One week on and the Succession discourse has yet to let up. The ending has been dissected in detail, the emotionally ambiguous scenes (the hug! the scars!) have been analysed to within an inch of their lives and, inevitably, the nervous first shoots of a backlash have begun to sprout. It feels like everyone alive has an opinion about the finale. But that isn’t exactly true. Brian Cox doesn’t have an opinion on it, because he hasn’t seen it.
“I’m dead! Dead people don’t watch things like that,” he said on BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg. “I’ve never liked watching myself for a start, and somehow or other, because of what happened to Logan, I’ve been disinclined to watch the rest.”
What Cox is referring to – and here comes a spoiler alert, for anyone who hasn’t seen any of Succession but for some reason wants to read about it – is the death of Logan Roy. It was a moment that was always going to happen, because you can’t have a succession if the boss remains alive and kicking, but the timing still seems to rankle a little with Cox.
You will remember that Logan died in the third episode of the most recent season, popping his clogs on a private jet with barely anything in the way of traditional foreshadowing. In the moment, Logan’s death felt like a dramatic masterstroke. It meant that the rest of the series would not only revolve around an all-out fistfight for power between his offspring, but that its overriding emotion would be grief. The only person who didn’t seem to think it was a good idea at the time was – you guessed it – Cox.
Cox appeared to spend much of his character’s post-death publicity circuit griping about how early in the season he was offed, to the extent that he also had fun teasing – perhaps with an eye on a far-fetched Succession sequel idea – the notion that Logan might not actually be as dead as everyone thought. At the time, it was easy to write this off as the grumblings of an actor who didn’t get to be on telly as much as he wanted. But now the show is over, it might be time to ask whether or not he had a point.
Because as thrilling as it was in the moment, and as exciting as the final two episodes were, it’s hard to shake the feeling that Succession lost a step or two after Logan died. Succession had always been a deliberately frustrating watch, with each character stuck in their own personal holding pattern of ambition and incompetence, and the hope was that Logan’s death would shake them out of their stasis. But this didn’t happen. Within hours of him dropping, the Roy siblings were back to their petty sniping and one-upmanship.
Part of the problem, I think, was the introduction of Lukas Matsson, the big baddie of the series who planned to buy Waystar Royco out from underneath the Roy family. Without breaking stride, Succession slotted Matsson in as a substitute for Logan. The siblings plotted against him, sided with him and tried to organise a boardroom showdown to take him out in various states of allegiance. Everything, in other words, that they had just spent the previous seasons doing with their dad.
This was presumably the writers suggesting that the Roys are so entitled and useless that they will always play second fiddle to someone, but my issue is that Cox played the oppressor so well. Whenever anyone refers to Succession as Shakespearean, they are almost certainly discussing Cox’s operatic rage as Logan. The sheer calloused-over fury of the man – his contempt, his bitter disappointment in his own children – gave the show its ballast and so every episode without him was always going to be left wanting to some extent. He was a monster, but a monster you missed when he wasn’t around.
Logan needed to die. Succession’s premise was a promise, and promises need to be kept. It’s just a shame that, in retrospect, he didn’t cling on for another couple of episodes.
