Get Ready to Say Goodbye to the Roy Family

When Game of Thrones ended, there was a good amount of murmuring over whether HBO could find another audience-pleasing series to latch onto as an anchor. Turns out the cable network found one such mooring in Succession, its Emmy-winning show about the conniving, back-stabbing, super-rich Roy family, starring Brian Cox as the patriarch and Jeremy Strong, Sarah Snook, Kieran Culkin, and Alan Ruck as his infighting adult children. Now, five years after it began, the show is wrapping up with its fourth season, which creator Jesse Armstrong now confirms will be its last, per The Hollywood Reporter. Armstrong made this reveal in a Thursday interview with the New Yorker.

"You know, there's a promise in the title of Succession," Armstrong says. "I've never thought this could go on forever. The end has always been kind of present in my mind." From the second season onward, he notes, "I've been trying to think: Is it the next one, or the one after that, or is it the one after that?" Armstrong says he first broached the idea of ending the show with series writers at the end of 2021, when they were starting to write Season Four. "I sort of said, 'Look, I think this maybe should be it,'" he recalls. HBO, for its part, "has been generous," Armstrong says, "and would probably have done more seasons," but they left that decision to end things in his hands—and he ultimately decided it was time to do so, despite feeling "deeply conflicted."

There are already some rumblings on the possibility of a spinoff, though HBO CEO Casey Bloys has said previously he didn't see that in the cards. But the Robb Report notes we shouldn't rule one out, based on Armstrong's own hints in his New Yorker interview. Although Armstrong feels the Succession story is "complete," he acknowledges a "strong" feeling that "there could be something else in an allied world, or allied characters, or some of the same characters." He adds: "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?" Season Four kicks off on March 26 on HBO, per ETOnline.com. Read Armstrong's full interview here. (More Succession stories.)