There are a lot of terrible characters on HBO’s stellar series ‘Succession.’ In honor of its series finale, here’s our ranking of all of ‘em
'Succession' characters ranked from least to most despicable. PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY JOE RODRIGUEZ. IMAGES USED IN ILLUSTRATION: MACALL POLAY/HBO, 5
Succession will go down as one of the best shows in recent TV memory in part because of how well it articulated some of the worst behavior ever seen on screen. From dick pics to endorsing fascism, the Roys, their friends, their allies, and their enemies have committed some really heinous deeds over the course of close to four seasons of drama and comedy. But which character has been the most worst? Before the series finale arrives on Sunday, here is our attempt to rank the 25 most significant Succession characters (technically, 26) from least despicable to most, by a variety of highly specific and/or subjective factors.
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We’re sticking to the adult characters, otherwise Kendall and Rava’s kids would be all the way down here. Like anyone who marries into the Roy family, you have to consider how much Rava knew going in, her motivations for that, her complicity in sticking around for a while, etc. She gets more of a pass than the others, though, because she married Kendall when he was relatively young and idealistic, back in the days when she could understandably convince herself that, like Michael Corleone claimed to want at various points in The Godfather saga, Kendall would be the one to take the family legitimate. Once it became clear that he was not willing or able to do that — and that his drug addiction would continue to hurt her and their kids — Rava got out, and has done her best to stay out, other than occasionally feeling obligated to bring Sophie and Iverson to celebrate important family milestones. Practically a saint compared to everybody above her.
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Willa marries Connor when he’s much older than when Rava married Kendall. And she has no illusions about the clan she is joining, nor about the fact that her marriage will largely be a transactional relationship. So none of that is great. But she never really actively hurts anybody, and even her sins of inaction are relatively small potatoes. Plus, we still want to hear Connor deliver the eulogy she obviously wrote for him to deliver at Logan’s funeral.
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Cousin Greg’s grandfather definitely gets credit for his loathing of younger brother Logan, and for giving so much of his fortune to causes like Greenpeace that are in opposition to what Waystar stands for. But, like grandniece Shiv, he loses points for not more openly combating Logan and the company until after Logan was dead and it was too late to matter. Hell of a eulogy, though.
DAVID M. RUSSELL/HBO
Kendall’s long-suffering assistant has almost as good a case for Rava for the final spot. And in the penultimate episode, we saw her finally hit her own breaking point with Kendall and the company. At the same time, she did work for this guy for years while knowing who he was, and what both he and the company were capable of. A job is a job, but there’s work at the post office, you know? If she’d quit sooner, maybe she’d be down at the bottom.
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On the one hand, Stewy is a billionaire, which fundamentally makes him a bad person. On the other, within the limited amount of time we spend with him on this show, he comes across about as well as someone with that much money can. Unlike the Roys and many other prominent characters, he seems to treat business as just that, not taking things personally, not going for vendettas, not trying to hurt anybody for any reason other than as a direct means to a lucrative end. By Succession standards, he’s a true gentleman.
Stewy frequently works in partnership with Sandi and/or Sandy. But the difference there is that everything for the father and daughter is personal when it comes to the Roys, creating a level of viciousness that puts the pair of them one notch ahead, on top of the larger issue with billionaires.
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Karolina seems like one of the Succession characters with whom it would be the least maddening to spend time with outside of a professional capacity. She seems sensible, logical, and with an accurate assessment of herself and her capabilities. But she has also chosen to devote years to washing the dirty corporate laundry of Logan and company, while knowing just how terrible it all is. And it is always clear that she knows just how bad these things are that she is helping to cover up. Again, see Jess re: the post office.
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Karolina’s partner in crime cover-ups goes a spot higher than her due to his recent eager acceptance of the role as Kendall’s lapdog. In some ways, his desperation should almost be a point in his favor — you know Karolina could take any corporate comms job she wanted, while Hugo is an acquired taste — but he’s generally more willing than she is, and at times even eager, to get down in the muck with this stuff.
