Shiv Roy, Kingslayer*

I hesitate to write this post. For starters, it requires me to admit I watch Succession. Oh yes, the show is gold. You could say (I would say) that no other series currently on air attains the heights of Succession’s delightfully acerbic writing, blue-ribbon cast, and nauseatingly accurate take on the current political zeitgeist. No program — past, present, or future —has or will have a better thematic musical number.

But to riff on Tom for a moment, I have of late attempted not to tarry too long with television. A full explanation would require lots of words, so I’ll just say the main dish is how limited the time of a parent is, with a side of our collective need to claw back the ritual of hobbies from the screen-dominated lifestyle imposed on us by the pandemic.

And yet, I can’t quit Succession. And I believe many of those musing on the interwebs are wrong about Shiv, and I have theories about why that is.

So might as well take a look-see.

At the close of Season Two, eldest son Kendall provokes a rare sign of approval from Papa Roy. You see actor Brian Cox allow the slightest of smiles to creep up on him as his character, Logan, watches Kendall announce on live television that his father —that is, Logan himself — knew about the sexual assault cases and coverups on the cruise line of Waystar, the family’s flagship company.

Kendall appears in this moment to defy Logan’s pronouncement that he doesn’t have what it takes, that he’s “not a killer.” In the profoundly jacked up psyche of Logan Roy, his children must be judged based on how well they align with his own moral character, which is to say how expertly they slice and dice any emotion or ethical objection that stands in the way of procuring and/or maintaining their position of power.

Kendall had agreed to be the “blood sacrifice” for the Roy family. His loyalty to dad and siblings and the Roy empire was, in the perverse family dynamic of Succession, supposed to be commendable.

Still, while Logan might have been grateful that Ken would take the fall for the cruise line scandal, he could never respect it.

But Kendall tossing dad to the media and congressional wolves in order to save his own butt? Now that gets Logan’s attention.

And yet, it’s obvious throughout Season Three that Kendall is indeed “not a killer.” (An involuntary manslaughter-er? Yes, he is that.) Kendall is here for the commercialized Me Too movement insofar as it gets him publicity, but upon getting wings, his Icarus heads straight for the sun and burns out by Episode Three. (Coming right back to this episode in a moment.) Kendall cancels his appearance on Late Night TV after Shiv releases a letter stating their family “concern” for Kendall, given his substance abuse issues and supposedly fragile state of mind. (The letter also labels him an absentee father.) He is subsequently shut out of the shareholder meeting in Episode Four, which closes with Kendall in a windowless box awaiting a confab with his father, a meeting requested by Logan. Meanwhile, Logan leaves the building and tells his assistant to permanently block Kendall’s number.

While the rest of the fam is off choosing the next president, Episode Six brings us Ken firing his legal team, drinking whiskey, hyping a big birthday bash for himself, and still cut off completely by dad.

As far as successors go, Ken’s out, at least for the foreseeable future.

This has produced a lot of chatter about the rise of youngest son, Roman. It’s true that in recent episodes he’s had some power plays thrown to (forced on) him. Roman had a one-on-one with the president, albeit it was over the phone and against his will. In Season Two, he saw through the bogus money deal gone awry on his misbegotten trip to the Middle East. And most recently, it appears Roman has managed to hand-pick the Republican nominee for POTUS, a fashy alt-right winking goonboi named Jeryd Mencken.

Roman is firmly on his father’s good side. This will end disastrously for both of them.

Because what Roman wants most in this world is more than just Logan’s approval. Roman wants Logan’s love.

Logan does not give his love (if he has any to give). And he could never respect Roman because on some level he knows that he himself is Roman’s greatest obstacle to killer status.

Go back to Episode Three. When Shiv presents Roman and Connor with the letter ripping Kendall, neither agrees to sign it. Roman says the thing makes him feel “unwell” and cites a memory from childhood, relating that Kendall was the one who taught Roman how to “aim” his pee for the toilet. In the utilitarian world of how relationships function on Succession, this counts as sentimental, even touching.

Roman’s not a good guy, but his affection for his family members is real, and it seems to be a guiding light of his actions. I cannot recall Roman ever doing anything for power that would hurt the people he loves. (Notably, real harm done to outsider plebs—No Real Persons, per Roy family parlance— causes Roman zero moral quibbles.) I suspect Roman would mess with Kendall and Shiv if Logan demanded it, but that’s solely because his hierarchy of loyalty and devotion has Pops at the apex, occupying a pointy little pyramid seat with room for just one.

