My favorite show ever is Arrested Development. And my favorite line from it comes from George Michael: “You know, say what you will about America, 13 bucks still gets you a hell of a lot of mice.” To this GOB, always prone to miss the point, says “Who said anything bad about America?”
Any fan of Succession has probably heard the show compared to Arrested Development. Heck, I even made the comparison. But I think that usually when people make this comparison, they’re thinking of the characters and how the members of the Roy family align with the Bluth family. There’s validity to this, but in making this comparison, we would do well to remember that Arrested Development had a LOT to say about America. It offered a savage critique of Bush-era politics and the War on Terror, while also more subtly jabbing at culture war issues like Roy Moore’s battle with the Ten Commandments (Google it, it’s a wild ride). It’s even speculated that part of the show’s cancellation was because of how they attacked Bush, and, given the Republican lean of many key figures at FOX (and most major studios), I’m inclined to believe this. And Season 4, for some of its faults, doesn’t get enough credit for seeing how the Tea Party ideology was shaping up and addressing some of Tea Party talking points, most notably a wall between the US and Mexico before they gained much traction ahead of the 2016 election.
In short, yes, Arrested Development and Succession were both centered on the antics of a quick-witted unlikeable family, but these are also shows that made some very pointed critiques of America and the American way of life. Barry also made such critiques, especially in regard to how the US treats veterans (poorly) and the near-universal impulse for celebrity.
The final moments of these respective shows do not mince words. As the credits rolled, they left me thinking grand thoughts about American mythology and how they had attacked it over and over for the last 5 years. When talking about TV shows, the finales—good or bad—often get too much weight, but that’s how it is with most art. There’s a saying in movie criticism that there are two parts of a movie, the end and everything else. In the coming years, for however long Succession and Barry remain a vital part of the TV landscape and discourse, their endings will be a big part of the conversation.
Spoilers to follow for these shows.
A while ago the YouTube creator Skip Intro, who does amazing analysis, especially on the use of police in TV, made this video about Succession. He makes a lot of great points, but one I find especially salient. “Succession likens our relationship with capitalism to that of children and their abusive father.” It’s a somewhat obvious observation (stated better than I could manage last time), but it’s a powerful one because it helps to explain why viewers so often find the Roys relatable. Most all of the world, to one extent or another, lives under the abusive father of late-stage neo-liberal capitalism, a force that surely is wounded and dying but keeps rallying. What made Logan’s death so powerful early in season 4 was not that it happened—from a narrative standpoint it seemed inevitable—but how it was framed in terms of his children’s reaction (which I wrote about here). How could their immortal-seeming father actually die? Even as they frequently admitted that their business was losing relevance and power, they couldn’t face the reality of this decline. In the episodes leading up to the finale, Kendall and Shiv seem to sort of try to face this reality, before this finale shows them back in “get this deal done” mode.
To restate: Logan Roy is the embodiment of American capitalism, and, as such, we are also his children, just way further down on the pecking order. We are like Greg, hoping to leverage the right random connections and fortunate timing into something big. In the finale, Tom calls Greg the highest-paid assistant ever and reveals that Greg is making 200k a year, before putting him in his place with fear of being knocked down to 20 or 40 thousand.
This is a fascinating moment because, for all the ways that Succession is about capital, the particulars of money rarely come into play. I’ve mentioned this before in my thoughts on season 1, but the world of the Roys is so untethered from the particularities of money that it rarely comes up in any tangible sense. We should take the particulars of Tom with a grain of salt. Greg might be making 200,000 these days, but the perks of his proximity to the Roys seem like more than that. And, I think it kind of unlikely that he would fall to a tenth of that salary if he was “bumped down.” The point here is the fear that Tom can strike Greg by addressing the particulars of money. This fear doesn’t exist for the higher-level Roys. They “lost” the battle for their company and are still filthy rich. In saying this Tom is really reminding Greg that he’s still not as real a Roy as he is, though, ironically, Tom could soon be far from the family (more on that in a moment).
So we are like Greg, far down the hierarchy of American capitalism, but forced to stay in its orbit just as Greg feels forced to stay with the Roys. It’s partly birthright—he is their cousin—and partly a belief of his mother that Logan should be doing something for him. These two ideas—birthright and a sense of manifest destiny—are key aspects of American mythology.
They factor prominently in the finale, too. Toward the end of the episode, we get the climax of the whole show, a confrontation between Kendall, Shiv, and Roman in a glass office space. The vote for whether or not to go through with the GoJo deal is tied, and Shiv is the deciding vote. They have previously discussed that the deal should die, and Kendall should be made CEO, but this was before Shiv learned that, if the GoJo deal goes through, Tom will be CEO. This is probably the most clever thing the finale pulled off because it created genuine suspense about what Shiv would do and what her motivations might be. If she kills the deal, is it to spite her (maybe soon-to-be ex) husband or is it to keep the family business? If the deal goes through, is it to please her father’s wishes or because she thinks Tom in charge is her best route to maximum power? These dynamics are still in tension at the end of the show.
