‘You have to be a killer’: why Succession was just The Godfather in disguise
Spoilers for the final episode of Succession follow
At the end of the final episode of Succession, Jeremy Strong’s Kendall Roy walks dazed and defeated through a park, having been thwarted in the only ambition that he has held in life: to become the CEO of his father Logan’s company Waystar Royco and, in doing so, prove that he is fit and worthy to be his successor.
It is no great surprise that Kendall is unsuccessful in his aims, not least, because as his sister Shiv has so helpfully noted a few moments before, he is not suited – morally, physically or emotionally – to the task. His grief at his loss is only equalled by his knowledge that, despite the grandstanding and fireworks of his funeral oration the previous week, he has remained a small man, never able to scale the heights that Logan so brutishly ascended.
Jesse Armstrong’s remarkable series – which, much to the relief of its millions of fans, stuck the landing – has been compared to everything from Greek tragedy to Shakespeare to Armstrong’s co-created sitcom Peep Show in its inimitable mixture of profane, rapid-fire and often scabrously comic dialogue with a grand, operatic arc. Yet perhaps its most notable progenitor, both in its focus on an intense father-son relationship revolving around the succession of the family business and in its unflinching gaze at contemporary America told through the story of one amoral family, is surely Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather trilogy. Yes, even the much-abused and now almost underrated third film in the series.
According to Strong, these parallels are wholly intentional. In an interview with Vulture, in which he explicitly called the show “a tragedy”, he said: “We talked about The Godfather a lot at the beginning. Jesse and [director] Mark Mylod said this was a show about family trauma. And while it is a wickedly funny satire – so funny that it hurts – on late-stage capitalism, for me as Kendall, it mainly just hurts."
It is undeniably true that, while Coppola’s films have their moments of dark comedy, they are hardly gut-bustingly funny in the way that Succession can be. But the Godfather series and Armstrong’s show both ask the same question, and answer it in the same tragic way: what should it profit a man if he gain the whole world, and lose his soul in the process?
The first lines spoken in The Godfather, in which the character Bonasera declares “I believe in America. America has made my fortune” set out the central themes that will be pursued over the next nine hours. Mario Puzo, author of the novel on which the original film was based, was a second-generation Italian immigrant, and Coppola a third-generation immigrant. Both men, and their families, knew something of the American dream, but also its dark side as well.
The Corleone dynasty in the Godfather series exemplifies the way in which power and wealth are taken by force and defended at all costs, and how paying respect to someone – not least the Godfather himself, the crime lord Don Vito Corleone – becomes an obsequious ritual in flattering an all-powerful man whose disapproval can lead to the gravest imaginable consequences. This is not the America of the Founding Fathers, a place of hope and optimism: this is an America built from blood and a dog-eat-dog ethos where only the strongest survive.
Vito Corleone, we learn from the second film in the Godfather series, is an immigrant from Sicily, escaping his home country after his family are murdered by a local mafia boss after his father refuses to swear fealty. It is equally significant that Brian Cox’s Logan Roy, the mafia-like patriarch and founder of the Waystar Roy dynasty, is himself an immigrant, albeit from the less obviously menacing environs of Dundee. There are numerous parallels between Vito and Logan, both in the way that the characters dominate their environment wholly but also in their ambivalent relationships with their apparent heirs.
In perhaps The Godfather’s greatest scene – one scripted by Chinatown’s Robert Towne – Vito expresses his regret at Michael’s apparent entry into the family firm: “I never wanted this for you. I work my whole life – I don't apologise – to take care of my family, and I refused to be a fool, dancing on the string held by all those bigshots. I don't apologise – that's my life – but I thought that, that when it was your time, that you would be the one to hold the string. Senator Corleone; Governor Corleone. Well, it wasn't enough time, Michael. It wasn't enough time.”
