The Box Set: "Succession."

S4, Ep. 1: "The Munsters."

Welcome back to The Box Set. As you know, we’ll be watching the final season of “Succession” week to week and I’ll be deconstructing it here after it airs.

I’m assuming most people watching got unfortunately sucked into the post-episode trailer (hard to miss, but it had already existed and you might have seen it previously), so my best advice is to try to forget what you’ve seen and never watch that again. OK. Good.

And for clarity, there’s this: I’m not going to watch the “post” show wrap ups until after I’ve written my weekly deconstruction, if at all, since you already know my feelings on those. I would suggest you do the same since we’re discussing what we saw, not what was “intended” and what often gets turned into wish-fulfillment reality on those post shows.

OK, then, onward.

Have you ever had that moment where you’re feeling good until the literal last minutes and then something slightly sour unfolds? Of course you have. It happens, even to great shows. So I’ll say right up front that I loved the episode but had no love for the ending, because while the Shiv (Sarah Snook) and Tom (Matthew Macfadyen) marriage and its odd quirks has been been funny and interesting, it hasn’t really been emotionally believable, set up as it was for the gigantic twist at the end of S3, but only once really paying dividends on the emotional end — because the emotional aspect isn’t really believable. Was there ever love there? Hard to tap emotion where it doesn’t exist in a relationship, which is what the last few minutes asked of us.

Ah, but all the rest? Loved it. Because the show is set up for us to love the internecine squabbles and brutally quick (and funny and painful) jibes that the Roy kids and their surrounding foils have mastered.

If “Succession” has lost some of its greatest gift — to be hilarious and dramatic and shockingly successful and surprising at both, which disappeared at the tail end of S2, it has otherwise always been entertaining and smart and ever-so-reliant on its humor as opposed to its drama, the S3 twist notwithstanding, which is a feat that shouldn’t be undersold.

What I mean there is that you can’t have S1 all over again — a comedy where the great surprise was the dramatic intensity and emotional punch of Kendall (Jeremy Strong) and his father, Logan (Brian Cox) battling it out in business — the kingpin and his spoiled brat No. 1 son — only to reveal to viewers that it wasn’t just about 1 percenters and business and blue blood entitlement — it was about love and abuse and emptiness. Now THAT, coming as it did in the final episodes, was what made “Succession” a great television series.