She does decide to go through with the GoJo deal after this tense scene with her brothers. This is among the most brutal and vicious scenes of the whole show, and it reveals how deeply these characters are caught up in inescapable American mythology. Kendall feels this most strongly. He appeals to birthright, being the “eldest boy” (he isn’t, Connor is). His more powerful appeal is also a comment on the horrors of capitalism, saying that he feels like a cog that only fits this one machine. If he can’t run Waystar, he doesn’t know what to do with his life. It’s a sad truth seen continually throughout the show. These characters only know the world of corporate jargon and maximized profits. When they try to have relationships with “civilians” outside this world, the relationships fail. When they try to say something honestly without spin, the words fail. They’re all only built for this world and would be adrift anywhere else.
The lowest blow comes from Shiv who counters Kendall’s claim of birthright with her own, saying viciously (but honestly) how Logan didn’t consider Kendall’s children his true grandchildren, a statement grounded in racial prejudice. This pretty much ends Kendall. His birthright might be strong, but his legacy isn’t, or at least isn’t as strong as Shiv’s will be. As if to confirm this, Shiv reluctantly takes Tom’s hand in the limo as they pull away (one of many nods to The Godfather throughout the run of the show). It seems that they’re going to “make their marriage work” or at least make it work well enough for the cameras. It’s a fitting end for the show, a new Roy-Wambsgams legacy (for however long it lasts) taking the place of the old guard.
But the show doesn’t end there. It ends with Kendall on the dock looking out at the water. It’s a perfect ending as water has been crucial to Kendall’s character throughout the show. To name only a few instances, he escaped the car while the boy drowned in season 1, his big shift at the end of season 2 happens while the family is on a boat, and he appears possibly dead in a pool in season 3. There is also swimming earlier in the finale and the obvious maternal connections to water.
But looking out on the water here also makes this ending exactly like that of The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald’s novel ends with Gatsby dead and narrator Nick Caraway looking out across the water thinking famous, poetic thoughts about American destiny and its seemingly inevitable current. In evoking such a famous moment, Succession evokes the same ideas. Nearly 100 years after the publication of Gatsby, here we still are, thinking thoughts about American identity while looking out at the water by the Statue of Liberty. We remain in the same abusive relationship with wealth and status. And maybe we’re all, like Gatsby, faking it more than we want to admit. But Gatsby dies by the end of the book, and none of the Roys do, even as their very American news empire is purchased by Swedish tech money.
There’s a horror to the characters still being alive at the end. They aren’t any longer in the world they knew, at least not exactly, but they still have no escape. Capitalism goes on, wounded though it may be, and so the Roys are still not free of their real domineering father. And neither are we.
A hundred years ago, Nick Caraway looked at that same coastline that Kendall is now looking at. But in another hundred years, it might have swallowed New York City completely. And no change of CEO is going to do a damn thing about that.
Barry also left me thinking about American mythology. This was a major part of the show in the early seasons. Barry is a veteran who fought in Afghanistan, a highly criticized and often deemed pointless war. A lot of the show is about how the American military system trained him to be a killer and bears some responsibility for his socialization, both as a soldier and as a veteran unable to adapt to civilian life. As the show focused more on the tropes of antihero television (season 3), this part of the story took a bit of a backseat in order to make space for critiquing antihero masculinity (which it did very well). Following the mid-season time jump, season 4 has focused on the future and Barry’s (and Sally’s and John’s) continued attempts at a normal middle-American life.
The finale basically plays out in three parts. As per the last episode, NoHo Hank has Sally and John and is using them to lure out Barry. He calls Fuches to come there for a final showdown between him and Barry. Fuches gets there before Barry does, confronting NoHo Hank about how he let Cristobal die in his quest to make it. Like Barry, Hank is a character who has tried to escape the hitman game with mixed success. Like Fuches, he’s ultimately a killer. Fuches shoots Hank before a firefight between all of Fuches’s guys and Hank’s. Fuches then helps John escape outside where John reunites with Barry, and then Fuches runs off into the shadows. Sally also gets away, but we don’t see this happen. We come back inside where a dying Hank takes the hand of the Cristobal memorial statue, a harsh parody of how Hank didn’t extend his hand to save Cristobal when he was getting sucked down into the sand. The camera retreats slowly, taking in the whole bloody tableau as if a Renaissance painting.
I think this part of the finale kind of works, but not as well as the part that follows it. It wasn’t really clear how one would wrap up Hank’s storyline, but this still doesn’t feel quite right. It did get Barry, Sally, and John reunited and resolve the tension between Barry and Fuches. I love Hank, but if I’m honest, he was among the weaker aspects of this final season. The show didn’t seem to really know what to do with him part of the time, and the beats of exactly how things went down with Cristobal were a little confusing.
