As she eulogizes her “dear, dear world of a father” in the penultimate episode of HBO’s Succession, Siobhan Roy repeats the pattern that’s made her such a brilliantly frustrating creation across the show’s four tectonic seasons: she tiptoes up to the edge of the truth, only to retreat from the harshness of its glare. As children, Shiv recalls, she and her brothers would sometimes play outside their father’s office, and he’d burst into the hallway to yell at them, insisting on peace and quiet while he ran one of the world’s most powerful media conglomerates. “What he was doing in there was so important, we couldn’t conceive of what it was,” Shiv says. “Presidents and kings and queens and diplomats and prime ministers and world bankers. And. . .” Then she pauses, swallows, and withdraws. “I don’t know. Yeah.”