HBO
How much should we penalize characters on the show for hypocrisy? Nan Pierce was the head of Waystar’s longtime, media rival PGN, and seemingly Logan’s ideological opposite in every way. Yet every glimpse we had of the Pierce family even before this season was as scathing a portrait of limousine liberalism as pop culture’s had in quite some time. Mainly, though, it was Nan’s willingness this season to sell her company to Logan — or, ultimately, to his rebellious children — that gets her this high. No one who truly cared about all the things Nan professes to care about would ever allow a Roy anywhere near PGN. In the end, though, she’s just as greedy and self-interested as everyone else — and more insufferable than most, given all her playacting about the great burden of having to discuss such a gauche thing as money while making this deal.
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Not only has Kerry never shown the kind of moral qualms about her job that Jess has, but she eagerly hopped into bed with Logan, hoping that he would at least make her a TV star, if not into his next wealthy bride. Generally an unkind person with no illusions about what she’s been doing or who she’s been doing it with, even before her relationship with Logan crossed over from professional to personal.
CRAIG BLANKENHORN/HBO
Like Kerry, Marcia had no real concerns with any of the toxicity that Logan unleashed into the world. Her only objections to his behavior were personal ones, like when his affairs brought her public embarrassment. Credit to her, we suppose, for being able to get more financially out of her marriage than some of the other past and present Roy spouses, but she’ll do whatever it takes to protect herself.
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We’re forced to split hairs among a lot of these smaller groupings, and the three most trusted members of Logan’s inner circle most of all. Gerri has a good case to be ranked most highly, since she is both the one with the most reticence about what Logan and the company have done, while also being the one whose job it is to help them evade consequences for those actions. But as a woman working for a man who, as his daughter noted, had trouble relating to women, and as the recipient of so many Roman Roy dick pics and other inappropriate behavior, Gerri has also suffered much more for her tenure with Waystar than Frank or Karl. Consider the slightly lower ranking her reward.
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Frank is the nicest of “The Grays,” and was arguably more of a father figure to Kendall than Logan ever tried to be. But like the others, he’s complicit in everything Logan and Waystar have done. And like several other people on this list, his actions in some ways seem worse because he is empathetic enough in certain moments to know how often he and his coworkers are in the wrong. At a certain point, the kindly demeanor is just a lie he tells himself and others.
DAVID RUSSELL/HBO
Credit the Waystar CFO for two things: 1) He did great things in cable in the Nineties, and 2) He is the least apologetic Gray about who he is and what he does. No hypocrisy here, but also the one you’d least want to spend time with. By the thinnest of margins, that puts him at the top of the troika.
HBO
Connor is among the toughest characters to rank. In many ways, he is harmless, and so profoundly sheltered and damaged that he has no idea how much of the world he completely misunderstands. But even if he was only supporting his father out of a futile attempt to gain his love or respect, he still did it every chance he got. And he still poured $100 million into a presidential campaign whose platform can essentially be summed up as, “America: Miscellaneous Angry Things.” He has not done nearly as many bad things as his father or siblings, nor many of his father’s employees. But he also has more money and a bigger platform than almost anyone on the list below him, and he had the power to do a whole lot more with both than he has. So let’s put him here.
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This one’s pretty simple: Cyd runs ATN, the worst and most damaging weapon in the Waystar Royco empire, and allowed Logan to use it as his propaganda machine for years and years, largely without complaint. A classic “I was just following orders” type.
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The epitome of the socially maladjusted tech bro who has no interest in the impact his technology has on the world at large. Oh, and he sends bags of his own blood to his comms chief (with whom he’s also had an affair) and humiliates her in public. And he has no problem allying with a Nazi (even saying “willkommen” to him in the latest episode) if it’s good for business.
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Say this for Kendall, Roman, and Shiv’s mother: she knew herself enough to know that she should not be raising her own children. There’s a good chance that if she had stayed, or if she had fought hard for joint or sole custody, the kids would have turned out even worse than they did under Logan. But by leaving them entirely in the care of a volatile, cruel man she knew to be incapable of loving anyone or anything — and by refusing to ever apologize for this, or anything else she ever did — she doomed her children into becoming what they are now.
