Succession is ending later this year
Jesse Armstrong has confirmed that the show's fourth season, premiering March 26, will be its final run
We’re currently a month or so out from the March 26 premiere of the fourth season of Succession, the critically acclaimed HBO series about a complicated, deeply screwed up family whose members spend the vast majority of their time trying to destroy each other. No, not that one. No, the other one. You know! The one with Cousin Greg!
But we kid Jesse Armstrong’s beloved dissection of the toxicity of wealth, especially as it enters its senior years—something highlighted earlier tonight, when news broke that Succession’s fourth season will also be its last season, bringing the saga of the Roys and their various boars, on various floors, to a close. Armstrong himself revealed the news, telling The New Yorker that he’d rather end the series strong, instead of letting it eventually peter out, and that the fourth season has been designed to be “pretty definitively the end.”
Here’s Armstrong, describing what sounds like a long process toward the decision:
There’s a promise in the title of Succession. I’ve never thought this could go on forever. The end has always been kind of present in my mind. From Season 2, I’ve been trying to think: Is it the next one, or the one after that, or is it the one after that?
I got together with a few of my fellow-writers before we started the writing of Season 4, in about November, December, 2021, and I sort of said, “Look, I think this maybe should be it. But what do you think?” And we played out various scenarios: We could do a couple of short seasons, or two more seasons. Or we could go on for ages and turn the show into something rather different, and be a more rangy, freewheeling kind of fun show, where there would be good weeks and bad weeks. Or we could do something a bit more muscular and complete, and go out sort of strong. And that was definitely always my preference. I went into the writing room for Season 4 sort of saying, “I think this is what we’re doing, but let’s also keep it open.” I like operating the writing room by coming in with a sort of proposition, and then being genuinely open to alternative ways of going. And the decision to end solidified through the writing and even when we started filming: I said to the cast, “I’m not a hundred per cent sure, but I think this is it.” Because I didn’t want to bullshit them, either.
In the rest of the interview, Armstrong weighs in on various character beats and moments from the show’s first three series—and yes, he agrees with actor Brian Cox that Logan Roy loves his children, for some profoundly fucked-up definition of “love”—while also refusing to spoil any of the mysteries of what will now be our final set of miserable, hilarious adventures with the Roys.