Succession season four raises the stakes and reinforces its extraordinary power

Can a TV show be as good as the greatest moments in your life? Maybe that’s hyperbole, or maybe it really is that good.

Roman Roy is actually sitting on a chair. Shocking.

Here’s a conundrum. When you know something is phenomenal, do you shout it from every high altitude point or do you moderate what you say, lest you set it up to fail under the weight of enormous expectations?

Because the fourth season of Succession really is that good. It’s more than just that good. It’s exceptional.

It’s the kind of extraordinary television that makes you stop and wonder if creator Jesse Armstrong entered a Faustian bargain with some lower being. Although surely, if such things actually existed, a higher being. Because when it comes to storytelling, Succession is transcendent.

Yes, there we go with the hyperboles. How could a TV show possibly measure up against the greatest moments in people’s lives? Can a TV show be better than the first time you held your child?

With siblings like these, who needs enemies.

Seriously though, the series, about an obscenely wealthy family and the Shakespearean battle for control of its media empire is the perfect balance between high drama and absurdist comedy, and grandiosity and pettiness.

Straddling those worlds and weaponising those contrasts is part of its brilliance.

Also knowing when to end is another skill so rarely deployed. Armstrong revealed in February that this season would be the final one, and there is so much weight to every line of dialogue, every look exchanged when you know it’s the last time.

Structurally, it makes sense that all the jostling, betrayals and alliance-switching is coming to a climax. When the show is called Succession, someone has to succeed. Power is like energy, it’s dynamic, it moves and it transforms.

But it can surge and be destructive – much like the complex and bruising quest to be on top when your rivals are your nearest and dearest, and when your relationships are so mired in resentment, love and hurt that you can never trust anyone.

Stream Succession on BINGE. New customers get a 14-day free trial and start streaming instantly. Sign up at binge.com.au

No one spits out an invective quite like Brian Cox. Picture: Binge

The toxicity in those relationships, especially between patriarch Logan Roy (Brian Cox) and his adult children Kendall (Jeremy Strong), Shiv (Sarah Snook), Roman (Kieran Culkin) and Connor (Alan Ruck), is the gunpowder in Succession’s fireworks.

Every exchange between the Roys is a masterclass in serial storytelling. Everything builds on what came before, and telegraphs what’s to come. There will be explosive moments before the series wraps at the end of this 10-episode season. And they will all be earnt.

Everyone who had access to the first four episodes made available for review has been asked to not divulge any details and while that can make it difficult to explain exactly why this season feels like yet another cracking escalation, Succession already has so much goodwill with its fans.

Nicholas Braun as comic relief, Cousin Greg.

There is no course correcting, this show has only gotten better and better with each new chapter. So it’s not hard to believe that the fourth season only reinforces why Succession is the best TV series of the past decade.

Chalk it up to its rhythmically beautiful dialogue or the achingly convincing performances or the clever camerawork which always finds the frame.

Setting a drama in the high-stakes world of family, media and billions of dollars is easy. Making it monumental is near-impossible. But Succession succeeds.

Succession season four is on Foxtel and Binge* on Mondays

*Foxtel and Binge is majority owned by News Corp, publisher of this website