GRAEME HUNTER
Just as people who convert to a religion can become more passionate and knowledgeable about it than those born into it, Shiv’s estranged husband has worked very hard to out-Roy the Roys whenever possible. He has done many mean and/or monstrous things out of his desperation to claim and maintain power within an organization where his only assets have generally been a marriage to a woman who doesn’t like him, and a willingness to cross lines that others won’t because their status is more secure.
MACALL B. POLAY/HBO
Once upon a time, Cousin Greg finishing this high would be shocking. When Succession began, he was the closest thing the show had to a POV character, as someone who was technically part of the family, but who had no money, influence, or allies. In those days, Greg was perhaps not lovable, but he was so intensely hapless and vulnerable that it was hard not to feel protective of him. Power, though, doesn’t so much corrupt as it reveals what a person always wanted to be. And the more power Greg has amassed — even if virtually all of it has come from riding Tom’s coattails — the meaner he’s become. Tom still occasionally has brief moments of humanity, where Greg more or less seems like a sociopath, and the worse of the two Disgusting Brothers — the one who embraces that name completely without irony.
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The hypocrisy score here is off the charts. Shiv positions herself as the one member who claims to find the company’s goals and methods distasteful. Yet like Uncle Ewan, she never did anything to stop Logan, and often went along with him, like when she reluctantly posed for a photo with Jeryd Mencken. Some of this was the result of a lifetime of emotional abuse, but a lot of it is pure self-interest. Even after Logan was gone, we saw Shiv looking out for number one above all else: for all her indignant protests over what Mencken’s election would mean for the country, Shiv ultimately chose to protect her arrangement with Matsson over calling the Jimenez campaign and potentially stopping Roman from crowning Mencken. And in a family whose love language is insults, Shiv’s taunts are by far the cruelest and most creative — particularly when it comes to the husband she’s treated so badly over the years. And she was willing to air all of Kendall’s dirty laundry out in public with the open letter she released last season, over the objections of her other siblings. She arguably has more of Logan’s personality in her than her brothers, even if she’s generally been the least successful in her professional aims prior to the latest episode.
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Kendall has a bottomless thirst to be the Number One Boy, but he often considers himself to be a much nobler and more high-minded person than the other members of the family. Given those conflicting motivations, do you think he’d be more annoyed that he ranks this highly, or more annoyed that he doesn’t have the top spot? Kendall has had many, many, many opportunities to do the right thing over the years — most notably in the aftermath of the death of the cater waiter — and every single time he has opted for what is most beneficial for himself. He’s a terrible person who believes himself to be a good one, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
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What to do with Mencken, who has had less screen time than all of these other characters (and whose worst actions have happened off camera), but is also a white nationalist who appears to have stolen a presidential election with the help of his dangerous followers? Basically, it comes down to which you think is worse: a Nazi who claims power, or the men who enabled him to claim power because they didn’t care about what he would do with it? Under the circumstances, third seems about right.
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The first draft of this list, written a few weeks ago, still had Roman in the top 10, but much further down. It was an acknowledgment that while Roman could be the most juvenile, petty, and gross of the four Roy siblings, he was also the one most likely to show empathy for people outside the family, even if it tended to be brief and in one-on-one situations. (And Gerri would almost certainly disagree with that assessment.) But what a difference a stolen election makes. In “America Decides,” he ran roughshod over America for purely selfish reasons — not least of which was the hollow satisfaction of proving that he could — and didn’t seem troubled for a second by the implications of ensuring that Mencken would get to take his throne. While all four of Logan’s children spent their lives jockeying for their father’s approval, Roman is the only one to do something big and awful enough to earn it, even if it was too late for the old man to witness. Congratulations, you smug trash person!
MACALL B. POLAY/HBO
His brother Ewan’s speech laid it out plainly: Logan Roy was a man who remade the world in his ruthless, miserable vision. He built an empire out of poisoning everything and everyone standing in his way, from democracy to his own children. His sins are too vast, many, and horrifying to list here, and nearly every terrible thing others have done on this show can in some way or other be traced back to Logan’s influence. He was worse than everyone else on this list combined, and the only reason to not put him at the top is that he’s dead and incapable of inflicting more harm. But he did so much of it while he was alive that there’s really no contest here.
From Rolling Stone US.
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