company would be sold to Lukas Matsson, a Swedish tech anarchocapitalist, with Shiv’s husband, Tom Wambsgans, as C.E.O.
And while the problem of who had won the presidential election was left open, the show’s fans were reassured that Willa, the wife of Connor, the eldest Roy scion, planned to redecorate Logan’s townhouse with a cow print sofa.
In its final season, “Succession” drew fewer than half the viewers, across all platforms, of “The Sopranos” or “Game of Thrones.” So if this was a water cooler show, that water was filtered. Yet its queasy, stinging satire of the ultrawealthy exerted an outsize influence on its audience. If you hardened your heart, or if your heart came pre-hardened, it made for a mutinous kind of comfort viewing, in which pleasure, envy and outrage could twine.
You could have watched the finale wearing a black Waystar Royco baseball cap (though the characters prefer the $525 logoless Loro Piana version) or gulped your morning-after coffee out of a mug, available in 11 ounce and 15 ounce sizes, emblazoned with Tom’s email, “YOU CAN’T MAKE A TOMLETTE WITHOUT BREAKING SOME GREGGS.”