Succession Season 5: Hit TV Show Rebooted 15 Years Later
A Hyperstitional TV Recap - June 9, 2038
The reboot of Succession season five picks up where season four left off, with Siobhan Roy rekindling her relationship with Tom Wambsgans as they welcome their baby son to the family. Tom is happy, feeling like they finally have a functional marriage, but what he does not realize is that Shiv’s tenderness is secretly a move to get closer to Lukas Matsson and the power center of GoJo/Waystar/ATN. Shiv begins having an affair with Matsson and convinces him to tone down ATN’s right-wing rhetoric and become more milquetoast centrist to “save democracy.” ATN pushes an election interference narrative that claims Jeryd Mencken illegitimately stole the presidency. As a result, the election results are overturned and Jimenez wins—but in the process ATN loses its core audience.
Ratings drop as former viewers criticize ATN for “going woke.” Matsson keeps ATN afloat despite hemorrhaging money because Shiv convinces him the network is more important for its propaganda effects than its profitability. Matsson doesn’t really care about ATN or Waystar—it was just a hill to climb, a company to conquer. He’s moved on to new ventures: AI, the metaverse, and a brain-computer interface competitor to Neuralink. He hopes to one day upload his mind and live forever.
After failing to take over his father’s company, Kendall Roy goes on a year-long bender full of alcohol, cocaine, meth, and hookers. He is on the verge of committing suicide, but with ATN’s shift leftward and subsequent ratings decline, he sees a new opportunity. Ken launches Roy News Now (RNN), a right-wing news network even further to the right and more extreme than Logan’s ATN, filling the void in the market. He recruits Mark Ravenhead and hires anonymous edge-lords from 4chan to host shows using Pepe the Frog avatars. RNN pushes the narrative that the election was stolen from Mencken by the “liberal media,” which ATN is now a part of. This spurs a heated debate between Ken and Shiv as they battle in both business and their personal lives.
Roman stays out of it. He’s not interested in ATN or RNN. He feels spurned by Mencken and leaves the world of politics for good. Instead, he focuses his efforts on another aspect of his father’s business: cruises and theme parks. With his experience in rockets, Roman launches a startup to create the first zero-gravity amusement park in space. Visitors will board a luxury rocket ship that takes them up to “Roman World” located in orbit around Earth.
The story moves ahead several years as RNN becomes the number-one news source in America. Ken has also gotten into movies to counter the “woke propaganda” being released by Hollywood. Bronze Age Pervert is hired as the executive producer of the movie studio. Their hits include a biopic of Logan Roy, an adaptation of “The Gig Economy” by Zero HP Lovecraft, and To the Stars With Blood, a science fiction epic about a brotherhood of Christo-Nietzschian conquistadors colonizing the galaxy.
Meanwhile, RNN’s positive coverage of Mencken propels him to win the presidency eight years after it was “stolen” from him. The American left freaks out that a “racist fascist” has taken over the country. California secedes from the union, spurring a “national divorce” where the USA divides into separate countries of red states and blue states: the Democratic States of America (DSA) and the Republican States of America (RSA). Gil becomes the president of the DSA, now able to implement full-blown socialism without any pushback from the right.
Shiv brokers a deal to merge ATN with Pierce, then they drop all pretenses and become the preeminent left-wing media network, catering to the DSA. Tom gives Greg Hirsch his own TV show as a political pundit on the new ATN. Broadcasting from the DSA in Manhattan, Greg is an ultra-progressive virtue-signaling liberal who routinely criticizes the RSA for being “worse than Nazi Germany” and calls President Mencken “literally Hitler.” Neither Tom nor Shiv know that Greg also secretly hosts a show for Ken on RNN as an anonymous far-right extremist, criticizing Mencken for “cucking out” because the RSA is “not based enough.”
Shiv is shocked and outraged when she walks into her teenage son’s bedroom and catches him in the act of—if only it was that, but no—recording a TV show for RNN. Her son is one of the edgiest anon commentators, popular in the RSA for his AI-generated anime comedy show that mocks and satirizes the communist DSA and “libtards” like Shiv. She sends him to a social justice reeducation program in virtual reality to be rehabilitated.
Tom eventually discovers Shiv’s affair with Matsson, but rather than getting a divorce, they begin to have threesomes where Tom just stands there watching.
Connor Roy becomes the dictator of North Dakota after the state secedes from the union—both unions. ND joins neither the DSA nor the RSA and remains independent. The Con-Heads flock to “Con-Dakota” to enjoy a tax-free anarcho-capitalist society running on the Bitcoin standard. It’s the perfect position for Connor because he doesn’t have to do anything; he simply lets the free market dictate all.
Roman World takes off—literally. His “space cruises” are a smash hit as wealthy tourists flock to the theme park in low-earth orbit. There is a children’s amusement park with zero-gravity rides and attractions, but there is also an adult-only theme park with zero-gravity sexbot brothels and AI-generated designer drugs illegal on Earth. Despite his monetary success and barrage of women throwing themselves at him, the only way Roman can get off is with his custom-built sexbot modeled after Gerri Kellman, programmed to constantly berate him while they have zero-g sex in a window overlooking Earth.
It is now 2038, fifteen years since Logan’s death. Despite their individual successes in business, the Roy family is broken. Shiv and Ken haven’t spoken since the national divorce. Tom resents Shiv because of the threesomes with Matsson. Their son hates them both for sending him to a “VR gulag” to be “brainwashed.” Greg is stressed from living a double life. Connor is not allowed in the DSA or the RSA. And Roman hasn’t set foot on Earth in years.
The season ends with the revelation that Connor secretly had his father’s brain cryogenically frozen following his death. After Matsson successfully invents the technology to upload human minds digitally, Logan Roy’s consciousness is revived. However, he is greatly disappointed to see the world that has developed while he was gone. Both the country and his children are utterly divided. So Logan inhabits a robot body and begins his quest to retake control of Waystar, GoJo, ATN, RNN, Roman World, Con-Dakota, the RSA, and the DSA, with plans to reunite America and the Roy family.
A post-credits teaser for season six reveals how Logan plans to accomplish it all: he creates thousands of copies of himself in android bodies, creating an army of Logan Roys to tell anyone in their way to, “Fuck off!”