Warning: This article contains major spoilers for the Succession Season 3 finale.
Succession just completed its third season, landing on many lists of the best TV shows of 2021 and throwing America’s favorite bloodthirsty capitalists into a brand new round of decorative infanticide. As the mega-hit HBO show has evolved, viewers have seen characters go from malicious imps to ill-rehearsed samaritans right back to demanding Hell expand dig operations. Often, that fluctuating morality rests less in a given moment’s manufactured conscience and more in negligent lack-of-backstabbing.
This list tries to award the Best Roy trophy to whichever member of the family would be last up to the guillotine: the Roy who has done the least harm (through choice, not availability), who pays any attention to leaving soil as salt-less as they found it, and who would even head the company without firebombing a tent city immediately. For the sake of cohesion and succinctness, Kendall’s children are not included, and neither is Greg’s mother Marianne — we don’t know enough about their morals and likely don’t want to. Celebrating the Roys, especially with news that the upcoming fourth season will have a Norway-centered plotline, per Variety, here they are, worst to best.
Updated October 17, 2022: If you love Succession, you’ll be happy to know we’ve updated this article with additional content and entries about the Roy family.
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12 Logan Roy
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Logan Roy’s greatest talent is that he’s ludicrously successful without having actual talent. Every time Logan wants something, it routinely explodes: from buying Pierce, to pressuring the Raisin out of the DOJ investigation, to offering Kendall as a very different kind of jailbait, Logan accuses his children of failing him before ever addressing that he’s an awful businessman. His every win — from being purchased by GoJo, to securing Caroline’s board powers, to defeating the proxy war via Kendall’s resignation — comes at the behest of somebody else approaching him while he takes full credit. Ultimately, Logan’s evil, his abusive tirades, his flailing stream of lies, are so powerful that he’s gotten his children, his employees, and even the viewers to believe he’s competent when in reality he’s just grouchy.
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11 Roman Roy
The apple doesn’t fall far from the forest fire. Roman is a spare child away from abusive fatherhood, his main obstacles being the timeline of Gerri’s uterus and a lack of paternal absence required to be directly abusive — Logan’s main benefactor in that area being sole custody. Roman will hold an impossible million dollars in a child’s nose, sexually harass the CEO, and maim an astronaut here and there. He can gather incredible empathy for his naivety, his monumental phobia for his father, even for his impoverishing Oedipal complex, but to claim that evil can’t derive from fear is a dismissal of the reality that every evil ever has derived from fear.
10 Caroline Collingwood
Should Caroline have been burdened with motherhood after the divorce, the show would be centered around her abuse, not Logan’s. She shot down Kendall’s desperate and painful attempt at coming clean about Shiv’s wedding, she told Shiv that she wished she had dogs instead of children — at every possible opportunity Caroline spews acid so caked in powdered sugar that it takes a moment to realize skin is dissolving. Ultimately, Caroline’s seeming lack of true evil comes from lack of opportunity, but viewers have to admit that she does an incredible job with what resources she does have.
9 Siobhan Roy
Shiv has two major problems: 1) she has more brains than the people around her and knows it, 2) that is like celebrating having legs among snakes. As Shiv tries to play a manipulation game, her successes and failures largely rest upon her trying to play chess against players who don’t know the rules. If she’s technically won but the other player thinks they have, the best she can ever earn at Waystar is a stalemate. By finally throwing herself in as a fellow snake, she’s become a repeated punching bag of misogynist dismissal, forwarding all of that to Tom in their bloated and rotting relationship. Shiv has proven she’d be cruel with more power, as she’s proven she’s vicious when denied it.
8 Connor Roy
When every other child is caked in coal, it’s a feat to be the black sheep. Much of Connor’s desire to do wrong or right comes with what’s available to him, and even then his inability to backstab provokes confusion as to whom Connor would ever have to backstab and why. Connor is Schrödinger’s Roy — he hasn’t yet emerged from his box—though there are more and more hints that that may happen soon: he’s attempting to build a libertarian cult, he accessorizes Willa as a beloved blankie, he has all the tools to become a Logan but seemingly none of the genetic venom. His (for the most part) lack of evil isn’t because he’s good, but because his only conscious decision in his life was to go for the only position a toddler would know: the U.S. Presidency.
7 Tom Wambsgans
Tom can get plenty of empathy for how much he has to take, from the company making him the fall man for every crime to Shiv dissecting his emotional borders like a child with a click pen. But with every beating Tom gets, he passes the memo down to Greg — physically assaulting him, moving his office to a cupboard under the stairs, even throwing the destruction of the cruise papers at Greg. However, the redemptive quality of Tom was quick but titanic: when Greg asked if Tom would take on Greg’s prison sentence as well and Tom agreed at no penalty (maybe the only act of true altruism in the entire series). While Tom did terrible things for Waystar and terrible things to Greg, his self-described Nero-esque desire to have Greg thrive gives him more empathy than most Roys. His betrayal to the Roy children was responsive to Shiv’s attacks and rather than continuing that stream of abuse down, Tom took a risk to have it be inclusive for the Egg.
