It’s the curse of anything truly successful to be dogged, basically forever, with questions about when you’re inevitably going to bring it back—especially in TV, where networks have made it abundantly clear over the last few years that there’s pretty much no conclusion so final that they won’t at least gently poke at a winning creator (like, say, Succession’s Jesse Armstrong) with a “But you could probably make some more somehow, right?” Just don’t bring that idea to series star Jeremy Strong, who has, now that we’re more than a year past the show’s very dramatic final episode, made it extremely clear, once again, that he has no interest in reviving the tortured-but-shallow soul of A-Number-One Failson Kendall Roy.
“In terms of the role that I played, he came to his terminal point,” Strong told People this week, after they broached the topic of getting more blood from this particular televisual stone. “So for me, that’s something that is very happily put to rest.” Strong, who’s up for a Tony this year for his Broadway performance in An Enemy Of The People, acknowledged that “Can we get more Succession?” is certainly somebody’s problem at the moment, but that it’s definitely not his: “I’m sure there’s a desire for more. I would really pass that buck to Jesse Armstrong.”
To be (slightly) fair to the hounds baying for more foul-mouthed boardroom mayhem from television’s worst family, Armstrong did spend a while hemming and hawing about whether the show’s fourth season would be its last, before ultimately bringing the whole thing to a satisfying conclusion. (Although, as we noted in our review of the finale, we’d absolutely watch a whole new season of TV just about Tom and Shiv driving each other insane in their latest new horrible domestic arrangement. Maybe with Greg as their live-in servant? We would watch it, is all we’re saying.) Strong’s not wrong about Kendall hitting a “terminal point,” in that ending, either—to the point that the actor actually tried to improvise a suicide attempt while filming the show’s final scene. (He was stopped due to safety concerns about, well, jumping into a freezing New York river.)
More to the point, we don’t actually know what the hell we’d learn from another season of Succession: That writing team, those actors, and Strong in particular, spent four seasons plumbing the ugly, rocky, not especially deep depths of the Roy family in full; a return visit might be fun, maybe even emotionally harrowing. But what would actually be the point, beyond a very Logan Roy-esque craving for “more”?
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