This finds a warped antithesis at the end of the second series of Succession, when Logan announces to Kendall that “You’re not a killer…you have to be a killer” in order to take on the family firm, shortly before Kendall’s thrilling table-turning “But…” moment on live television reveals that he is, after all, his father’s son. His tragedy is that he isn’t enough of a Roy in the final analysis to fulfil his apparent destiny, while Michael Corleone’s tragedy is that he is too much of a Corleone to escape the devastating fate – the deaths of virtually everyone close to him – that has been ordained as soon as he entered the business.
Strong’s performance is the clearest homage to The Godfather – something that he acknowledged when he commented on Succession’s pervasive water symbolism. “There's another moment I think of from the first Godfather, where Michael comes home after his first wife has been blown up in a car,” he has said. “That's like that satanic birth you talk about, where Kendall comes up out of the water [in the finale of series 1, after inadvertently causing the death of a waiter]. He has suffered an irrevocable loss of a piece of himself. Of a piece of his humanity.” But the show is littered with other callbacks and homages.
Kieran Culkin’s Roman, the younger brother who flatters himself that he can walk the walk but is shown, brutally, that he is as insignificant as his elder brother, feels like a clear nod to the Godfather’s doomed Fredo. In turn, Fredo’s resentment and anger that he, the elder sibling, is passed over in comparison to the more dynamic Michael finds a lighter echo in Alan Ruck’s Connor, the ignored eldest Roy scion who declares, heartbreakingly, after his father’s death that “He never even liked me”.
Much the same could be said of Vito and Fredo: the latter’s card is marked after his father dies and his younger brother declares, iconically: “Fredo, you're my older brother, and I love you. But don't ever take sides with anyone against the Family again. Ever.”
The irony in Succession is that the turncoat characters, forever shifting allegiance to whoever appears to be in the ascendant, have long since given up any pretence of loyalty to the family. It is a show that shows the moral limits of self-absorption, and finds them persistently wanting.
One aspect that the Godfather films has been criticised for is that the female characters feel thinly developed compared to the male ones. The two major ones, Diane Keaton’s Kay – Michael’s wife – and Talia Shire’s Connie, Vito’s daughter and Michael and Fredo’s sister, are largely defined by their relationships to the men. But their ability to make appalled moral judgements on the actions of the male characters is not something that would be granted to Succession’s major female protagonist, Shiv Roy (Sarah Snook).
In the final episode, Shiv betrays Kendall by siding with Alexander Skarsgaard’s Lukas Matsson in his attempts to buy Waystar, knowing that by doing so she will enable her semi-estranged husband – and father of her unborn child – Tom Wambsgans to become the puppet CEO of the company. But in the warped, venal familial world that the show depicts, the fact that Tom is the father to a Roy – unlike Kendall and Roman, the former who has adopted children and the latter of whom is often hinted to be impotent or gay – gives him a greater stake in the future, in Shiv’s eyes, than her brothers merit.
Both the Corleones and the Roys run family businesses, nominally at least, and while the activities of the former are criminal and the latter are (theoretically) legal, the way in which their denizens ruthlessly exploit their own interests, stopping at nothing to achieve their goals, is common to both sets of characters. Robert Duvall’s Tom Hagen, the Corleone family’s all-knowing consigliere, finds his own parallel in a variety of the various COOs and executives who prowl the Waystar boardrooms, not least Fisher Stevens’s morally flexible Hugo and Peter Friedman’s well-connected Frank.
To describe Succession as the 21st century answer to the Godfather is more than just a recognition of the two works’ excellence. It's an acknowledgement that their clear-sighted view of America as a country built on greed and exploitation, and its wealthiest members as backstabbing and deeply morally compromised, is the substance of truly great drama.
Kendall, who at times has flirted with being the moral centre of the show but eventually is shown to be as flawed and undeserving as everyone else, departs as Michael Corleone did, alone and regretful. It might make for a miserable life for them, but it is also the heart of brilliant, indelible drama that will continue to be regarded as the height of artistic achievement.
