Succession’s Kendall Roy was never going to win Father of the Year, but this season, his parenting is more miserable than ever.
Throughout the HBO drama’s four-season run, which will conclude in a movie-length finale on Sunday, Kendall has been a stereotypical absentee father. He chides his ex-wife Rava’s parenting from afar and generally seems to know nothing about his kids’ day-to-day lives. Now he’s also imperiled the world they will one day inherit by backing a fascist for president—the very same one his abusive father, Logan, hand-picked for the job.
In the wake of Logan’s death, Kendall and his siblings have been struggling through fragmented bouts of grief. But as they scramble to reconcile their father’s titanic professional legacy with his monstrous behavior (both toward them and everyone else), is there really any chance the Roy kids will wake up and stop repeating his mistakes? So far, both Kendall and his younger sister, Shiv, are zooming down the fast lane toward replaying all the old hits—especially with their own progeny.
It’s pretty hard to overstate what a pathetic excuse for a parent Kendall has been from Day One. I mean, he’s lost his kids’ birthday presents and killed (or at least nearly killed) their pet rabbit. The only time viewers see his daughter’s bedroom is when Kendall and his siblings take over her house as a corporate headquarters and stage a meeting on her bed while she’s away. And few things give Kendall’s younger brother, Roman, more joy than feigning shock each time Kendall remembers his kids’ names.
Season 4 cuts even deeper. When his daughter, Sophie, gets attacked by an apparent Mencken fanatic, Kendall never shows up to comfort her; instead, he sends one of his flying monkeys to follow her without asking or telling anyone, scaring her even further. Even worse, he blames Rava for the effects of a candidacy that he and his family have enabled for months.
As much as Kendall loves to see himself as the progressive sibling who will usher in change, he refuses to engage with the truth of his daughter’s attack—both that it was likely racially motivated, and that it was likely a direct result of his political plays. Incomprehensible privilege and denial can make a hell of a cocktail, and right now, Kendall is as drunk as they come.
“Tell Sophie I love her,” Kendall told a furious Rava on the phone during the show’s election episode, “and that is why I do everything I do.” It’s a near-perfect echo of his father’s comment during Season 1, when he gathered his kids for a session of family therapy (and, conveniently, a magazine photoshoot): “Everything I’ve done in my life, I’ve done for my children.”
As much as he tries to deny it (to Rava, to Roman, and to himself) Kendall knows he’s a crappy dad. He even came close to admitting as much to Shiv during the election episode, when he confided, “I don’t think I’m a very good father. Maybe the poison drips through.” But to untangle his bad parenting, Kendall would need to explore the pain his own father caused him rather than run away from it— through denial, through drugs, and through the undying dream of becoming Logan and assuming his power instead. And who wants to do that when you could simply become richer and more powerful instead?
If Kendall’s exalting eulogy for Logan during the show’s penultimate episode is any indication, he won’t be changing course any time soon—and neither will Shiv, whose pregnancy also has her feeling a little introspective about her upbringing.
The subtext of that funeral could have filled an entire cathedral, as each eulogy from Logan’s children uncovered scars he’d left behind. Roman, who always seemed closest to Logan in spite of perhaps having been hurt most by him, disintegrated into tears at the lectern. Kendall, meanwhile, sang their father’s praises from the rafters to rescue Waystar’s stock price.
“Yes, he had a terrible force to him, and a fierce ambition, that could push you to the side,” Kendall said. “But it was only that human thing, the will to be, and to be seen, and to do. And now people might want to tend and prune the memory of him, to denigrate that force, that magnificent awful force of him, but, my god, I hope it's in me. Because if we can't match his vim, then god knows the future will be sluggish and gray.”
And then there was Shiv, who reflected on playing with her siblings as children outside their father’s office hoping they would hear them. “He would come out, and he was so terrifying,” she said during the eulogy, a look of wrenched wistfulness on her face. “He kept us outside, but he kept everyone outside. When he let you in, when the sun shone, it was warm.”
The comment called to mind a scene from her wedding at the end of Season 1, when Kendall’s son, Iverson, started to enter the room where he and Stewy were working on a letter to Logan announcing their hostile takeover of Waystar. Just like his father, Iverson got yelled at for coming too close. Unlike his father, however, Iverson has Rava—who scolded Kendall for hurting their son when all he’d wanted was a tour of the house.
Kendall might not terrorize his kids like his father, but his abandonment is abuse in itself. Repeatedly, Succession has made clear that just like Logan, Kendall struggles to see his kids as real people. Instead, he uses them as supporting characters in the story he’s consistently writing about himself in his mind.
Kendall doesn’t pick on his apparently neurodivergent son the way his father does, and for that, he seems to think he’s succeeded. But has he ever read a book to Iverson? Comforted him through some mundane slight? Placed a bandage on his forehead? For his son, Kendall is likely mostly a constructed dream.
And yet, later on at Shiv’s wedding, when Kendall joyously dances with his kids after killing a caterer, we see how effortlessly he uses these relationships as a delusional escape hatch. As long as he can see himself as a devoted “family man,” he can deny the deeper truths about himself and his own upbringing.
As devastating as Shiv’s eulogy might have been, she, too, already appears to be following in her father and brother’s footsteps. As the only girl in the family (another source of grief she mentions in her speech), Shiv has had a front-row seat for the kind of misogyny that sidelines women, and especially mothers, in her chosen workplace. Still, she’s also not about to let a small thing like bringing life into this world ruin her chances at winning Daddy’s crown.
When Lukas Mattsson questions Shiv’s bid to become CEO of Waystar based on her pregnancy, she doesn’t hesitate. She calls herself “one of those hard bitches” who can do 36 hours of maternity leave and answer emails through her “vanity cesarean.” With a coy, heartbreaking grin, she adds: “Poor kid will never see her.”
What a perfect, utterly sad distillation of the Roy family pathology: an expecting mother seems to take pleasure at the thought of abandoning her child, all the while refusing to admit that it’s her who still feels abandoned, even now.
However many jokes Kendall, Shiv, and their siblings might make about their upbringing, the poison is dripping through. It could keep dripping forever, unless they realize that Logan never produced the light they occasionally felt in his presence. In reality, he spent their lives standing in front of the sun—blocking its warmth so they’d become desperate with gratitude whenever he let them feel it.
Keep obsessing! Sign up for the Daily Beast’s Obsessed newsletter and follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok.
