Toward the end of Succession’s second season, the comedian Demi Adejuyigbe went viral with a video that added lyrics to the show’s main theme. (The fact that Nicholas Britell’s whirling composition is already a banger didn’t hurt.) “All the rich white folk are going to argue,” he sang, “and then whoever’s best is going to win a kiss from Daddy.” What made the joke pop was that, for all the clout that Succession’s billionaire characters appear to wield, the show’s stakes seemed almost preposterously small. Like Rupert Murdoch, on whom he was transparently modeled, Waystar Royco CEO and Head Daddy himself Logan Roy was presented as a shaper of worlds, a maker of kings. But the specific environment that the show’s characters inhabit is so insulated from the one most people live in that they might as well occupy a separate plane of existence. (Kieran Culkin, who plays middle child Roman Roy, pointed out in an interview that the real-life versions of the Roys can go from private jet to chauffeured car to penthouse apartment with such airtight seamlessness that, even in the dead of winter, they don’t wear coats.) Occasionally, we’d see a hint of a ripple, as when Kendall personally ventured into the Vaulter newsroom to fire its staff face-to-face or when Shiv met with a single victim of the abusive culture at the company’s cruises division. But even when Kendall drunkenly crashed his car and drowned a young man at the end of the first season, it was swept briskly under the (admittedly very costly) rug. By and large, Succession has shown us very little of the truly destructive consequences of the Roys’ corporate jostling, outside of the psychic damage they deal unto themselves and one another.
But after “America Decides,” with only two episodes remaining in the show’s final season, it feels as if a storm is coming. The episode plays out as a terrifying mirror of election night 2020 at Fox News HQ, when the network’s decision desk made a controversial early call—with Murdoch’s express consent—predicting the state of Arizona for Joe Biden. In the show’s version, with no elder statesman to steady the tiller, the fateful task of calling a purple state falls to Logan’s sons Kendall and Roman, now co–interim CEOs of the Fox News-ish American Television Network. The Republican presidential candidate Jeryd Mencken, a white nationalist who believes that Hitler had a few good ideas, has already privately admitted his likely defeat. But when a fire, likely started by his supporters, consumes 100,000 absentee ballots in the Democratic stronghold of Milwaukee, he sees a chance to claim victory based on his lead in in-person votes. Roman, who pushed Mencken on his father at a secret gathering in which a cluster of Republican megadonors effectively picked the next nominee, orders his ineffectual brother-in-law Tom, the head of ATN’s news division, to proclaim Mencken the winner in Wisconsin, and when the night is over, the state’s 10 electoral votes are just enough to put Mencken over the top. America has its first fascist president—at least, according to ATN.
It’s not quite that simple, of course. Even the Roys can’t just declare the next president of the United States—although Roman does claim that Logan once dethroned the ruler of an unnamed country with a single fax. But while “we might not be able to crown him,” Shiv argues, “we can stop him.” An ostensible liberal, although she’s never shown much dedication to any principle more complicated than her own self-advancement, Shiv is openly horrified at the prospect of Mencken’s election. (After their first meeting, she proclaimed him an “integralist, nativist fuckhead.”) But she’s at least as concerned with the fact that the Democratic candidate, Daniel Jimenez, is less likely to interfere in the sale of Logan’s company to a Swedish tech giant, which would benefit her both financially and strategically. Mencken, on the other hand, has pledged to block the deal in exchange for the network’s editorial support, a quid pro quo that both brothers support so they can maintain control of ATN. Kendall—whose South Asian daughter was physically harassed by fans of the racist ATN host Mark Ravenhead (also something of a Hitler fan)—and Shiv wrestle openly with the seriousness of the decisions they have to make. They’ve spent their whole lives jockeying for their father’s power, and it’s only just occurring to them what it means to actually wield it. Roman, meanwhile, can’t throw the levers fast enough. When Kendall balks at the possibility that ATN’s meddling could do serious damage to the country’s democracy, Roman just smirks, “Oh, America.”
Set almost entirely inside the ATN newsroom, “America Decides” shows us nothing of America itself beyond the images that flash, often muted and out of focus, on screens adjacent to the Roys’ private quarrels. When the head of ATN’s decision desk takes a moment before the returns start pouring in to remind the staff of the meticulous terms and conditions that govern their work, his words are drowned out by the uninterested chatter of Tom and Greg. Even the rare cutaways find characters in the backs of cars or hotel suites; not until the last few minutes, as Shiv storms out of the building, does anyone take so much as a breath of unfiltered air. But there is a world out there, and no matter how tight, the seal isn’t perfect. “Maybe the poison drips through,” Kendall muses at one point, a stray observation connected to both nothing and everything.
At Shiv and Tom’s election-eve party in the previous episode, reports that Mencken’s supporters had firebombed a campaign office had filtered in, and the next day, they torched enough ballots to throw the outcome of a presidential election into doubt. Whether we’re in for a repeat of 2020 or 2000, it’s clear that more uncertainty and unrest are going to follow, and for once, not even the Roys can be sure of their safety.