“Succession” creator Jesse Armstrong recently announced that the fourth season of HBO’s zeitgeisty drama will be its last. It’s appropriate, then, that the new season — which starts airing Sunday, March 26 — focuses like never before on the title topic: Who will succeed Brian Cox’s monstrous patriarch Logan Roy as head of the Waystar/Royco media empire?
In the first quartet of episodes provided to reviewers, a tone of serious business emerges over the sometimes goofy, ever-morphing equations of loyalty, favoritism and backstabbing that have been so wickedly entertaining since the drama series’ 2018 premiere. Though that formula hadn’t run out of morality melting steam, one did wonder how many more combinations could be made from it before the template got tiresome.