It’s not easy to feel sorry for someone who lies, cheats, and manipulates her way through life. Who does heinous things in the pursuit of power, with no thought for the consequences. Who’s named after a knife and takes every opportunity to stab her loved ones in the back, front, and wherever else she can land a blow.
If we still struggle to empathize with flawed female characters on screen, then Succession’s Siobhan Roy presented our greatest challenge yet. But it’s hard not to emerge from the finale of the HBO drama without feeling sorry for the show’s only daughter, played perfectly by Sarah Snook.
I know, I know—she’s hardly a classic victim—but her story arc underscored a difficult truth: you don’t have to be a good person to be a victim of misogyny. You can be an appalling human and still be kept down in the cruellest way, purely because of your biology. You can behave despicably, but you’ll be held to a higher standard than the men around you, who are doing exactly the same if not worse—and who aren’t being called a witch, a bitch, or a slut because of it.
And you can do all this, only to discover that you were never going to be able to break the cycle after all. That the only possible outcome for you was to be adjacent to male power, rather than wearing the crown yourself.
This is the tragedy of Shiv Roy. “A young woman with no experience,” as her father, Logan (Brian Cox), puts it in season two. “A woman… that’s a minus,” Shiv bites. “Of course it’s a minus,” her father shouts. “I didn’t make the fucking world!”
But he made her world: one in which she was forced to compete, on an unequal playing field, with her brothers, Kendall (Jeremy Strong) and Roman (Kieran Culkin), for power, love and attention. As the only woman in the Roy family circus, Shiv found that she was never enough: not a good enough wife, a good enough sister, a good enough daughter, a good enough liberal, good enough to be a mother, good enough to run the company.
And for all the Roys’ billions, PJs, and penthouses, it felt horribly familiar at times, because this is what happens to women in workplaces. Shiv was never going to “win,” because she’s one of us. Not even status, money, and power offer full protection from the patriarchy.
“It’s only your teats that give you any value,” Kendall says after Shiv rejects his plan to take down their father. “You’re still seen as a token woman.” And in the end, she was just another woman in a man’s world—sidelined, ignored, dismissed as “hysterical” and “too emotional” when she tried to express an opinion. She could have been the most qualified, smartest woman in America, but she was always going to lose. How could she ever be empowered when the gilded cage in which her ambition fluttered was built by a misogynistic man upon misogynistic values, into which she had been born?
It seems naive now to have ever doubted it. After all, this is the woman whose own husband, Tom Wambsgans (Matthew Macfadyen), tracked her menstrual cycle in the hopes of impregnating her as an insurance policy against his own imprisonment. The woman who was treated differently to her brothers by powerful men. “If I hug you, will I get a lawsuit?” asked creepy Scandi tech bro Lukas Matsson (Alexander Skarsgård), when the siblings arrived at his Norwegian compound to do a deal. Whose emotional journey remained largely unknowable to us, whether through her own fear of appearing too vulnerable, or because she could only ever be two-dimensional – defined by the men in whose orbit she had to operate. Even her family nickname was “Pinky” – a generous interpretation, counting on your fingers, might be that Shiv was Logan’s fourth child. A blunter reading was always the obviously gendered one.
It’s all so pathetically basic, when you think about it, like Nan Pierce’s taste for cheap wine. The women who survived in the world of Succession were those who played the game like men, like Gerri and Karolina. Others—Marcia, Kerry, Rava—were defined by how the Roy men treated them. Shiv emerged as a blend of both: realizing that her game-playing had given her the power to crown a king, but that she would only ever be the woman standing behind the man. She could only decide whether it was her brother or husband’s shadow into which she was prepared to step.
That’s what happens when the world’s most influential men can reach the top without ever needing to step back and consider women as rounded, living, breathing people, worthy of attention. As fulsome entities, rather than disposable atoms of your own empire and ego—wives, mistresses, assistants. “My father couldn’t hold a whole woman in his head,” as Shiv put it at Logan’s funeral, in perhaps the most devastating critique of this family’s woman problem.
If all this makes it sounds as though Shiv was a feminist, though, don’t be fooled. She was, after all, the one who persuaded a woman who was sexually assaulted on a Waystar Royco cruise ship not to testify. Her battle against the tidal wave of misogyny she faced was not for the greater good, only her own. And, until the final season, she arrogantly believed that she might be winning.
It was her pregnancy that finally brought about a reality check. In her bid to become the company’s new American CEO, she told Matsson that she’d be “one of those hard bitches who takes 36 hours of maternity leave, emailing through her vanity caesarean,” but she knew that her ability to run with the men had been compromised in their eyes, and the unspoken knowledge that ran through the final episode is that she couldn t take over where Logan left off, because she was about to pop a baby out. Nor could she be the American CEO, because Matsson was worried that he wanted to sleep with her—a sex object or a walking womb.
Shiv’s was a story about a girl who played the rules of a misogynistic world and was swallowed whole by them. Who was so busy trying to become her father, that she didn’t realize her only option was to become her mother instead—a squirming fish caught on a line, unable to break free of her biological destiny, and the men who could never hold a whole woman in their heads.