Succession to End With Season 4

The Roys are calling it quits, as HBO’s Succession will be ending with its upcoming fourth season.

Thursday (February 23rd), series creator Jesse Armstrong revealed (via The New Yorker) that the decision to end the series was a creative one, saying that after meeting with writers for the series:

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.

Succession has become one of HBO’s most popular and critically acclaimed series, with 48 Emmy nominations and 12 wins, including two consecutive Emmys for Outstanding Drama Series. In recent years, speculation has often been that the show would end with Season 5, though no timeline was ever confirmed, and star Brian Cox told The Times in September 2022 that no deals were in place for a fifth season.

In Armstrong’s interview with The New Yorker, he revealed that while “I do think that this succession story that we were telling is complete,” there is a chance that the world of Succession might live on: “I have caveated the end of the show, when I’ve talked to some of my collaborators, like: Maybe there’s another part of this world we could come back to, if there was an appetite? Maybe there’s something else that could be done, that harnessed what’s been good about the way we’ve worked on this.”

For now, we can look forward to the beginning of the end, when Succession returns to HBO and HBO Max on Sunday, March 26th.