Everything We Know About 'Succession' Season 4

Ever since Jesse Armstrong's prestige drama Succession premiered on HBO in 2018, fans have wondered how they could ever love a group of corporate jerks so much. Well, not necessarily love, but be so engrossed in capitalistic wheeling and dealing, family melodrama, and petty jokes that it's the only thing they want to spend their Sundays watching and tweeting about. The show about the fictional Roy family's ploys for power within their father's media empire, Waystar Royco, introduced more than a few surprises in its third season, from hilarious, over-the-top episodes to a penultimate finale that altered just about every dynamic on the show.

Because TV fans just can't get enough board meetings, contentious phone calls, and snarky insults and HBO won't dare let its award-winner—which raked in 25 Emmy nominations, including the most acting nominations ever, for its third season—go too soon, a fourth season was ordered back in fall 2021. With a lot to process following that jaw-dropping Season 3 finale, we're breaking down everything we know about Succession Season 4 so far.

HBO announced in late June that Succession Season 4 had started production. With the show presumably filming throughout the summer and into early fall, we'll speculate that we might be back in the frigid cold embrace of Logan Roy and his family sometime by early 2023. 

Early 2023 seems about right, but we do know that the show will definitely be back by May 2023 at the latest. In a July 2022 interview with Deadline following the series' 25 Emmy nominations, HBO and HBO Max Chief Content Officer Casey Bloys said that the show should return in time to qualify for the next Emmys season. 

The upcoming season will feature 10 episodes, which is one more than Season 3 and the same episode count as Seasons 1 and 2. We'll take as many opportunities for scathing insults and sibling rivalry as we can get!

All of the shareholders should be pleased, because about everyone is confirmed to return for Season 4. Even though Kendall's (Jeremy Strong) fate was unclear toward the end of Season 3, he is still alive (and hopefully getting the help he needs), so he should return, as should his siblings Shiv (Sarah Snook), Roman (Kieran Culkin), and Connor (Alan Ruck). Of course, Logan (Brian Cox) remains at the top, making deals that can't be fucked with and ruining all of his children's lives, so he'll be back. Marcia (Hiam Abbass) and Willa (Justine Lupe) are also confirmed to be back. And if you were wondering why an actor with as a high of a caliber as Matthew Macfadyen was playing Tom Wambsgans, who is often a punching bag, now it's clear that he's in one of the show's most important roles. Expect he and his Sporus, Greg Hirsch (Nicholas Braun), to be an even bigger part of next season.

Outside of the family, even though GoJo just bought Waystar, our favorite capitalists should be sticking around. That means Gerri (J. Smith-Cameron), Karl (David Rasche), Frank (Peter Friedman), Hugo (Fisher Stevens), Colin (Scott Nicholson), Cyd Peach (Jeannie Berlin), and Kerry (Zoë Winters) don't seem to be going away any time soon. We'll probably see even more of Alexander Skarsgård's slimy Swede tech visionary Lukas Matsson as he moves to buy up Waystar Royco.

Since the beginning of Succession, fans have wondered which Roy child will get a kiss from Daddy. Turns out, it's none of them! The Season 3 finale showed Logan deciding to pursue Lukas Matsson's deal of GoJo buying out Waystar with the promise of a Logan-approved board. Logan also revisits his divorce agreement with Kendall, Roman, and Shiv's mother, Caroline Collingwood (Harriet Walter), so that they no longer have a supermajority against their father to override his plan, essentially stripping them of power. The last 15 minutes of the season essentially reframe everything about the show as fans know it, setting up a fourth installment that finds the Roy kids opposite their dad instead of the Kendall-vs.-Logan power dynamic we're used to.

Per the official Season 4 logline from HBO, next season will focus a great deal on the sale of Waystar over to Lukas Matsson as it moves closer. The logline states, "The prospect of this seismic sale provokes existential angst and familial division among the Roys as they anticipate what their lives will look like once the deal is completed. A power struggle ensues as the family weighs up a future where their cultural and political weight is severely curtailed." 

Perhaps Matsson will give Roman, who Logan claims he likes enough, some power. More likely, Logan may want to see his kids working hard and fending for themselves in a way they haven't had to before. In an interview with Vulture, Brian Cox says that by the end of Season 3, Logan is "tired of his children not being savvy operators or able sparring partners," and in a more recent post-Emmy-nomination interview, he said we can expect him to keep looking to his children to "step up to the plate" and "do something original" in the coming episodes. Considering how damaged, obnoxious, and power-hungry they all are, there's no way they'll let any of this go without a fight.

Most interestingly, though, we'll probably see Tom continuing to conspire with Logan. He's long noted how no one wins like Logan does, and now he made a "deal with the devil" by ratting out Shiv and her brothers' plans, it's sure to make him a key player in Logan's future vision for the company. Macfadyen told Deadline he has no idea where the writers will take his character, but he certainly trusts Logan more than he does Shiv and thinks what played out "makes sense." While it may have been shocking, what will definitely make for a few surprises and schemes is the knowledge/percolating hatred coming from Shiv, who saw Logan acknowledge Tom affectionately at the end of the episode. Sarah Snook told Vulture, "If Shiv knows, but her brothers don't, and Tom doesn't know that Shiv knows—there's a lot of potential there."

There's also a lot of potential for Greg. While Nicholas Braun told Deadline in an interview following the announcement of his Emmy nomination that he and his character are ready to go to the "dark side," he notes that the transformation won't happen overnight. He explained that, "he has to acquire the skills" and "doesn't have the vocabulary or the swagger that the Roys have," so we could start to see more of his evolution—maybe even out of the role of punchline—in Season 4. 

HBO didn't announce Season 4 as the final season, nor it doesn't seem like it will be. Not only is it one of the network's most popular dramas and an awards favorite, when asked by Variety if the end of the show is in sight, Jesse Armstrong said, "I won't answer that [question] precisely. I don't think it should go on forever. But we're still having fun at the moment."

While the sibling and corporate rivalries of the Roys can't continue on forever, it sounds like fans can look forward to at least a couple more seasons of Succession. Of course, that's just speculation, though, and we don't want to get too ahead of ourselves, so we'll continue to look forward to Season 4 and update this article when more information is revealed. 

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