The stakes are higher than ever in this, the fourth and final season of Succession (see: bumping off the guy who drives the show’s core conflict in episode three). But now that we’re a third of the way through the season, a surprising trend has developed, one that makes the march to the finale feel even more tense: So far, the events of season four are unfolding over the course of just two weeks, with each episode documenting one day after the next. “We were locked into the fact that each episode is one day, which we haven’t done in the series before,” Brian Cox said in HBO’s Succession Podcast. “So [Logan] dies on Day three.”
Some keen-eyed viewers have noticed this, and as Time notes, the tightness of the timeline underscores just how rapidly the family drama is hurtling to its conclusion. Kendall, Shiv, and Roman spent $10 billion to buy Pierce, the rival network to Logan’s beloved ATN, and had their tense karaoke confrontation with their father—spawning one of the great late-era Succession memes with the Roy patriarch saying simply, “I love you, but you are not serious people”—in the span of two days. The next day, the siblings attend Connor’s wedding in the New York and Logan dies on his way to (hopefully) finalize the planned sale of Waystar Royco to mercurial, Elon-esque tech billionaire Lukas Mattson. The wake in episode four follows just a day later, and GQ can confirm that this Sunday’s fifth episode maintains the trend.
This pace is a departure for *Succession—*past seasons have given the illusion of some weeks or even months between episodes, playing up arcs like Kendall’s various periods of estrangement from the family or skipping ahead to the celebration of Logan’s 50th anniversary at Waystar in his Scottish hometown.
The speed at which events are unfolding now emphasizes the tremendous amount of stress the Roys and their associates are experiencing. As a result, the season is as tense as 24, or even a Safdie brothers film.
“I like everything having real-life models and examples, but the time frame is where I have to hold my hands up and say, Look, TV is just really hard. We’ve been doing the show for six or seven years, and people have aged, but the story moves at a pace that the story demands,” showrunner Jesse Armstrong told The New Yorker in February, when asked whether a single year has transpired between the series premiere and the first episode of the fourth season. “I think that there’s probably been a couple of years elapsed in story time, but, to an audience, and indeed to ourselves as writers, it feels rather longer.”
This season, Succession is clearly set on subverting audience expectations. Knowing that the season will play out over the better part of essentially two weeks raises the tension surrounding the deals and board votes hanging over the series, the potential sale of Waystar to Matsson especially.
In a podcast interview with The Ringer, Arian Moayed, who plays sleazy finance bro Stewy Hosseini, confirmed that each episode would be a single day. The Time writer suggests that this could mean the series finale falls on election day. Connor, meanwhile, is hemorrhaging money to hold onto his one percent in the presidential race, and Shiv vehemently opposes Roman’s support for the MAGA-esque candidate played by Justin Kirk. This would also mean we wouldn’t see Shiv carry her child to term (her pregnancy was one of the fourth episode’s revelations.) It’s also possible we get an epilogue that leaps ahead in time.