Kendall might say that he wants to take the throne because the increasingly mad king is sending the company - and, by extension, the family - into the gutter, but that’s another concocted reality that even he hardly believes: Every punch and swipe at Logan is deeply emotive, driven by vengeance for a childhood lost to neglect. They exist as offspring in the most functional of terms: pawns for his power plays, sacrificed at the whims of shareholders while themselves posturing for a greater sliver of the Waystar pie. In establishing a Murdochian, 50-year media empire spanning a network of tabloid-news programs, broadsheets, film studios, and theme parks, Logan Roy sacrificed everything else, including any kind of paternal affection for his children. So what is the fundamental allure of Kendall Roy, the entrepreneur-cum-rapper, –cum–incompetent businessman, –cum–failed father, –cum–regicidal son, –cum–drug addict, –cum–accidental murderer?Īs is so frequently the case, not least on Succession, it begins with trauma. But we, the all-knowing, all-seeing audience, are by now well aware of the ploy. Suits are hot, after all, as tend to be the charismatic men who wear them. This projection, in symbiosis with the power granted to him by his material wealth, serves as its own, superficial draw to those who inhabit the world of Succession (well, aside from the likes of Ziwe’s Sophie Iwobi, who anoints him “Oedipussy” the lion’s share of those within and adjacent to his inner circle and those perceptive enough to see through his faux-feminist gestures about fucking the patriarchy). But it’s in this quip that Kendall, albeit typically unaware, captures his very own essence: He’s a construction of his own blind confidence, or at least the confidence he wants to project. We’ve become accustomed to his cringeworthy performances, and it feels appropriate that a man so vested in artifice would enter his quadragenarian years singing a song notionally about the nature of truth while nailed to a cross. “If I start second-guessing, it collapses,” says Succession’s Kendall Roy at the start of “Too Much Birthday.” He’s standing onstage at the venue-to-be for his gargantuan 40th, having just warbled his way through a rehearsal of Billy Joel’s “Honesty” akin to that of a drunkard doing karaoke in a village hall. Viewers have become accustomed at this point to Kendall’s cringeworthy behavior, and yet we can’t look away.
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