"Succession" Recap: Two Young Turks
In "Living+", the CE-bros use different means to assert control over their father's empire.
In the opening minutes of “Living+,” Logan Roy returns from beyond the grave. He appears in a video recording taken sometime before his death to launch the episode’s titular new lifestyle product. His announcement is typical—emotionless, scowling, only there because he needs to be. Unfortunately, the woman directing the announcement (played by episode director Lorene Scafaria) isn’t having it. She stops the shoot after a few seconds and—clearly unaware of who she’s dealing with—asks Logan to be “a touch more upbeat.” His fury is immediate. “You’re fucking useless, the lot of you!” he explodes at the camera crew. “You’re as bad as my fucking idiot kids!”
This footage, which gets chopped up and re-edited to various ends throughout the episode, serves as a ghostly reminder that this violent family patriarch is an eternal and inescapable force. This is especially true of the two Roy brothers, whose are exchanging the processing of their father’s death through trips of egomaniacal self-destruction. Roman begins haphazardly firing Waystar executives—first a studio lead and then Gerri, both of whom fail to take his leadership seriously. Kendall, still obsessed with tanking the GoJo sale, rigs up the Living+ product launch with the kind of faux-visionary bullshit to make him seem bigger than he is. Both instances reveal traumatized young boys trying and failing to emulate their father’s cutthroat behaviors, replacing genuine grieving with empty imitations.
“Living+” returns Succession to the realm of outright corporate satire, using the titular product—an incomprehensible premium living space “enriched with the integrated interactions of Waystar’s movie and TV characters”—as the backdrop for a family grieving session. It is the kind of magnificently vacuous business concept that Succession specializes in: a lifestyle product for retirees based entirely on corporate synergies. Everyone can smell the bullshit. Kendall calls it a ploy to “warehouse the elderly and keep them drunk on content while we suck them dollar dry.” Matsson compares it to being on a cruise, except that “you also get to stay in the same place the whole time.” It’s utterly stupid, but in a world where Adam Neumann and Elizabeth Holmes are inventing similarly coked-up business plans, it’s also utterly believable.
Much of the humor from “Living+” is mined from Kendall’s die-hard commitment to making a product launch as iconic as the announcement of the iPhone. Arriving at the stage where he is slated to reveal the product, he invents bananas ideas on the fly. Build a Living+ house out of plywood! Put ATN on a wall! Make clouds descend from above the stage! It’s all in sequence with Kendall the wannabe-prophet, the likes of which we saw in last season’s “Too Much Birthday” in which he devised a birthday party involving Billy Joel’s “Honesty” and a performative crucifixion. Here as then, he gives up midway through, though not before forcing his lackeys to try and accomodatel his partiuclar brand of billionaire insanity.
All this ego-tripping is Kendall’s way of distracting himself from his father’s death, a fact that his sister is processing in neatly-scheduled chunks. I mean this literally: she’s booking out conference rooms in twenty-minute blocks to allow herself a cry or two each day. “You’re scheduling your grief?” asks an aghast but sympathetic Tom, who, through a lack of judgment, finds himself reconnecting with her in this episode. It’s a reasonable question, yet these scheduled tears seem necessary in the wake of her brothers’ recent stupidity. She immediately clocks that they’re trying to tank the deal, partly because Matsson told her about Roman’s mountaintop confession, but also because they’re just plain terrible liars. Their need to establish cool-guy authority before the Waystar board is toxifying into some truly reprehensible business behavior, and Shiv sees right through it.
Roman is particularly cruel in this regard. His need to display power is what leads him to fire Joy, the studio executive who dared disagree with him, an act that in turn leads him to fire Gerri, a truly catastrophic decision. “You’re a weak monarch in a dangerous interregnum,” she says, summarizing the entirety of his fragile situation. His ego can’t handle it, however, and rather than face the reality of the situation, he exercises the worst excesses of his power and fires her. It’s a surprisingly tragic moment, with Kieran Culkin conveying depths of emotional vulnerabilities beneath his authoritative exterior. J. Smith-Cameron, equally magnificent, uses the sexual history between the two characters as a source of rich pathos, looking like she might break into either tears or violence at a moment’s notice.
