Succession Season 4 deserves its award wins for this one reason

Succession’s final season has been completely dominating award season and it’s because one very specific reason.

HBO Max’s hit drama series Succession aired its fourth and final season a year ago, but its hold on the public’s consciousness has not waned in the slightest.

The show follows the infighting of the wealthy Roy family as the three youngest children — Kendall, Roman, and Shiv — are constantly at one another’s throats in order to claim ownership of their father’s billion-dollar company.

Succession Season 4 has gone on to win countless awards from Golden Globes to Emmys much to no one’s real surprise but, if you really think about why the show continues to dominate over its peers, there’s one glaring and obvious reason behind its true success.

Succession showcases how trauma and grief are never-ending

The biggest part of the show as a whole is the interpersonal relationships between the Roy family and how those relationships were doomed from the very beginning because they were built upon a foundation of resentment and non-affection.

It may be cliché to say, but the Roy kids, including their older half-brother Connor, truly had no chance at having any kind of well-adjusted lives because their father, Logan, never allowed them to be real, serious people.

From the time of their births, each child was used as a pawn in Logan’s game: Connor was forgotten, Kendall was groomed for a kingdom that would never be his, Roman was a punching bag, and Shiv was the weak link because she’s the only girl.

Logan himself suffered trauma at the hands of his own family, yes, but it’s that never-ending cycle of abuse and neglect that makes Succession so compelling to so many people.

HBO

At the end of the day, most people are not going to be able to relate to a billionaire family who lives in their own bubble and have no regard for anyone beneath them, but they can relate to a father who pins his children against one another for his own gain. They can relate to not being able to fully connect with one’s siblings due to their own emotional hangups. And they can relate to feeling like something is missing in life because they never received true familial intimacy.

Couple the Roys’ intergenerational trauma with the gut-punching grief they all deal with in Season 4 when Logan unexpectedly dies and you have one of the greatest seasons of television ever made.

Succession Season 4 is one of the best depictions of how grief never leaves you, especially when you don’t get any closure from the person you lost.

There’s no guarantee that you’ll ever get answers or apologies from those who hurt you because that’s just not how life works.

Sometimes the people who stomp you on consistently no matter how hard you try to please them just drop dead and you’re left to pick up the pieces with that weight-lifting feeling of closing the chapter for good.

HBO Max

The Roy kids may have all the money, power, and influence in the country but, at the end of the day, they’re not immune from dealing with the worst parts of life.

Money can’t make your abusive parent love you, power can’t grant you the answers on why you may not have been good enough in your distant parent’s eye, and influence can’t bring your neglectful parent back from death.

Succession Season 4 pins these wealthy people under a microscope and shows the audience how, deep down, they’re broken and lost just like everyone else and how being at the top doesn’t exclude you from the parts of life that leave you empty inside.

While there will undoubtedly be more shows that let us into the fractured world of America’s elite, it’s unlikely that any of them will do it with the storytelling and character work that Succession did.

Succession, and particularly its final season, will always be remembered as some of the most gripping episodes ever put to television because it’s so consistently realistic and human that it’s incredibly hard to watch at times which, in our opinion, is the true mark of a brilliant drama series.