6 Kendall Roy
Sometimes, Kendall has clear remorse, like when having to visit the Dodds family (the waiter who died in the crash being Andrew Dodds). Other times, Kendall appropriates empathy for individualist ascension, like claiming a neoliberal advocacy for women’s rights movements in order to accurately paint his family as misogynistic (while simultaneously demeaning Shiv’s value to solely her femininity himself). Kendall will manipulate and threaten Greg to maintain leverage against the family, he’ll promote Aaronson’s perception of Logan’s health over Logan’s literal health, and he’ll be undeniably absent in his children’s lives. It’s hard to call Kendall morally superior to the others for the instances where he advocates for familial treaties — it’s like calling a losing warlord morally superior for not wanting to lose anymore — but his fleeting instances of legitimate guilt for what he’s done give him the slightest of advantages over all of his siblings.
5 Marianne Hirsch
An outsider to the Roy drama, Marianne encourages her son, “cousin Greg,” to make a good impression on the extended family and align himself with whoever has the best chance of becoming Logan’s successor. Greg of course shows up on the very day Logan has a stroke. Marianne’s father Ewan (James Cromwell), Greg’s grandfather, cut her off long before he decided to donate Greg’s inheritance to Greenpeace. She has since racked up a fortune in credit-card debt, according to her son. Marianne’s lone scene the series’ pilot episode left us wanting more and wondering if she’ll ever make another appearance down the line.
4 Greg Hirsch
Greg is a caterpillar in a rose bush, trying to find a spot to grow without resting on a prick. He’s our Alice in Waystarland, being taught jargon and traditions as we learn them, his meme-ridden ignorance exaggerated as we get more familiar with the Roys ourselves. Greg’s desire to do the right thing comes from inexperience in the octagon, the Egg slowly realizing that putting yourself out there means vulnerability, and soft bellies earn their pikes. Greg’s occasional want to do what’s morally correct often coincides with his need to not be trampled or extorted—he’s the healthy “before picture” showcasing Waystar’s side effects. He clumsily refused Ewan’s centi-million dollar offer to abandon the evils of the company, showing he’s got the bug like the rest of them, but for every douchey attempt at exploiting a “dating latter,” he’s also got a mismanaged attempt at morally advocating against Connor’s presidential bid in the Roy’s political Shark Tank.
3 Ewan Roy
It seems that we learn more about the interesting culmination of Ewan’s politics and familial preferences with his every appearance, but one thing we know for sure is that Ewan would never become Logan given that Ewan had the chance to and didn’t. A few plusses about him are his clear recognition of ATN’s poisoning of public discourse, leaving his fortune to Greenpeace, enlisting to “fight communism” (which, while being a seemingly uninformed and machismo-driven perspective, from Ewan’s perspective demands some version of honor), refusing to break from his loyalty to his brother at the vote of no confidence, and attempting to help Greg escape Waystar before it devours him. There are random minuses, such as demanding Greg drive him twelve hours in silence or the occasional paleoconservative rant, but in a buffet built on insatiable greed, Ewan’s acceptance of his one plate (albeit, a 250 million dollar one) gives him a lack of dependency.
2 Marcia Roy
Marcia is the first contestant here with no obvious or glaring examples of malpractice. She threatened Rhea passively, but only under the pretense that Rhea was having an affair with her husband. She tried to block Shiv from seeing a stroke-recovering Logan, which turned out to be the decent move for every party involved. Marcia’s ability to move in silence among the Roys gives her freedom to be either entrepreneurial or abstinent in any moment, so her regular preference to do right by Logan (within reason)—as well as do right by those who do right by Logan—makes her one of the only Roys who is given the a consistent opportunity to backstab without religiously taking the bait.
1 Rava Roy
On any other show, Rava would be a notably nice character. In the moral universe of Succession, she could have a religion named after her. Not only does she strive to make sure her children can have an ongoing relationship with their estranged dad, she offers up her home to Kendall’s parade of suits and egos following his secession from the family, even immediately relinquishing wrath against Greg and Kendall for ruining a gift from her godfather. Rava had all the ingredients thrown at her to be a Tom and suckle Kendall’s teats for gold until they chafed, but she refused. It’s not that greed isn’t her game, it’s that kindness is — regularly offering Kendall counsel and warmth in his most difficult moments. In many ways, Rava’s presence is as a smelling salt for the viewers: a sobering reminder that these other characters aren’t natural or acceptable but lustful idiots who swim in pools of cut diamonds out of hierarchical fear — that you as an audience member do not have to choose between being a Kendall, a Shiv, or a Roman, but you are most likely a Rava, because you’re a person and the other choices aren’t.
