Anyone who compares the best series of the last 10 years with the Game of Thrones disaster has never understood Succession

Succession is over. After 4 seasons and 39 episodes, the best, smartest, heartbreaking and funniest seriesthat I’ve ever seen. Media mogul Logan Roy’s once huge family empire has a new owner and a new CEO. However, whoever ends up holding the reins at Waystar Royco seems to have surprised many.

Showrunner Jesse Armstrong has compared the multiple award-winning series to Game of Thrones from the very beginning – also by us at Moviepilot. Both series are about toxic family dynamics, power struggles and also about who ultimately rules everything. The surprising twist in the Succession finale? For many just as annoying as the end of the eighth and final season of GOT, which fans are still not over.

If you don’t like the Succession finale because it supposedly makes the same disastrous mistake as Game of Thrones, you’re wrong – and never understood what the real core of the series is.

Warning, spoilers follow for the Game of Thrones and Succession endings.

Succession and Game of Thrones have a lot in common, but only one series ends in disappointment

We remember: In the final episode of Game of Thrones, Bran Stark (Isaac Hempstead-Wright) is crowned King of Westeros because, according to Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage), he has the best story of all the characters and is therefore the most suitable. For one thing, that’s a pretty blatant lie. Secondly, Tyrion’s opinion shouldn’t matter, after all he’s a prisoner at the time of his big speech and not the official electoral committee of the seven kingdoms. Even die-hard fans of the fantasy series were disappointed by this resolution, and rightly so.

Succession also ends with a kind of coronation: Tom Wambsgans (Matthew Macfadyen) becomes Waystar Royco’s new CEO after GoJo’s takeover. Tom, who always seemed a bit goofy and for a long time only seemed to have a position in the family empire because he was married to Logan Roy’s (Brian Cox) daughter. Yes, Tom. It’s not a surprise or a completely idiotic plot development, though.

Because Tom is not suddenly hyped as the ideal candidate who makes the right decisions in a highly competent manner and therefore rightly “wins”. He’s a sweaty, greasy, neurotic nothing who understands power dynamics and can do something the Roy siblings would never be able to do: kill his own ego.

Men like Logan Roy and Lukas Matsson (Alexander Skarsgård), the new owner of Waystar Royco, don’t want anyone who is their equal, who challenges them. Matsson can’t sit on the throne himself, so he needs someone to implement decisions from above and take the lead if things get tricky. Tom is not the worthy successor to Logan Roy, not the most suitable candidate for Waystar Royco’s iron throne. he is one Meat puppet with no agenda and no conscience – making it the perfect choice for the empty, cold world of Succession.

In the best series of the last decade, it was never really about who “wins” at the end

In both Game of Thrones and Succession, the struggle for succession is in the name. With the Roys, however, it quickly became apparent that something else was actually at stake. Succession was never really within reach, it remained an assertion. Something patriarch Logan Roy could use to pull his children to him over and over again, only to then push them away. A means of manipulation.

Then actually there is no family empire without Logan Roy. Logan knows this, and in the first episode he denies his son Kendall the agreed-upon promotion. The old company guard around Gerri, Frank and Karl knows that, and they don’t work with his children, but rather around the seemingly adolescent quarrels of his children. The bankers who see the company’s share price plummet after Logan’s death know this. And the new company owner Lukas Matsson knows that too, so he doesn’t have to hold a place on the throne for a Roy.

There is already a lot of family trauma in the opening of Succession:

The fact that neither Kendall (Jeremy Strong), nor Shiv (Sarah Snook), nor Roman (Kieran Culkin) can win here is the focus of the narrative broken, grown-up kids who may have all the money in the world but aren’t real, self-sufficient people. The Roy offspring only needs four seasons to understand that.

Game of Thrones ends with an unimportant character on a melted throne, selling the claimed renewal of Westeros as a grand resolution. Succession shows in all its bittersweet cruelty what trauma and lack of love do to people. What mistakes of your parents are you cursed to repeat? Can you ever escape your own family, your own imprint? In the end, the Roys are free of their father’s superhuman legacy – but a happy ending was never possible. And let’s be honest: who of them deserves one?

After the Succession finale: 20 exciting series starts in June

Need fresh streaming tips? The most exciting series that you can stream in June on Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+ and more can be found here in the monthly preview:

We have checked the long starting lists of the streaming services and present you the 20 big highlights of the month in the Moviepilot podcast stream trawl. Also included are Netflix’s big sci-fi return Black Mirror after 4 years, Henry Cavill’s final appearance as The Witcher, split personality Tom Holland in The Crowded Room, and the hilariously hilarious Pirates of the Caribbean replacement Our Flag Means Death.