He Really Deserved It.
Dear Wags,
Yesterday, everybody did their little Succession chin-tugs. We almost didn’t, because honestly, there’s enough Succession content and can we just have Memorial Day? Still, we keep thinking about Tom Wambsgans (Matthew Macfayden) who wound up becoming the CEO of Waystar Royco. Tom, we all know, outflanked the scheming Roy siblings, including his wife, Siobhan (Sarah Snook), who spent the last four seasons reminding Tom he was a pathetic wannabe from St. Paul. Tom shivved Shiv and her brothers Kendall (Jeremy Strong) and Roman (Kieran Culkin), who never took him seriously as they scratched and clawed over the family company. And…bravo!
The Roy sibs are, as Roman says in the finale, bullshit…nothing. They don’t work for a living, they scheme as distraction and therapy (their monstrous daddy didn’t love them, oh boo-hoo). Tom, the climber, actually goes to the office! Sure, he’s a sycophant who, Shiv kindly offered, will always “suck the biggest dick in the room.” But less artful ambition makes him more deserving of the top job than any of the Roy heirs, who thought they were entitled to run their father’s global media company by virtue of their toxic DNA.
Tom may be an icky careerist, but at least he has a career. And he needs one, to get all those nice things he craves—privileges his spoiled in-laws take for granted. He was (somewhat) willing to go to prison for the firm. Like Roy Paterfamilias Logan (Brian Cox) he’s a nobody from nowhere who wants a piece of the action.
America is hyped as a nation of Wambsganses—middle-class climbers who fight for their piece of the pie. But increasingly, we seem to be a country dominated by Roys, indolent one percenters born on third base who think they hit a triple. “I am the eldest boy!” Kendall whined at Shiv when she threw her board vote in favor of the company being acquired by Lukas Mattson (Alexander Skarsgård). Yuck.
So Tom, who spends most of his time worrying if he’s going to get canned (something Roys never have to sweat) elbows his wife out of the way and grabs the poisoned chalice. Succession maestro Jesse Armstrong obviously drew from The Great Gatsby in the creation of the character, who shares the Midwestern roots of the novel’s hero Nick Carraway, and the name (and lousy marriage) of the novel’s villain, Tom Buchanan. In the end, he nabs every prize he longed for—including Shiv—not that it will make him one bit happier.
Tom will be the mercurial Mattson’s flunky (Shiv’s damning recommendation actually got him the gig). And he’s married to a woman whom he described as “incapable of love, and … maybe not a good person to have children.” Tom has a soul in there somewhere— he loves Shiv Roy, who maybe doesn't have one, and she will be the mother of his child.
It’s going to be hell.
But Shiv, the most interesting Roy, was right on the money when she betrayed her elder brother and assured Tom’s ascension. Kendall would have been a disaster as CEO because Kendall is a disaster, full stop. Logan, the old scorpion, let his son know as much in life, telling him he simply wasn’t enough of a killer to do the job (though funnily enough, Kendall actually killed somebody). Her decision — I just don’t think you’d be good at it — isn’t a belated declaration of loyalty to Tom, but a cold assessment of the facts.
So Tom, the blank in the gray flannel suit, or as Shiv puts it, a striver and a hick, gets it all. Which is supposed to be the American way. He’s even keeping duplicitous Cousin Greg (Nicholas Braun) by his side, because he’s a striver and a hick, too. They were a sideshow the Roy siblings sneered at — the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of this nasty affair. Now the arrivistes have arrived.
Success will ruin them. Or rather, make them even worse. Look what it did to the Roys. Logan was a vampire, but Shiv’s “world of a father” built an empire. All Tom can do is manage its decline while kissing up to another tycoon.
In the end, he’s the only man for the job.