Roman immediately turns to his older brother as a source of stability—the worst possible choice for a mentor. Kendall only enables him out of his own narcissism, envisioning a fiction where Roman’s terrible decisions reflect well on the both of them. He can see the headlines: “Dynamic Waystar Duo Shake Up Their Senior Leadership Team. Grumble-quote, grumble-quote. Caveat: Some are saying these two young Turks might have what it takes to turn things around.” It’s ridiculous, but if there’s one lesson he learned from his father, it’s that believing what you say will eventually change the very fabric of reality. He’s trying this exact strategy in his Living+ presentation, cooking the numbers on the projected sales both to grow his own ego and to break the GoJo sale. The numbers are insane, apparently: “It’s enough to make you lose your faith in capitalism,” he says to Roman with a cackle. “Like, you could say anything.”
It seems like Kendall’s hairbrained product presentation is destined for failure, and given his onstage history (remember “L to the OG”?), there’s reason to expect it. The episode’s great twist, however, is that he actually pulls it off, converting the Living+ product launch into a Logan Roy eulogy. He uses the aforementioned (and heavily-edited) footage of his father to play on his audience’s sympathies: “If you asked me, would I take an extra year, right now, with my Dad? Say the unsaid? That would be priceless.” He delivers these words with tears filling his eyes, and—despite the fundamental bullshit of the product he’s selling—there’s nothing inauthentic about it.
Kendall leaves the stage a hero, the stock market chattering about his honest performance. Roman, on the other hand, suffers an embarrassing defeat. Originally scheduled to go onstage with Kendall for the announcement, Roman abandoned him at the last minute, under Shiv’s (pretty reasonable) suggestion that Kendall’s speech looked like it would be a train wreck. When the opposite turns out to be true, it crushes him, made all the worse by Kendall, who creates a deep-faked video of their father insulting him. “Roman Roy has a micro dick and always gets it wrong,” says Logan’s digital ghost, and Roman can’t help but listen to it on repeat. With Logan gone, his masochistic need for fatherly punishment is at an all-time high.
Kendall, on the other hand, is floating—literally. At the end of the episode, he goes to Malibu for a swim in the ocean, drifts serenely across the top of the water. Kendall has often found himself in water in moments of crisis and doubt—think of the drowned waiter at the end of season 1, or his own near-drowning towards the end of season 3. That he would return to the water in these final moments suggests that, like Roman, he cannot shake the feeling that his successes must somehow be punished. Deep down, the ghost of Logan Roy looms large.
Notes and Quotes
I didn’t get the chance to mention anything about Tom, which is a shame, because he gets one of the all-time great Succession monologues in this episode. He’s brutally, radically honest about his love of wealth in a way that no Roy has ever been. He tells Shiv, “I love my suits, my watches—I like nice things. And if you think that’s shallow, why don’t you throw out all your stuff for love? Throw out your necklaces and your jewels for a date at a three-star Italian.” Shiv offers genuine laughter at his hedonism, suggesting that she, like him, understands that the only real thing the two of them share is the precious dollar bill.
Speaking of Shiv and Tom, their relationship is rebounding in a big way, largely because of this speech. They aren’t trying to be emotionally open, they aren’t trying to pretend that their love is more profound than it actually is. No, what they’re doing is playing “Bitey”—a challenge to see who can withstand the pain of a full-clenched bite the longest—and it’s doing a lot to spice up their shallow sex life. “Look at that,” Shiv quips. “Tom Wambsgans actually made me feel something!”
Kendall really does deliver a great presentation, but his introduction definitely leaves something to be desired. He talks to the teleprompter, he has repeats “Big shoes” enough times in his opening remarks for the product launch, Roman claps back: “Big shoes. Big hat. Big nervous breakdown.”
Roman on the early stages of Kendall’s speech: “If I cringe any harder I might become a fossil.” He’s right, too: I’m not sure we could have survived Tom’s “and YOU are an ATN citizen!” speech if the episode writers had played it out in full.
Greg finally gets his own Greg! He forces video editor to sound-edit Logan into saying "double the earnings” instead of “a significant boost,” and he uses Tom Wambsgans-style extortion! Good for you, Machiavellian Greg!
An impeccable moment of Succession comic timing: Greg, the “Pitch-bot,” describes Kendall’s stupid Living+ pitch as being “kind of dope” in a robotic stutter. Then, after a full one-second pause, an exasperated Roman: “Oh my God, you’re fired.”
Greg finds the silver lining in Matsson’s Nazi tweet in terms of Tom’s presentation: “This is kind of good for you, because your presentation—not great, and now no one will be watching!” (This is a great episode for tall-boy cuzzo!)