We leave Hank to see Barry, John, and Sally in a hotel bed. Sally says that she’s been talking to Gene Cousineau and that Gene is getting blamed for Janice’s murder, which Barry committed. She wants Barry to come clean, and Barry doesn’t want to, believing God has something different for him. The role of religion in season 4 is fascinating as it seems to be simply the next thing to believe in when the acting bug failed. But here, and elsewhere, they don’t do a lot with it, so it doesn’t really come together. Sally turns away from Barry for a final time, and the next morning, she and John are gone. Barry suspects they went to see Gene (they didn’t) so he goes to Gene’s house. Gene is not in a good way, gun in hand. A shot goes, and we think Gene might have shot himself, but he has entered the room and shot Barry. Barry registers this and says “wow” before a shot to the head kills him.
Two things of note to this final moment for Barry. First, there’s no afterlife sequence. We’ve seen throughout the show how Barry sometimes has these vision-type things of a beach with all the people he killed. That’s how the vision appears in season 3. By season 4, the vision of the same beach is getting sparser, and now, on his death, there is no resolution. We, like Barry, are denied answers about his morality or the legitimacy of his belief. So often viewers have been identified with Sally, but here we are aligned with Barry, denied resolution of the thing our protagonist wanted most. It also must be noted that Gene is now a killer. As was a major theme of season 2, his quest for revenge led to a violent end that ultimately solved nothing. He became the thing the media had been saying he was, just as Barry had been forced to play the role of the killer when he really wanted to act.
The core of the show has been about Barry’s trauma from war, Sally’s trauma from abusive boyfriends (Sam and then Barry), and how the narrativizing of trauma, through acting or other means, help characters process those experiences. With this in mind, the final sequence of the show offers a final twist of irony.
It’s several years later again. Sally has finished directing a production of the quintessentially American play Our Town. A guy after the show hits on her and she politely refuses him, a reverse of what happened with Barry at the very beginning. This is a demonstration of Sally’s growth, but it’s also odd. It’s snowing heavily—usually associated with death—and her car has a clearly frosted and undrivable windshield. She doesn’t clear the ice and snow but drives off. It’s a strange, surreal moment, quite reminiscent of Charlie Kaufman’s film I’m Thinking of Ending Things (an excellent movie, and book; go watch it on Netflix if you haven’t). There’s something about this ending that feels surreal without easily being able to say, “Maybe Sally is dead now.”
John is older now, too, in late high school it seems. He spends the night at a friend’s house where they watch The Mask Collector against Sally’s wishes. This is the version of the Barry/Gene story that eventually got made into a movie. Through the passing of time, the narrative that it was Gene that killed Janice has calcified into fact, something that dawns on the audience as the segment of the fake movie plays. By the end, things have warped so that Barry is a typical action hero saving his family (it’s actually pretty similar to the fake movie at the end of Robert Altman’s The Player, which you should also watch). The fake movie ends by saying that Gene is serving life in prison for the murders of Janice and Barry, and that Barry was buried with full honors as a war hero.
It’s a gut-punch of an ending. Hollywood has now set the narrative, a highly inaccurate and reductionistic one. As he was a soldier of the US military, there is no choice but to spin Barry’s story as that of a war hero. Barry chafed against such a mythologization of American military might throughout 4 seasons, but its protestations seem no match for the easy answers of Hollywood. This is America. Everyone wants to be famous, and no one wants to imagine soldiers as killing machines.
I close this with a consideration of Sally and her hesitancy about John watching The Mask Collector. On one hand, it surely isn’t healthy to see a film version of your own life. But I think there is a deeper truth here. Sally once fought for John to not know anything about Barry’s past, or her own (she also killed someone at the end of season 3). But now that she’s admitted this to John, it seems that she wants him to have an accurate portrait of his parents. She doesn’t want John to see Barry as a war hero and, crucially, understands that media will only present him that way. Barry, the show, has fought hard for viewers to see Barry as a killer, but they did so by presenting him as the subject. At the end of the day, did this mere act of representation warp the narrative, despite their best efforts?
With the end of Succession and Barry, I feel like all that I’ve known TV to be is ending. As noted, on the other side of this writers’ strike, TV will be wholly changed, as is always the case. These were the last shows from the 2010s that still felt like they came out in the 2010s. The era that raised me and got me through my 11 years of college is done, just as I, too, am now done with college. Is this a touch dramatic? Maybe. But it’s how I feel. Succession and Barry were great shows, and there isn’t a lot left out there like them, willing to challenge core ideas about American identity and our relationship to its myths. An era is over. But what an era it was!
