Nearly 10 years after the New Yorker’s Emily Nussbaum codified the phenomenon of the “bad fan,” the viewer who declines to acknowledge a TV series’ emphatic hints that the show’s protagonist is not meant to be admired or idolized, Succession watchers are engaged in a fierce debate about which of Logan Roy’s children will end up with the keys to his media kingdom. Will it be Kendall, the absentee father and drug addict who crashed his car into a river and left a young man to drown; Shiv, the ostensible liberal who has talked female victims of sexual abuse out of pressing charges to serve her own interests; or Roman, who’s hard at work trying to grease a white nationalist’s legally murky path to the White House? “Roman Roy Has Always Been Succession’s Most Empathetic Character,” Time recently declared—before he tried to throw a presidential election in favor of a right-wing fascist, to be fair—the equivalent of nominating him as the world’s shortest giant.
The bad fan isn’t just a phenomenon of viewership, but of the delicate dance of the antihero show, which dangles the hero’s potential for redemption in front of the audience while keeping them from making any forward progress that might disrupt the balance of the show. Walter White and Tony Soprano weren’t perfect, sure, but they were trying, and in the meantime, they made being bad seem like it could be an awful lot of fun. Some of these gleeful manipulators even conned their own creators into giving them better endings than they deserved: In Breaking Bad, Walter White lost his family and his empire, but he still managed to go out in a blaze of glory. From the bad fan’s point of view, that was a win.
Succession seems determined to not let viewers make the same mistake. The show has kept us guessing over the years as to just how much of a chance its protagonists have of turning things around, how robust is the flicker of conscience within them. “You’re not Logan,” the political operative Nate Sofrelli told Kendall on the eve of the presidential election, and he meant it as a compliment. But being incapable of seizing his father’s mantle isn’t the same as refusing it, and as many opportunities as Kendall has had to choose a different path, he has always turned back to the one he knows the best.
“Church and State,” the series’ penultimate episode, features its most sustained argument against the admiration of Logan Roy, in the form of a eulogy from his estranged brother Ewan, played by James Cromwell. Like “Connor’s Wedding,” in which Logan’s children suffered the shock of his sudden death, “Church and State” begins by soliciting our empathy for the Roys through the universality of grief, and Ewan’s speech takes us back to long before the show’s timeline began: Logan’s rough and sometimes terrifying childhood, the possibly unearned sense of guilt he felt for the death of the baby sister who caught polio after Logan returned from school, and how his aunt and uncle let that guilt fester. And then the speech turns. Yes, Logan’s life was hard, Ewan says. But his brother was a person who made other people worse instead of better, who “closed men’s hearts,” and “fed that dark flame … that keeps their hearths warm while another grows cold, their grain stashed while another goes hungry.” Ewan, raised right alongside Logan, admits that he may have felt the same temptations. But “I tried,” he says. “I don’t know when, but sometime he decided not to try anymore, and it was a terrible shame.”
After Roman is too distraught to deliver his planned eulogy, Kendall takes his place, and as furious as he is at Ewan’s unplanned assessment, even he has to admit that his uncle has a point. “My father was a brute,” Kendall allows, “but also he built and he acted.” He goes on to deliver a paean to all the things Logan made and did, “the lives and the livings and the things that he made—and the money.” For Kendall, money is just not wealth or power, but the “lifeblood” and “oxygen” of civilization, and perhaps the only thing that truly flowed through Logan Roy’s heart. He has never seen his father so clearly, in all his greatness and terribleness, and yet, in the end, he decides he still wants to emulate him. “People might want to tend and prune the memory of him, to denigrate that force, that magnificent awful force of him,” he says, casting a glance at Ewan in the pews. “But my God, I hope it’s in me.”
There is no more Logan to impress, no more drops of affection to be wrung from his stone of a heart, and yet his children are still bound to his memory, still craving the feeling, as Shiv says when she speaks after Kendall, of the rare moments when his attention focused on them, when it was “warm in the light.” They were raised in a broken family, by domineering and distant parents who taught them to associate cruelty with love. But in a world whose borders are defined by money, no one has a greater opportunity to reinvent themselves, to step out of Logan’s shadow and just go be rich somewhere. Roman and Shiv and Kendall and Connor have all expended varying degrees of effort to escape their father’s orbit. But even after Logan’s light has gone out, they’re still circling a dead star, and they’ve stopped trying to get away.