Succession: Shiv Misunderstood

What everyone gets wrong about Succession

[WARNING: SPOILERS]

A couple years ago I said in a group chat that Shiv reminded me of my (beloved) sister. Someone replied in horror: how could you say that about your sister!

And it’s stuck in my craw ever since. I didn’t get it then and, having finished the series, I don’t get it now. And I think it gets to a fundamental misunderstanding of the show.

And it wasn’t just that conversation. Note especially the howls of derision against Shiv after the series finale: Brutus! Witch! Snake! Wrong, wrong, wrong.

I hear it often said that unlike in Breaking Bad and The Sopranos, where audiences were famously seduced by their anti-heroes, it is impossible to like Succession’s protagonists — maybe with the exception of Tom and Greg who provide comic relief as some sort of clownish sideshow. I don’t understand this. Logan and his kids are all flawed but the show does not dislike them.¹ It reveres Logan, whose power pulsates through every one of his scenes, whose contempt and disappointment in his heirs drips from every pore. Roman is the beloved truth-spitting jester, stunted, erratic yet perhaps most clear-eyed of all (this might be my favourite moment). Kendall is impossible to love, unless it’s in the way one might love to throw a bag of cats against a wall. He is the Buffoon Supremo, the inferiority complex heir-apparent that demands to be respected, screaming for his birthright into the void. The joke is always on him.

(And I never found the sycophantic limp-wristed Tom and Greg sideshow that likeable, to be honest. I found sincere, pained Tom more appealing — more on that below.)

But Shiv? What has she done that raises the hackles of fans? Is she the Skyler White of the show, drawing Bad Fans to hate her? I kvetched in defense of these Bad Fans: I admit to being one of them. But I see no resemblance at all between them. Is it just that she is a woman and foils Kendall? Shiv is an ambitious player in her own right. She owes Kendall no more than the fraternal love she gives. She suppresses nothing. She plays the same dynastic game.

Perhaps it’s her treatment of her husband Tom. Like in this brutal scene where both reveal ugly truths — she’s selfish and he’s servile. That’s just marriage, bro. Sorry to break it to you. Go watch Judd Apatow’s This Is 40 or Fleishman is in Trouble if you want more bleak marriage truth-bombs.

What about her “betrayal” in the final “twist”? Here’s the thing: there is no betrayal. And there is no twist. Kendall’s mission is fundamentally Quixotic: the megalomania of a buffoon. The tension is Kendall managing at all to hold together a fragile and tragic alliance to thwart a lucrative and overvalued bid whose only overpeer is his own ego. He just wanted to sit in the chair and play bossman — play daddy. To hold the real strings of powers instead of LARPing war games and tantruming through inherited proxy ersatz power.

But of course this unravels. This is not a story about the Will to Power of a Great Man who bends the world around his will. It’s about a pathetic and denuded failson. And so of course he couldn’t hold it together with his vaporware schtick. He cannot contain his younger, smarter, more loyal (and deranged) brother Roman nor his better and sidelined sister Shiv. It is just the last grand immolation in a lifetime of immolations. There is simply nothing there.

Look at where they each end up.

Shiv as Queen Mother beside a newly invigorated Tom.

Ken as the lost puppy, a poorly fit single-purpose cog without a slot, trailed by his protector — no, haunted by the keeper of his Secret.

Roman broken and tormented in his brilliant, tortured, clownish way, and still deranged in Freudian yearning for geriatric Gerri. He cannot live up to his namesake Romulus. He will not strike his brother.

Character is destiny.

If your understanding of the Succession series arc is the ascension of Kendall, then Shiv is the shiv in his back. But it’s not that at all. Shiv is entitled and overrates herself, but Kendall is a blackhole of entitlement, and a pathetic gimp. I AM THE ELDEST BOY he screams at her in anguished desperation. Of course she changed her mind as he stood before the Board, making no coherent case for himself — for there is no case to make. Of course she cannot hand over the family heirloom to this supreme buffoon. He was born to play in the sandpit not sit at the adults’ table, let alone head it. I just don't think you'd be good at it. What else does she have to say?

In the final moment Shiv was the only one with enough sense to execute on Logan’s plan. And Shiv is the keeper of the bloodline, the others are dead ends. Ken’s a fake dad — divorced and distant and uncaring and unknowing. And they’re not even his. The show can’t help rubbing his face in shit one final time as the King Cuck. Roman cannot have children — he can’t even perform. (Connor — well, we almost forgot to even mention old man Connor). Only Shiv proves worthy. Her husband emerges not entirely parasitic and even capable of genuine love. Importantly, the series culminates in Tom’s first grasp on power. It’s only an inch — he remains a front man to a Swedish puppet master. But it’s an upgrade from literally no power (aside from whatever he had over Greg). And with his star rising he finally impregnates his wife, who has to date treated him as any other disposable accessory of the rich. And with his ascent to the throne, his ascent to fatherhood, he finally earned his wife. Not simpering into the ruling family like a parasite, but offering his hand as a King Father. And she accepts her role as Queen Mother. Humbled and cured of Ken’s ego incontinence, Shiv is tamed and bonded, riding away with the new CEO and a giant pay packet from the company sale. It is a happy ending for them, or as happy as such broken people and relationships go.

Succession is obsessed with its characters’ sex and love lives. Ironically, there is very little sex and very little love in the show. Power is the show’s currency, and sex is a distraction to power. If character is destiny, their sexual predilections are those characters’ most visceral expressions. As Logan and the family sing so poignantly through the TV from beyond the grave:

There's nought but care on ev'ry han',

In every hour that passes, O

What signifies the life o' man,

An' 'twere na for the lasses, O.

Green grow the rashes, O

Green grow the rashes, O

The sweetest hours that e'er I spend,

Are spent among the lasses, O

What signifies the life of man: his lasses. It always comes down to their women. Logan grinds through them like he grinds through all men and all things. Connor must buy and beg. Kendall’s relationships are defined by failure. He is a sexless weasel that leaves behind an ex-wife he could only impregnate with another man’s seed. Rome is a stunted man-child and impotent to boot. Even the Swede — the techno-billionaire. Our new generation of billionaires aren’t even man enough to be vampires, they literally send their own blood to their “prey” (today’s soyboys don’t hunt). Tom and Shiv are poster-children for bleak marital dysfunction but emerge as something real and maybe even admirable: persistent, fecund, determined. Winners.

This is Succession’s comment on broader generational succession: the geriatric ruling class’s clutch on power, pried only from their dead hands. Their successors are impotent — unable or unwilling to have children. All dead players. Louise Perry observes women today beg to be choked in bed to feel some last vestige of masculinity from their soyboy partners. Status games are all that’s left while alarmism and fake problems dominate discourse to distract us from our own impotence.

This was Logan’s explicit view of the world. He is Og, the last of the Nephilim:²

America… I don’t know. When I arrived there were these gentle giants smelling of fucking gold and milk. They could do anything. Now look at them. Fat as fuck, scrawny on meth or yoga. They pissed it all away.

It’s Logan’s world, we’re all just living in it.

1. Just like Michael Mann’s Heat is an ode to its broken men. And no show loves its women more than Fauda, whose poor, rich, Arab, Israeli, civilian, military women are all deeply charismatic in a kaleidoscope of ways and are impossible to dislike.

2. I’ve written before about this anxiety of our moment: