Succession and the Gospel: Inversion of Patriarch's Power Games

Succession is like King Lear but with an inverted plot. In King Lear the powerful patriarch partitions his empire among his children, only to find himself suffer insanely. In Succession the powerful patriarch, Logan Roy, a character with more than a passing resemblance to the media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, does the opposite. He promises the kingdom to his kids only for them to suffer dearly as they reckon that Logan's tantalizing promises were just a ploy making them the bait in the patriarch's power games.

The series starts with Logan promising to step aside to let his son Kendall Roy take over as the CEO of the media conglomerate he built. But just as Kendall is about take over, Logan decides that he will stay on at the top. Later in the show we will learn that when Kendall was nine years old Logan promised he would be the CEO of his empire. Kendall build his identity around inheriting his father's throne. So the betrayal in this real life game of thrones sends Kendall into a relapse of drug addiction in Season 1. The last episode of the final season is called With Open Eyes. The phrase is taken from a poem by John Berryman. The key lines in the poem which applies to Kendal's character go such...

There sat down, once, a thing on Henry's heart

só heavy, if he had a hundred years

& more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time

Henry could not make good.

This thing that sat on Kendal's heart since he was nine is the desire to be crowned as the King. Is that because he really wanted to do the job. Or is that because that is the only way he could get his father's approval. Is Logan exploiting Kendall's need for his approval. Logan would repeat similar tactics with his other children too, Shiv and Roman, manipulating their ambition and loyalties sowing the seeds for grand betrayals and escalating rivalry.

Why would Roy so cruelly manipulate his own children?

The show never discloses what made Logan into this megalomaniac. In the final Season Logan's brother alludes to how his childhood experience so scarred Logan's soul that he stopped trying to love anyone. Where love lacks, power fills the gap!

Every relationship in Succession becomes a power transaction. Whether it is a relationship between parents and children or siblings or spouses or colleagues. Succession is tragedy not just because Kendal is lost and suicidal or that Shiv is stuck in a loveless marriage or that Roman is giving into decadence as the only way of life. But because even the guy who wins in the end to become the CEO of this conglomerate isn't happy either. In this world, the only way to succeed is to trade love for power.

Succession is no mere family melodrama. It delivers a biting critique of a society that fosters a dysfunctional family as the image of aspirational success. Oscar Wilde wryly observed, "the United States was the only country to go from barbarism to decadence without passing through civilization." Succession dramatizes this societal shift. It is a world where squabbling spiteful siblings sitting high in the board rooms is not different from the barbarism on the streets . It is a world where news is transmogrified to be entertaining. It is a stark universe bereft of moral values except to turn attention to money and to turn money to power.

In juxtaposition, the Gospel is a divine saga of the World's Sovereign surrendering his scepter, seeking to show us the way to selflessly love, etching a pathway to hope away from violence and despair. The French anthropologist Rene Girard says that the Bible is the first time in religious history that the story is told from the point of view of the victim. In contrast, most origin stories - take, for instance the origin story of Rome, where Romulus commits fratricide against Remus - tend to narrate the events from the point of view of the aggressor, the victorious party. It is not mere coincidence that, in the last episode, Shiv and Roman playfully plot to kill Kendall so he wouldn't become the King.

The Gospel inverts the Partriarch’s power games. Rene Girard suggests that, in the Bible, God allowed himself to be the victim of human violence, thus paving way for a shift in the dynamic of human development away from seeking power to showing love. The Gospel helped transformation societies from a framework founded on power and dominance to one grounded in self giving love and empathy. The Historian Will Durant in his book Caesar and Christ talks about this shift pithily with the words, "Christ and Caesar met in the arena and Christ won." The arena is where Christians were martyred in Rome. It was an attempt by Rome to use it power to squash Christianity. But it backfired. Indeed, the Roman citizenry, contrary to expectations, found themselves drawn to the Christlike attributes of love and empathy. These virtues proved far more enticing than the hedonistic entertainments offered by the nihilistic, late-stage Roman Empire.

Starting with our archetypal parents Adam and Eve the compulsion to barter love for power is the worm in the human heart. The Presbyterian Minister Fredrick Beuckner in his book Telling the Truth says that King Lear, though a tragedy, has a moment of grace. In the course of Lear's downfall, he has a moment of transformative self-recognition. He experiences self awareness as he sees himself as a , "a very foolish, fond man." In Succession the moment of true self recognition never arrives. Even a glimmer of self recognition would have given a sense of hope for the characters. Rather, the show ends with nihilism as Roman's confesses, "we are nothing." Thus mirroring Macbethean motif, "Life is a tale told by idiots signifying nothing."

What makes Succession great is that it gets you at the edge of your seat just by the sheer potency of the spoken word. Every player on this grand stage is a bard, weaving their own narrative, hoping to ascend the coveted throne. Succession is modern day Shakespearean drama reflecting the timeless truth that harrowing nihilism follows when hollow power rushes in to fill the chasm where love once resided. If anything Succession shows the need for the Gospel of love by vivifying the drama of its absence.