‘Succession’ Will End After Upcoming Fourth Season

The drama around the upcoming season of Succession just got even more intense — with the announcement that Season 4, which premieres in about a month on HBO and HBO Max, will be the final one for the acclaimed series.

That’s according to creator Jesse Armstrong, Succession’s creator and showrunner. He told The New Yorker in a new piece about the series, that this upcoming run of episodes will be the show’s last.

“The end,” he said, “has always been kind of present in my mind. From season two, I’ve been trying to think: Is it the next one, or the one after that, or is it the one after that?”

He added:

I got together with a few of my fellow-writers before we started the writing of season four, in about November, December, 2021, and I sort of said, ‘Look, I think this maybe should be it. But what do you think?’ And we played out various scenarios: We could do a couple of short seasons, or two more seasons. Or we could go on for ages and turn the show into something rather different, and be a more rangy, freewheeling kind of fun show, where there would be good weeks and bad weeks. Or we could do something a bit more muscular and complete, and go out sort of strong. And that was definitely always my preference.

Some fans might have preferred the “rangy, freewheeling kind of fun show” if it meant more seasons of the Roy family and their endless infighting. But probably most would agree that “freewheeling” is not really what Succession is about. At some point, there’s got to be an actual succession. It sounds like it’s going to happen a lot sooner than some in the audience expected.

The fourth — and final — season of Succession premieres on HBO on Sunday, March 26.