Succession · Season 4 · Episode 1 · 26 March 2023
S4E1 The Munsters
THE MOMENT The Roy siblings' phone conversation - a masterclass in saying nothing while communicating everything.
The final season premiere re-establishes the Roy siblings in opposition to Logan's GoJo deal. The family's irreducible dysfunction is immediately back at full voltage. The episode plants the seeds for everything that follows with the show's characteristic precision disguised as chaos.
Full episode analysis below. Spoiler-light verdict above.
Updated
The final season opens at a party - the siblings together for the first time in apparent solidarity against Logan's GoJo deal, performing the kind of familial warmth the show has spent three seasons establishing they cannot sustain. Jesse Armstrong's writing here is architectural: everything planted in 'The Munsters' will bear weight later, but the planting is disguised as social comedy about people who are awful at being human. Brian Cox's Logan appears briefly and controls every room he enters anyway. The siblings' alliance has the texture of something real and the structural integrity of tissue paper - the episode knows this even if they don't. Jeremy Strong, Kieran Culkin, and Sarah Snook are operating on the specific frequency the show developed over three seasons: saying important things through the form of saying nothing important. The premiere's restraint is correct. The season has one of the great gut-punch episodes in television history coming in episode 3; this episode earns it by letting the audience believe the family dynamic might finally stabilise.