Succession, a family saga and satirical comedy-drama series stars Brian Cox, Jeremy Strong, Sarah Snook, Kieran Culkin, Alan Ruck, Nicholas Braun, Matthew Macfadyen, Peter Friedman, J. Smith-Cameron, Dagmara Dominczyk, Justine Lupe, David Rasche , Fisher Stevens, Hiam Abbass, Arian Moayed, Harriet Walter, James Cromwell, Natalie Gold, Juliana Canfield, Annabelle Dexter-Jones, Zoë Winters, Jeannie Berlin, Alexander Skarsgård, Sanaa Lathan, Linda Emond, Jihae, Adrien Brody, Hope Davis and Dasha Nekrasov.
Set in New York, the series explores themes of power and family dynamics through the eyes of patriarch Logan Roy (Cox) and his four adult children, Kendall (Strong), Siobhan (Snook), Roman (Culkin), and Connor (Ruck) .
The final episode of the fourth season is expected on Memorial Day Weekend.
Succession's third season averaged 0.12 in the 18-49 demographic and 553,000 viewers in the live+same day ratings (including all DVR playback up to 3:00 AM). Compared to season two, that's 17% less in the demo and 7% less viewers.
In an interview with The New Yorker, Armstrong said the fourth-season finale is "pretty definitely the end" of the series. He chose to reveal now that Succession is coming to an end so that he and the cast don't have to lie about the future of the series in interviews.
When asked what made him and his fellow writers decide it was time to end Succession, Armstrong replied:
"It’s been a bit tortured, and I felt unexpectedly nervous about talking to you, because it’s all theoretical until this point, and I have tried to keep it theoretical for a whole number of reasons. Who knows about the psychological reasons, but the creative ones were that it felt really useful to not make the final, final decision for ages. You know, there’s a promise in the title of “Succession.” I’ve never thought this could go on forever. The end has always been kind of present in my mind. From Season 2, I’ve been trying to think: Is it the next one, or the one after that, or is it the one after that?"
I got together with a few of my fellow-writers before we started the writing of Season 4, in about November, December, 2021, and I sort of said, “Look, I think this maybe should be it. But what do you think?” And we played out various scenarios: We could do a couple of short seasons, or two more seasons. Or we could go on for ages and turn the show into something rather different, and be a more rangy, freewheeling kind of fun show, where there would be good weeks and bad weeks. Or we could do something a bit more muscular and complete, and go out sort of strong. And that was definitely always my preference. I went into the writing room for Season 4 sort of saying, “I think this is what we’re doing, but let’s also keep it open.” I like operating the writing room by coming in with a sort of proposition, and then being genuinely open to alternative ways of going. And the decision to end solidified through the writing and even when we started filming: I said to the cast, “I’m not a hundred per cent sure, but I think this is it.” Because I didn’t want to bullshit them, either.
The New Yorker also asked, "So even during the shoot, is there a possibility in your mind that you'll make it to season five?" to which Armstrong replied:
"I don’t know whether that’s a psychological trick on myself, to stop being sad about stopping doing something which I really, really enjoyed. Or it’s a creative trick to not make us get lachrymose or sentimental, or to kind of do it differently than we have done before. And a certain percentage of not definitively saying early on that this was the last season was also a feeling that sometimes on the show, previously, we’ve discovered plot avenues, character dynamics, which have demanded we follow them. And therefore not wanting to definitively close off the possibility of that happening this season—at least until it got weird to not say, O.K., I think this really is it."
Finally, The New Yorker asked Armstrong if he always had an idea of where Succession would end up. Armstrong replied:
"Not when I was writing the pilot, nor probably in the Season 1 room, but I think, growing from about Season 2, I started to know where I thought it should end. I don’t keep that secret because that’s what the writing room is there for: to test the ideas out. The show is an artifice—you are making up the story. And yet there are certain ideas which feel organic and some which feel inorganic, and I guess the writing-room process for me is a great way of making a piece of artifice feel organic to us, and to myself."