The Succession Season 3 finale was everything one might want from the culminative episode of a series of prestige TV: huge stakes, devastating revelations, more drama than you can shake a wad of ill-gotten cash at. After accruing such a fervent (and extremely online) fanbase since it premiered in 2017, the show has gone from strength to strength, picking up new viewers at an exponential rate. And now, as reported by Variety, HBO has revealed that the finale attracted the series' highest viewership yet.
According to the studio-come-streamer, the episode, "All the Bells Say," delivered 1.7 million viewers across all platforms "in same day viewing," as Variety specifies. That marks a 47% viewing increase compared to the Season 2 finale, a 21% increase versus the Season 3 premiere, and 8% up on last week's sun-soaked penultimate episode, "Chiantishire". For some illustrative context, the Breaking Bad Season 3 premiere attracted 1.56 million viewers to network AMC back in June 2010; HBO's biggest behemoth, Game of Thrones, brought in an average of 10 million viewers across all platforms in its final season.
Still, getting almost 2 million people to watch what is effectively modern-day Shakespeare, as opposed to a Lord of the Rings-esque epic fantasy, is no mean feat.
Jeremy Strong, who plays Kendall Roy on the show, has been at the center of recent media fervor after a New Yorker profile meticulously detailed his relentless capital-M Method. We recently spoke to him all about Kendall's arc in Season 3, asking the actor how he would describe Kendall's mental state by the time of that huge denouement:
"It’s hard to talk about. I would say that it’s as far from where the season starts, as you can get. If the season starts with the character, in a sense, on top of the world, it’s as far down from that, as it could possibly be. At the same time, what’s so brilliant about the writing is that all of these experiences lead to what they call, in physics, a phase transition where there’s like a change from one state to another, and there continue to be these phase transitions, where there’s a change from one state to another. There continue to be these phase transitions, and there’s another one, at the end of Season 3. There’s a shedding of a layer of skin that leads to a molting that leads to something also new. This season, he starts to come out of an egg-shaped bathtub, so it is a rebirth, in a way. And then, I think there is a kind of death, and I don’t know what will happen after that."
There is no air date yet for Succession Season 4, but all three existing seasons are available to stream on HBO Max.