‘Succession’ Ending with Upcoming Season 4 on HBO
The Roy family drama is coming to an end. “Succession” creator Jesse Armstrong revealed in an interview with The New Yorker Thursday that the upcoming fourth season of the show on HBO will be its last.
Season 4 of “Succession” is meant to debut next month on March 26 on HBO, and the series first premiered in 2018. Armstrong previously teased that the show could end in either its fourth or fifth seasons.
“There’s a promise in the title of ‘Succession.’ I’ve never thought this could go on forever,” he told The New Yorker Thursday. “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?”
Armstrong said he began considering to conclude the show upon writing the fourth season back in 2021 but toyed with numerous options for how the show could continue or not, but that he never wanted to lead on his writing staff any more than he would the audience.
“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,” he said. “The decision to end solidified through the writing and even when we started filming: I said to the cast, ‘I’m not a hundred percent sure, but I think this is it.’ Because I didn’t want to bulls— them, either.”
“Succession” has won 19 Emmys in its run on HBO, including Outstanding Drama Series in 2020 and in 2022. Armstrong even earned an overall deal with HBO on the back of the acclaim for the show, a tentpole for HBO in the wake of the conclusions of both “Game of Thrones” and “Veep.” The show stars Brian Cox, Jeremy Strong, Nicholas Braun, Kieran Culkin, Matthew Macfadyen, and Sarah Snook, many of whom have become household names in the process and seen their stars rise over the years.
The third season of “Succession” ended in a cliffhanger with the Roy kids all coming together in unity against their father, which Armstrong discusses in new detail, as well as what to expect in the new season or even if we’ll see more of these characters post-“Succession.”
“I do think that this succession story that we were telling is complete. This is the muscular season to exhaust all our reserves of interest, and I think there’s some pain in all these characters that’s really strong,” Armstrong said. “But the feeling that there could be something else in an allied world, or allied characters, or some of the same characters—that’s also strong in me. I have caveated the end of the show, when I’ve talked to some of my collaborators, like: Maybe there’s another part of this world we could come back to, if there was an appetite? Maybe there’s something else that could be done, that harnessed what’s been good about the way we’ve worked on this. So that is another true feeling.”
Read Armstrong’s full interview here.