A week after the first footage from the upcoming fourth season of Succession was unveiled in an HBO sizzle reel, a first trailer for the hotly-anticipated new season has now dropped online, teasing, among other things, the release window. Succession will return to HBO (and HBO Max) in Spring 2023. This should be great news for fans of the Emmy-winning show, as the varied release dates of previous seasons made it difficult to predict when to expect Season 4. While the first season debuted in June 2018, the second dropped in August 2019. The third season was released in October 2021, after an expected delay in production due to the pandemic. The good news is, fans don’t have to wait that long this time; the fourth season will arrive sooner rather than later.
A satirical black comedy about the powerful Roy family, and the feeding frenzy among its scions in anticipation of the power vacuum that will be created in the event of their father’s death, the series has received significant acclaim. Critics and audiences have especially responded to the show’s acerbic writing and grand, Shakespearean themes of ambition, jealousy, and betrayal.
The third season ended with probably the biggest shock yet, with the otherwise comedic character Tom Wambsgans being revealed as a double-crosser to the protagonist Kendall Roy and his sibling allies, including his own wife. With the lines clearly drawn between members of the Roy family — if they weren’t already — the upcoming season will explore the fallout of the failed coup, and the patriarch Logan Roy’s response to it.
The trailer offers glimpses of what we can expect in the new season, including Logan going ahead with his decision to offload Waystar Royco to Lukas Matsson, defying the wishes of his children. Logan seems to be in a particularly livid mood, “I’m a 100 feet tall, these people are pygmies,” he says in the opening moments of the trailer, which was unveiled during the season finale of House of the Dragon. We also see “the new-gen Roys,” — Ken, Shiv and Roman — as they form what their older brother Connor describes as a “rebel alliance,” presumably against their dad. The tantalizing trailer ends with Tom bringing up the subject of his betrayal with his wife, Shiv, and receiving a death-stare in return. “Do you want to talk about what happened?” he asks, as we absorb Shiv's reaction before the screen cuts to black and reveals how long we have to wait.
The battle lines are now drawn; the knives are out. Succession will return to HBO and HBO Max for a 10-episode fourth season in spring, 2023. The show stars Brian Cox, Jeremy Strong, Sarah Snook, Kieran Culkin, Alan Ruck, Matthew Macfadyen, Nicholas Braun and J. Smith-Cameron. You can watch the trailer here, and read the official synopsis down below.
In the 10-episode season four, the sale of media conglomerate Waystar Royco to tech visionary Lukas Matsson moves ever closer. The prospect of this seismic sale provokes existential angst and familial division among the Roys as they anticipate what their lives will look like once the deal is completed. A power struggle ensues as the family weighs up a future where their cultural and political weight is severely curtailed.