Online debate ran hot and high after a devastating twist in the “Succession” series finale that saw Shiv Roy (Sarah Snook inexplicably shift the balance of power away from the Roy family to her backstabbing husband Tom (Matthew MacFadyen). Many questioned whether Shiv’s decision amounted to a betrayal of the feminist strength she’d showed throughout four seasons.
But in the segment airing after the episode, series creator Jesse Armstrong and director Mark Mylod said that it had been in the works for the “self-sabotaging” character all season, and that her volatile relationship with Tom was still playing out.
“As with Tom’s betrayal at the end of Season 3, everything was working towards this idea of Sarah’s character Shiv ultimately sabotaging herself and sabotaging the deal,” Mylod said.
Nonetheless, many women debating the show online found something anti-feminist in the ambitious Shiv’s decision to cede the Waystar crown to her husband.
“Why do the women always get f—ed in big HBO finales?” tweeted Megan McLachlan, a tv editor at AwardsDaily.
“Tragic moment for women, who watched Shiv be a gladiator for four seasons only to end up (like this),” tweeted Summer (no last name).
Hollywood insiders who were gripped by the ripped-from-the-headlines nature of “Succession” and its ties to Fox News and the Murdoch family, also grappled with the decision.
“Every man in her life — Logan, Kendall, Matsson, Tom — dismissed and degraded Shiv,” Anne Sweeney, the former president of the Disney/ABC Television Group and current Netflix board member, wrote in an email. Sweeney is herself a veteran of Hollywood attitudes toward ambitious women. “Seeing no other options, she became the weapon that ended the family and legacy. Now ‘they are nothing.’ No one survived. And maybe, that is the only real power she ever really had,” she reflected.
But many others said that Shiv turned out not to be a feminist at all, despite her raw bid for power.
“Sometimes I wonder what show ppl were watching,” tweeted Emilie Martz. “Shiv was rotten. She might never be ceo because she’s a woman, but she would slit any other woman’s throat to try and get there.”
Responded a Twitter user named Ponderosa who calls herself a lawyer, writer and mom in her Twitter bio: “Shiv was never a feminist. Always seeking power she had not earned and the approval of a man.”
Reactions to the Succession finale were intense from the moment the screen went to black on Sunday night. “I am the eldest boy” – the primal scream that came from Kendall Roy as he begged Shiv to back him in the board vote – trended on Twitter in the hours after the finale.
Yet Shiv pivotal decision – and why she made it – stood out from the accolades that went to the show.
“Her strongest move… turned out to be the lock on her self-constructed cage,” wrote Roxana Zivar Hadadi in Vulture.
The episode began with Shiv reaching out to Tom to give their marriage another try, partly because she is pregnant with his child. Then came the blow that he had finagled his way to become the new CEO of the GoJo-owned Waystar Royco, the role she had negotiated for herself.
One of the last shots of the episode was of Shiv and Tom, in an uneasy truce, silently entering the same limo and staring ahead as if they had no idea what came next with their on-again, off-again relationship. (Perhaps a nod to the famously ambivalent ending of “The Graduate”?)
“Shiv is still in play, I’d say in this rather terrifying, frozen emotionally barren place, but she has got this kind of non-victory, non-defeat,” said Armstrong. “‘There’s still a lot of that game to play out, but that’s where we leave it and it feels like it’s going to be hard for them to progress, emotionally, given the things they’ve said to each other.”
“I thought about all their stories… they don’t end, they will carry on, but it’s sort of where this show loses interest in them because they lost what they wanted, which was to succeed, this prize that their father held out,” said Armstrong.
All episodes of “Succession” are now streaming on Max.
