Review: 'Succession - The Complete Second Season' is Soapy, Satirical Fun

If you had the opportunity to sell a company that may be valueless in few years for $10 billion, or maintain your current monopoly in a media empire, what would you do? This is the question that Logan Roy (Brian Cox) proposes to his family at the beginning of the second season of "Succession."

As the founder of the media and entertainment conglomerate Waystar Royco, Roy's position is pretty clear. He wants to cling to power for as long as he possibly can, and he has the money and the power to do whatever he wants. But his health is declining and his time is waning–his board wants him to name a successor.

After he was thwarted as the presumptive heir, Roy's son Kendall (Jeremy Strong) attempted a hostile takeover of the company. Now, battered by life experience and a crippling drug addiction, Kendall has returned to his father's fold with his tail between his legs. Because of attempted usurpation, Roman (Kieran Culkin), the irreverent youngest son, thinks he may have a shot at the title. He has always had the smartest mouth in the room and garnered the least respect.

No one expects anything from Connor (Alan Ruck) the most socially conscious and most inept of the family members (but he plans to disrupt his reputation by making a bid for President of the United States.) So Tom Wambsgans (Matthew Macfadyen) considers himself a candidate. After all he just married Roy's only daughter, Siobhan (Sarah Snook).

Siobhan is known as Shiv, a shortened version of Shiva the Hindu god of righteous destruction or a sharp, often handmade, weapon used–primarily in prisons–to stab your enemy in the back. She works for political candidate Gil Eavis (Eric Bogosian), a outspoken opponent of Waystar Royco's attempt to takeover local news networks, and the man poised to takedown the conglomerate's cable news network ATN, (a network strikingly similar to Fox News.)

With her political savvy and overlooked abilities, Shiv is the smartest person in the room. But what are the odds that her father will actually recognize this?

"Succession" entertains from beginning to end, functioning both as a fantasy soap opera for the lifestyles of the rich and famous and as a scathing satirical comedy. The characters are charmingly incompetent in their backstabbing and betrayal, desperately trying to hold onto their piece of the pie while also attempting to shove everyone else's piece in their mouths.

Special features include a behind-the-scenes featurette with some of the series' creators, as well as the HBO mainstay, the Inside the Episodes mini-featurettes.

"Succession: The Complete Second Season"
DVD $29.95
www.hbo.com/