As Kendall Roy (Jeremy Strong) sat sad and bewildered in Manhattan’s Battery Park after Tom Wambsgans (Matthew Macfadyen) became the successor that Logan Roy and his children never wanted or planned on occupying the big chair at Waystar Royco, fans posted and reacted to Sunday night’s series finale of HBO’s drama “Succession” with laughter, sadness and appreciation for what the show accomplished with its last episode Unlike Roman Roy (Kieran Culkin), no one had pre-grieved the loss.
“Jesse Armstrong and Crew stuck the landing,” writer and podcast host Giovanni Lago tweeted. “#SuccessionHBO will go down as one of the landmark television series of all time. Even till the final frame it never missed a beat. It’s gonna be hard for anything to come close to this for a very long time.”
Before the “Succession” finale aired, The Washington Post spoke with showrunners from some of the most celebrated TV series of the past two decades about balancing the pressures of ending a show with the increasingly high expectations from fans about how they want their favorite characters to go out.
Showrunners agreed that satisfying fans when their favorite show ends has become more difficult in recent years, because of TV’s overall quality level, a sprawling streaming landscape and social media platforms that allow people to voice their disdain and displeasure in real time. Those who remember the reaction to the final season of “Game of Thrones” in 2019 know all too well how a finale perceived as underwhelming can leave a bitter taste for even the most hardcore fans.
“You already have this built-in disappointment when the show you’re watching for years, and those characters, are going to be gone, so you’re fighting an uphill battle,” Winter said. “It’s difficult to stick the landing when they are replaying the many hours of ‘Succession,’ and it was the same with ‘The Sopranos’ and ‘Boardwalk Empire,’ so you’re trying to end a very long journey and make it a satisfying one.”
Winter thought it was a great idea and was in the edit room as the final moments of “The Sopranos” were carefully cut for the world to see. But he started to wonder how fans might respond to the ending when the group he was watching it with at his sister’s house in Los Angeles went into an uproar over Tony Soprano’s uncertain ending.
“I went, ‘Wow, that did not go the way I thought.’ And the next day, everyone was like, ‘What the hell did we just watch?’ and ‘This is David’s middle finger to the audience,’ and that’s not remotely what we went for,” Winter said. “I asked people, ‘Did you want to see Tony Soprano get killed in front of his family?’ People don’t know what they want.”
Jason Katims remembered being surprised when he saw the ending to “The Sopranos,” and how some became overly critical of a show regarded by many as one of the best ever. Katims kept that reaction in mind when he was thinking of how to end NBC’s “Friday Night Lights” in 2011. There was pressure to put together a strong ending for the fans who helped keep the show alive for five seasons.
Katims admitted that he couldn’t imagine how he would have reacted if “Friday Night Lights” had the same kind of constant questions that “Succession” faced in the last few weeks about whether the finale could live up to everyone’s expectations.
“I’m sure people asked me how [“Friday Night Lights”] was going to end, but it’s not at this level now with the attention being put on the ‘Succession’ finale,” he said. “It is a testament to what shows like ‘Succession’ and ‘Barry’ mean to their viewers. People are so invested in them that the curiosity for how they’re going to end grows exponentially.”
David Mandel was living in a very different world from the one he started in by the time “Veep” was inching toward its series finale in May 2019. The showrunner’s original plan for ending the series after seven seasons had Selina Meyer running again for president — and losing again in hilarious fashion. But when Donald Trump won the presidency in real life, Mandel began to think about how “so many terrible people were winning, not just in the U.S. but also in the world, and all of a sudden I started to question the notion of her losing again.”
“I was definitely aware of the pressure surrounding the finale, but ultimately the pressure for me was my own pressure,” he said. “It was my not desire to ‘stick the landing,’ or whatever that means, but to do something that Julia [Louis-Dreyfus] and I thought was the ending. That’s what was important to me.”
Mandel, who worked as a writer on “Seinfeld” (which had a much-maligned series finale in 1998), learned something from Larry David then, that it was important to do the show he wanted to do, since the showrunner is the one who ultimately must live with the final product — whether people love it or hate it. Mandel, who is now the showrunner for the HBO miniseries “White House Plumbers,” said that he was satisfied with the reaction to “Veep’s” finale, in which Selina wins the presidency and turns her loyal bag man, Gary, in to the feds. Yet, Mandel wished it would have come without the hand-in-hand criticism of its HBO partner, “Game of Thrones.”
“Succession” director Mark Mylod argued in the post-show interview that aired after the finale that Armstrong pulled off exactly what he wanted by pitting Kendall, Roman and Shiv against one another until none of them was left in power.
“Jesse kind of, I hate this expression, stuck the landing with this climactic showdown between the three siblings,” Mylod said. The director pointed to Armstrong’s decision to let Roman sum up the terrible truth of what the Roy siblings represent: “We are nothing.”
This content was originally published here.
