Spoilters abound, and reading this requires some knowledge of both Succession and The Walking Dead.
One of my very favourite shows, Succession, will soon premiere its fourth season on March 26. This is very good news for its millions of fans. But the even better news is that Season Four will be the end of its run.
It may seem odd to celebrate the end of a beloved series but so many shows have hobbled past their prime, becoming nothing but cash cows for creators who milk them for their franchise potential with little attention paid to actual story telling. Consider, for instance, The Walking Dead, once a pioneer among zombie shows, with a storyline that exposed the dark choices always present in dystopian landscapes without being preachy about all of that. And then came the weird plot choices, like Negan’s brutality (recall, if you will, Glenn’s head, slowly dribbling into a messy puddle)—which would have been fine unto itself, except that it becomes really hard for a show to extricate itself from something so potent without either continuing to explore the darkness or taking the reform road. The Walking Dead ended up going down the latter and that’s how it became a suburban cul-de-sac of boredom. Consider Andrea, the quintessential Nice White Lady for whom the whole enterprise seemed more like running a nonprofit (killing her was the best option, since most fans wanted to do that anyway). Or consider Michonne, excuse me, Michonne, a woman who made it solo through the first years by dragging two mutilated zombies behind her on a chain and lopping off heads with her fearsome katana, thank you, but who was eventually reduced to someone who blubbered on about separation from an absent Rick who, in turn, had disappeared in Season 9.1The official story about Rick’s disappearance is that Andrew Lincoln wanted more time with his family: this may have been somewhat true, but I often wonder if he didn’t just want to leave before the show went into its complete decline. Consider that Negan ended up as a doting father and husband which, again, is fine, fine, fine but the domestication of an arch criminal—a murderer and a rapist—into someone else entirely was symbolic of a show that, at some point, began to flail around looking for whatever might make viewers happy and only ended up alienating most of them.2I’m not judging Negan here but making the point that when you present one such character as the moral opposite of so many others, the only way to move forward from that is to either kill him off or have him change, and both are eventually unimaginative choices.
If TWD hadn’t become so obsessed with spawning spin-offs featuring, it seems, nearly every one of its main characters (Andrew Lincoln was supposed to star in Walking Dead movies) and if it had allowed the storyline to continue to a grisly, dystopian finish, it might have ended far sooner than its faltering, messy, too-many-bows-tied-neatly eleventh season and still kept the respect of its core fans. As it is, the spinoffs will more than likely die out and I’ll be surprised if any of the promised Rick-centred movies ever see the light of day.
In contrast, Succession has never tried to become nicer, kinder, gentler and it has consistently refused to pass judgement on its characters, people who would quite literally sell each other to the highest bidders. What makes Succession such compelling viewing is our knowledge that this is not a show about a “them” but about power laid bare and in that it is unceasingly and remarkably clear. The last episode of the third season was haunting, not because we saw reconciliations and any kind of changes in its core characters but because we saw and understood that everything about them could flip at any moment, no matter what. Even as we watched Ronan expose his vulnerability, as Shiv understood the truth about her husband, and Kendall realised how futile he had been all along. Power: who has it, who loses it, who keeps it, where does it go? Those are the abstract questions that sustain this show, not whether or not we like anyone more or less than the others.
Watching that last episode, I worried about Succession going on forever, like some version of the original Dynasty, slowly accruing more and more florid characters gleaming with lipgloss and curled under large hats until all of us began to sigh and scream at the screen, as so many of us did with Walking Dead, weeping silently, Oh, please just die already.
With television shows, it’s not that all good things come to an end but that the best of them know when it’s time to end.
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