Wayward Waystar
Succession, it turns out, is a lot like your mid-30s. You come full circle on the person or television series you set out to be, finally at the perfect vantage point from which to assess what parts were worth it and what parts weren’t. The last few episodes of season four — punctuated by revelatory speeches; a son’s unravelling at his abusive father’s funeral; and of course the death march turned victory lap turned undoing of Kendall Roy — closed the loop almost perfectly on a show that had me from the very first trailer.
There was not much to make of the Murdoch lineage in Paper Tigers, 1993’s summary glance by Nicholas Coleridge at the mostly devious men who manufactured global news. I read the book long after Robert Maxwell had passed and in Conrad Black’s career twilight; but even in the early Noughts it shed a great deal of light on how truth often swings upon what’s best for business. How careless men will make a piety of the numbers, to render substance of dangerous headlines.
I don’t know who James or Lachlan Murdoch are as people, even though I find it infinitely fascinating that one or the other once tried to operate an underground record label (for, no less, incendiary rap music). But I know that Kendall Roy, the perpetual heir to the throne in HBO’s Succession, whose grasp of the crown slips because there is cocaine dust on his fingers, or blood, or actual dust, was never less than lucid about the numbers and/or the headlines. But first, a note on full circles.
In episode 1 of season 1, Kendall is seen grasping at straws for control of his father’s declining multimedia empire. A right-wing news operation beats spiritedly at the centre of a business whose film and theme park interests (amongst others) have seen better trading days, not unlike FOX News at the centre of NewsCorp. Kendall says ‘bro’ one too many times at a meeting with a tech founder, whose plucky startup he believes can thrust Waystar RoyCo into the modern age. He has to beg his ailing father to look him in the eye at dinner, and refute therein that the time for ascension is now. In episode 2 he makes love to the mother of his children, a woman he is divorcing very gradually, on a no-doubt luxurious staircase. But set him in the big seat for a handful of hours, show him the stocks on Monday morning, get him a table for two with private equity douche Stewy Hosseini, and there is no place else in the universe Kendall Roy was born to be.
In fact, there are plenty more thorns and banana peels and even powdery sachets to come. Allies will desert him at the 11th hour, and not for the last time. A body will be buried, and Kendall will mourn in isolation, in rehab, in his father’s omnipresent arms — right after orchestrating all of the necessary notes for a corporate bear-hug. More often than not, Kendall Roy is outdone by egoistic motivations within his own family. Changes of mind that have nothing to do with innovation, recapitalisation, board approval, or even (to borrow the man’s love of metaphors) crossing the genetic aisle.
It is Kendall who crosses all his Ts, dots all his Is, by aligning all the Roys who stand to be reasoned with at various moments: when the family patriarch regains his violent swagger and pomp, begins to warm to a Norse god of culturally problematic tech, and when Kendall himself pulls the trigger on a shitstorm of sensitive information. (We all saw Logan’s face, how proud he was — how aroused by the unexpected precision and timing of each challenge.) Say what you will, or think what you will, about Kendall’s opportunistic turns towards feminism, his lackadaisical attitude towards far-right uprisings, that he dismissed an entire workforce once at daddy’s command, and even the fact that he helped bury a body. But the young man understood the excesses of commercial time: you win some, you lose some, you swing again and attempt to limit the casualty count — especially if you’re aboard a sinking Waystar RoyCo.
He was no Shiv, fundamentally guided by admirable and yet untrained idealism, blind rage. He was not Roman Roy, more than delighted to float the lifeboat out to all the Nazis. Lord knows Kendall possessed more stones than Tom Wambsgans. But he was punished, unjustly, for being the one person that understood his father’s castle, and made the most thorough effort to balance the best and basest interests of the Roy family. When the moment called for it Kendall took on his old man, drank his siblings’ spit, and made an awful lot of phone-calls. He even hand-delivered the odd turkey that was Living+ — but he was punished for it, justly, because good villains die beneath picturesque sunsets.
