How `Succession,' a show about business, turned into a show about marriage
Never underestimate a corn-fed basic from Hockeytown.
In the heartstopping series finale of “Succession” on Sunday night, striving Midwesterner Tom Wambsgans was named chief executive of Waystar Royco, completing his transformation from groveling buffoon to business titan.
After years of personal and professional humiliation, and of nonstop scheming and marital backstabbing, the man who once sucked up to Logan Roy by buying him a Patek Philippe watch became his official successor. Now that Waystar is owned by GoJo, Tom may be a powerful lord within someone else's empire — it's a title he earned through fawning submission rather than ruthless conquest — but a throne is still a throne.
And he has a consort by his side — at least for now. In one of the most stunning twists in an episode full of breakneck narrative turns, Tom, the newly coronated chief executive, drives off into an uncertain new future, handjust-barely-in-hand with Shiv Roy — his estranged wife, the woman carrying his unborn child, and the very person he betrayed to score the top job.
Along with who would succeed Logan to become chief executive, the question
of whether Tom and Shiv's uniquely toxic marriage would survive — and if it even should — became the show's most gripping storyline. In the end, their relationship is still intact, but it has morphed into something colder, more calculating: a tentative, probably doomed alliance. Certainly not a romance.
Over the course of four seasons, Tom and Shiv's thorny partnership moved from the margins to the very center of the narrative, becoming a lens through which creator Jesse Armstrong explored the role that power plays in intimate relationships. When Shiv got pregnant, the business and personal storylines merged, and the fate of their marriage became inseparable from the succession battle.
“Succession” was, on its face, a show about sibling
rivalry and the dynastic struggle to control a conservative media conglomerate. But like so many other great TV dramas of the last two decades — “The Sopranos,” “Mad Men,” “Breaking Bad” — “Succession” was also a show about a uniquely awful marriage, poisoned by money, class and noxious gender politics.
All of those shows were superficially about other things: organized crime, the ad business, drug dealing. Yet each used marriage to examine the lies people are willing to tell themselves, the humiliations they'll endure, and even the crimes they're willing to be complicit in if their personal comfort is assured. This triggered a misogynistic reflex in some viewers, who vilified TV wives like Carmela Soprano, Betty Draper and Skyler White while reveling in the misdeeds of their husbands.
What made Tom and Shiv unique in the Prestige TV canon was how they seemed to invert the typical power balance between husband and wife: Tom was the gold-digger who married above his station and enjoyed the perks of someone else's ill-gotten fortune, while Shiv was the philandering partner who repeatedly embarrassed her spouse and was able to do so because she held the purse strings.
From the moment we first met Tom in the series pilot — standing outside a luxury jewelry store on the Upper East Side, asking Shiv what to buy Logan for his 80th birthday — he was subservient. And for three out of four seasons, Shiv gleefully wielded the upper hand in their relationship, taking an almost erotic thrill in dominating her husband in a way she was never able to do with her father.
When he proposed in the hospital, where Logan was recuperating after a stroke, she sneered: “I'm not gonna give you a blow job when your dog dies.” On their wedding night, she informed Tom she wanted an open marriage. While debating who would be the “blood sacrifice” to take the fall for the cruise division scandal, Shiv told her husband he would be a logical candidate because “you're like family … but also not family.”