Shiv, on the other hand, is a budding Logan in waiting.

This iteration is new. In Season Two, Shiv all but begs Logan to pledge that her husband, Tom, will not be the one to face jail time for the sexual assault scandal. Or take it back to Season One, with Shiv a lefty political operative working outside her family’s media empire altogether. Long hair, oversized hippie cardigan? Yep, that’s how we first meet her.

She is reliably more put off by the morally dubious (and often straight-up diabolical) goings-on at ATN and within the broader company as a whole. Her instincts are to do the right thing.

But there’s something Shiv values even more than the right thing, and that is her own self-estimation. She sees herself as the most worthy and obvious choice to replace her father. From what I’ve seen, she’s not wrong.

In Season Two, Shiv is the one who successfully talks a former employee of their cruise line out of testifying. Incredibly, she accomplishes this by telling the truth. No, this woman shouldn’t trust Shiv’s motivation for their conversation. But just because Shiv is doing it to keep her family out of trouble doesn’t mean the excruciating media fallout won’t be exactly as awful as she’s presented it.

Then, in Season Three, Shiv is the sole reason the company remains in Roy control. Shareholder meeting is on, a vote is imminent, and Logan disappears into a UTI-induced hallucinatory state. Shiv is the only adult with the cojones to make a move without Logan’s stamp of approval, calling up daughter Sandy and agilely negotiating a backroom deal that not only saves the company from the whims of its shareholders, but also gives both these undervalued ladies a board seat of their own.

This is masterclass maneuvering, the likes of which we might expect to see from… Logan himself.

So yes, Shiv is both the smartest and the most capable of the Roy children. But I think this has been difficult for many commentators to see because of an earnest, doe-eyed, cornfed man named Tom.

As performed by Matthew Macfadyen, Tom has become the one character truly beloved by fans of the show. I’m not sure he was always meant to evoke the level of empathy and investment he now commands, but Macfadyen is a silver screen revelation in this role. (Please, please give this man all the awards.)

Tom has real, deeply held emotions that he refuses to ignore or eliminate, which makes him conspicuously human, and that puts him under constant threat in the knives-out bloodsport of Roy interaction.

He genuinely loves Shiv, and we’ve watched for three seasons as she cheats on him, dismisses him, ignores him, and mocks him, and it looks increasingly like he’s headed for ultimate rejection. Obviously, Tom is worried Shiv will not be waiting on the other side of his almost-certain prison sentence, a punishment he does not deserve and that will earn him nothing tangible from the self-obsessed Roy family.

Because we’ve gotten to know Tom, it’s impossible to ignore Shiv’s role in his demise. Kendall and Roman are no doubt equally awful to the various wives and lovers in their own personal lives, but we’ve not been given access to those characters’ perspectives, so it doesn’t register nearly as much, if at all, in how we assess them as potential Logan replacements.

And in Season Three, the Shiv who went to bat for Tom’s innocence is gone. She’s replaced with a Shiv sporting a nonchalant attitude towards his prison predicament. The understandable disgust this engenders towards her character has, I believe, blinded many a commentator to what is really going on with Shiv’s transformation.

She’s publicly slandered her closest sibling, without apology or much hesitation. She’s happily mused on the possibility of sending her father to prison with a wannabe Republican presidential candidate. If she were in Kendall’s position, Shiv would have gone right ahead with the Late Night interview and skewered her siblings for trying to smear her with a lame letter. And yes, she’s going to let Tom go to prison and move right on with her life.

People. Shiv’s a killer.

And Logan knows it.

That’s why he dressed her down in front of the company inner circle after she saved his butt from a shareholder-bred takeover. It’s why he’s buddying up with Roman and pitching the ATN lot with a candidate who openly borrows from “H” and thinks yelling at detractors that they should “Read Plato” counts for meaningful debate. He coerces her to take a family photo with Mencken and mocks her for acquiescing with the tiniest compromise (she won’t stand directly next to him). “Okay. You win, Pinkie.”

No, Shiv didn’t win that battle. But my bet is: she’s gonna win the war.

*Kingslayer is an aspirational moniker for Shiv, as Logan is still very much around. But one day… one day.