As fans of prestige television (that also sometimes contains accusations of “micro-dick” possession) know: We’re just four short episodes away from the end of HBO’s Succession. Except, as it turns out, at least one of those won’t be so short at all: Series composer Nicholas Britell has confirmed to Variety that the show’s series finale, set to air on May 28, will actually be bonus-sized, running 90 minutes in length.
Now if, for some strange reason, part of your job happened to be writing about episodes of Succession—analyzing them in detail, trying to come up with something coherent to say about them, etc.—that might potentially sound terrifying. (Hypothetically. This certainly doesn’t apply to any specific people who we may or may not be, and who may or may not be praying right now that HBO will relent on its usual hyper-strict finale security policies and send out screeners for this thing so that we’re not up until 3 in the morning writing about failsons.) In general, though, it’s probably for the best: Succession is already a dense show, so having a little more room for these last parts of its story to play out certainly sounds like good news for all involved.
What’s interesting about this is that, to hear series creator Jesse Armstrong tell it, the fourth season of Succession wasn’t always intended to be its last. (Despite the big, premise-shaking event that occurred three episodes into its 10-episode run.) Armstrong reportedly wrote multiple versions of the season’s ending, teasing all sorts of different outcomes for the assorted Roys that the show concerns itself with. As such,i t’s not clear at the moment if Armstrong deliberately wrote the episode to be extra-length, or if that decision ended up coming through in the editing room; either way, we’ll be very excited (and/or borderline terrified) to see what embarrassments and petty evils Armstrong is set to deploy for all these poor, awful bastards when the finale finally arrives.
