Shiv was no feminist. In Succession’s dark gender politics, it wasn’t an option

Was there ever a more pathetic cry? “I’m the eldest boy!” shouts Kendall Roy, the actually not-quite-eldest boy of the dead yet ever-present Logan Roy, capitalist, control freak and deeply callous parent, at the denouement of the Succession finale.

It is perhaps the show’s greatest feat that it turned its audience into Logan’s mirror – each of us willing the writers to choose our favourite Roy child to win control of the business, or at least, to become its kneecapped CEO when it was eaten up by the marvellously creepy Scando tech bro Lukas Mattson.

A bleak tableau for women: Australian actress Sarah Snook as Shiv Roy in Succession.Credit: David M. Russell/HBO

We quibbled over which of the children was better, or worse; who was the least unstable and the least incompetent; who had the chops. Just like Logan, we loved them, but we knew they were not serious people.

Just like Kendall, we knew the real eldest boy (the hapless half-brother Connor) was never a contender, so we didn’t count him.

Kendall was a weak narcissist, Roman was too nihilistically deranged, and while Shiv was smart, she was hubristic and unable to commit to anything. Plus, she was a woman, a fact she emphasised by falling pregnant in the final series.

In the end, the show’s writers hustled a truly Logan-esque move. They pulled a punch and pulled off a coup by installing the odious (yet strangely vulnerable) Tom Wambsgans, Shiv’s husband, as the new boss. Tom screwed over his own wife to get there, then his wife screwed over her siblings to get Tom there.

It was the best she could do – in the realpolitik of Succession, no woman holds power in her own right, no matter how hard she has tried, Lady Macbeth-style, to “unsex” herself and become a man.

Succession was always a show about men, the power struggles between them; and the inability of patriarchs to cede power, let alone raise boys worthy of ceding power to.

Most of the cast was male, reflecting the world of the corporate super-rich, and true to the values of that world, not a word was mentioned about the misogyny in which its characters bathed. That is, until the funeral of Logan Roy, when Shiv, in a rare moment of emotional honesty, broke ranks with her brothers and stopped pretending to be another Roy son, just for a minute.

“When he let you in, when the sun shone, it was warm,” she said of her father. “But it was hard to be his daughter … he was hard on women.”

And then, trying to explain: “He couldn’t fit a whole woman in his head.” It was a perfect line – about as good a summary of misogyny as I have heard.

In the end, Shiv denies her brothers power by choosing her husband, Tom, to take the reins.Credit: HBO/Foxtel

Shiv knew her brothers were the same. The decision by the writers to make Shiv pregnant in the final season furthered the dark gender politics of the show. Apart from a brief phone conversation with her doctor about test results, Shiv doesn’t acknowledge her pregnancy, and she keeps it secret from her husband Tom (the baby’s father) and her brothers for as long as she can.

She needs to keep pretending to be a man: the only thing the boardroom misogynists respect less than a woman is a pregnant woman. When Mattson ditches her as CEO, he calls her the “baby-lady”.

The pregnancy raises the stakes for Shiv, not just personally (her body and her life forever altered, all that), but in a business sense – she’s now carrying another potential successor. All of a sudden, her status is potentially elevated.

Like a pregnant queen at the Tudor court, she represents a true bloodline, as Roman pointed out in the nasty final confrontation between the siblings.

The initial secrecy of the pregnancy was echoed in the secrecy of Shiv’s dealings against her brothers, as she plotted with Mattson to hand him the business over them. But as women know, biology wins, and even if you act like a man, your body will eventually betray you. Shiv turned that betrayal to her advantage – she picked Tom, the father of her child, and in picking him, she secured a seat as close to power as possible.

In the end, her value was measured in terms of her sexuality.

Earlier in the episode, Tom proved his loyalty to Mattson by unflinchingly allowing the mad Finn to speak about wanting to “f---” Shiv, his wife (Mattson also complained she was “pushy” and “too much”). Shiv wanted to be CEO of the company under Mattson. Instead, she was the sexual currency the two men traded to stitch up the deal that relegated her.

And what of Succession’s other women? At Logan’s funeral, his wives and mistresses were corralled on a single pew, a widows’ club in which any personal bitterness was offset by the size of the settlement they got.

Kendall, in his eulogy for his father, listed all the things his father made – ships, buildings, companies, money. Then he added that their dad “made me and my three siblings”. The camera cut to their ice-dry English mother, looking quietly miffed. What did she have to do with it? She was only a supplier of potential successors.

But Kendall was right – his father was the one who made the Roy children, in the sense that he ruined and weakened them, and doomed them to forever disappoint him.

Probably the bleakest message from Succession is that the only person competent enough to be CEO was, of course, a woman, the magnificent Gerri Kellman. But she was summarily sacked when the youngest Roy child, Roman, had a tantrum.

A man’s world ... Jeremy Strong as Kendall Roy, Sarah Snook as Shiv Roy, and Kieran Culkin as Roman Roy.Credit: Foxtel/HBO

The same Roy child with whom she had engaged in a murky-kinky, mutually-harassing phone-sex relationship, a relationship she later held over him to secure an excellent golden parachute from the company.

The thorough pessimism with which the show treated its women was bleak, but felt right.

In the United States, abortion care is outlawed and criminalised in several states, and Donald Trump looks assured to take the Republican nomination for the next presidential election.

The women of Succession look after their own interests because they don’t trust that anyone else will. That’s why they’re smart.

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