(Spoilers ahead for anyone who has not seen the series finale of Sucession)
Series finales generally don't work, and rarely do they live up to expectations (the main exception in recent years I can think of is Veep, which showed just how far Selina Meyer was willing to go to get the one thing she always wanted, even if it meant nothing by the time she got there). This one wasn't perfect (there were a couple of stories introduced that were never properly resolved...I think, especially with Gerri & Roman, they needed some sort of sendoff scene that must've gotten cut on the chopping room floor).
But when it came to the three main characters of Shiv (Sarah Snook), Kendall (Jeremy Strong), and Roman (Kieran Culkin), they got it perfect. The three have spent the past four years jockeying for the position of leader of their father's empire, but in the process they've basically sold everything decent about themselves. This all ends up being for naught, specifically for Kendall, who gave up the most as the series progressed, when Shiv decides at the last second to switch from voting for Kendall to be the Waystar CEO, and instead chooses her estranged husband Tom (Matthew Macfadyen).
This honestly works perfectly, because it shows how both Shiv & Kendall could never be their father, and will never entirely understand why. Kendall started the series as a new voice, someone who disagreed with the way his father did business & thinking he could be a different kind of Roy. In the process of the past two seasons, though, he's mimicked his father in hopes of securing power for himself. By the finale, he had abandoned his wife, his children feared him, and was even starting to physically abuse Roman the way that Logan (Brian Cox) did when they were children, using that to control him. All of this was in the quest of being the thing he'd been told he would be since he was a child-his father's successor. Giving up all of that humanity and then ending up broken & defeated was the correct course of action (and, let's be honest here, was weirdly similar to the wildly unpopular plotline Daenerys went through on Game of Thrones, though I'll admit that Succession learned from the rabid hatred people threw at that series by being far more opaque about it, and will be less hated by fans as a result).
Conversely, Shiv ends the series as the most complicated character, and the one that fans will more openly debate. Sarah Snook, in my opinion, gave the best performance in the cumulative series (a title that many other actors could've taken, but I'm giving to her), and really messed with people's expectations. In a family of men, we're taught by television that the one woman, beautiful & seemingly brainy, will girlboss herself to the top. But in the actual corporate world, where misogyny is far too common, Shiv was never going to get there. Her brothers & father never took her seriously, just viewing her as a chess-piece that they could move around, and in a really smart twist, the writers didn't try to prove them wrong. The genius of Snook's work is that she plays Shiv as not the killer that her father is, not as savvy as he is, and frequently makes mistakes, sometimes critical ones. Her choice in the end feels less about saving her brothers from becoming their father (and instead, she becomes her mother), and more about realizing she can't win, and instead chooses whom she wants not to lose. She understands, as is often said throughout the series, that none of the Roy children are "serious people" and instead gives the power to Tom, hoping that in the process she gets something of a false win...though in the process she gives up any dreams or hopes she had for herself.
Succession's leaving marks the end of the best show currently on HBO, and in some ways the end of a specific type of zeitgeist drama that HBO popularized in the past 20 years. Starting with The Sopranos, HBO has since had Boardwalk Empire, Game of Thrones, Westworld, and now Succession, series that feature complicated, grey-area characters that are frequently not good, but develop weird types of fandoms around them. One of the most shocking things about Succession is the way that the series inspired people being "Team Kendall" or "Team Shiv" without acknowledging that these are bad people. In a weird sort of twist about how gaslighting can make people misunderstand love (a common trope on the series), we saw the fandoms constantly reminded that these were bad people, humanely played by gifted actors, but totally awful human beings who deserved the worst fates coming to them...and yet people still wanted to root for them. Roman helped elect a literal Nazi as president two weeks ago, and yet this week people were happy that he might "finally find peace." If you've ever wondered why people keep giving the Republican Party a second chance...this is a good case study.
That's a testament to the actors, but it's also a testament to a TV landscape where (maybe in part because of the reactions of fans to the morally grey areas of shows like Game of Thrones taking risks in their final seasons & hurting their viewers' love), the small screen plays it far too safe. Ted Lasso, a show I generally like even though the quality waivers wildly from episode-to-episode, has had three main villains in its run (Rebecca in Season 1, Nathan in Season 2, and to some degree Rupert in Season 3). In all three cases, they seem to want to make them all have happy endings, making them just "misunderstood." That's sweet, but it's toothless, even for a comedy, and in most dramas the lines between good-and-bad feel more like we're in a 1940's western than a 2020's TV series, free to play with artistic ideas in a more intriguing way. Succession is proof that you can have a devoted audience and still create a really great piece of art, a true all-timer series...even if social media indicates that people's adoration for it in the wrong ways shows that media literacy may be a thing of the past when it comes to zeitgeist stories.
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